2023-09-22 19:46:59
In 1994 Pascal Quignard decided leave everything and retire from public life to dedicate himself to literature. “He had been an editor at Gallimard for 25 years, he had worked with three generations, Claude, Antoine and Gaston. He had two options: dedicate another 25 years to it or leave it all. I chose the latter, although I was afraid“, acknowledges the author of the bestseller ‘Every morning in the world’.
The novel, made into a film by Alain Corneau and starring Gérard Depardieu, became a phenomenon in the early 90s (ten million viewers in France alone) and sealed his friendship forever with Jordi Savall, author of the soundtrack and guilty, along with Quignard, of the popular recovery of baroque musicprotagonist in the novel and the film.
Quignard confesses today, three decades later, that that decision It cost him money and all his friends. “Friends like to share values and hate when you question them,” he slips. But he assures that cutting ties with the literary scene and Parisian intellectual circles has made him “increasingly happier” and has allowed him give oneself to writing like someone who is ordained a priest.
He says it calmly and smiling in the hotel Canfranc Stationin Huesca, a few kilometers from the French border, the train station that witnessed in the past a war effort formed by Nazis, Jewish spies and fugitives, today converted into a hotel which this weekend hosts the Formentor Literary Conversations, in which the French writer is honored.
Sainte-Colombe returns
Galaxia Gutenberg has just republished ‘All the mornings of the world’ and publishes its latest novel, ‘Love the sea’, both united by the thread of a real personage, Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, the 17th-century French composer and viola player of whom hardly any biographical data is known and who reappears as a character. “We don’t know many things about him, but we have his music. And that allows us to understand their emotions. I play his scores every night on the piano to blend in with his universe. And every year, for the last 30 years, I meet with my friend Jordi Savall for a concert in which we remember him. You could say that I have a special friendship with him,” says the writer and musician, a happy hermit who proudly remains apart from the literary ecosystem, although he has never stopped winning awards.
“Literature is something vertical”
“The publishing profession has changed. When I was on the Gallimard reading committee we couldn’t see the authors. Was Andre Gide Whoever had that idea did not want there to be contact so that there was no influence between the author, the reader and the editor,” he recalls. “Then that changed and we started to accompany the authors because they needed it. For me literature is something vertical, something that exists between oneself. The criticism, the publication, what appears in the newspapers… all that does not belong to the writer. There is something wild in writing that requires isolation. In the background, he who writes is always a bit of a prisoner“, points out the author of ‘Villa Amalia’ and ‘The Errant Shadows’, with which he won the Goncourt in 2002.
Where then is the reader in that equation? “We are here, in Canfranc, surrounded by imposing mountains and forests, in a beautiful place where the deer, for sure, have their disputes. I think that, in the same way that Nature has no audience, the same happens with literature. In reality, there is no target audience.”
Against puritanism
For Quignard, the man who decides to leave of society has always existed. “It is something that is in Taoism, Buddhism and Christianity, it is not that rare. I don’t know why our society likes integration so much. There have always been individuals who decide to separate themselves from the group, just as happens in animal societies,” reflects an author who confesses baroque, more concerned with intensity that for perfection, of whom the jury has praised his “dazzling erudition” and “the skill with which he escapes textual banality” and who would like to be remembered in a category similar to that of Colette.
“The literature that I have enjoyed the most is that of the senses. I like to write about sensual experiences with admiration. I have written three essays about sex and I It is sad to see puritanism and censorshipespecially in American films,” says Quignard. “The transformation of female desire has lost along the way Freud’s rich and revolutionary idea regarding sex and love. “The roles have returned to the sexual dispute.”
#Pascal #Quignard #wild #writing #requires #isolation