Luz, real name Rénald Luzier, worked for the satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo” for many years, but fortunately slept through the assassination attempt on January 7, 2015. After “Katharsis” and “We Were Charlie”, he has now turned “The Life of Vernon Subutex”, the three-part best-selling novel by the French bestselling author and WELT Literature Prize winner Virginie Despentes, into a graphic novel (reproduct, 304 p., 39 euros).
WELT: Luz, do you feel kinship with Vernon Subutex?
Luz: I definitely resemble him. Vernon is a stray, that’s the human condition. We have something else in common: dematerialization. Vernon just disappears. It’s very hard when it wasn’t the result of a free decision, as it was for him and me. However, I have a roof over my head, that’s what makes us different. I envy him for the fact that even at the lowest point he still feels a tremor and swings and that the music stays with him. It had disappeared from me. As I worked through his character, it slowly came back. I’m listening to music again. I couldn’t listen to music for years after the assassination.
WELT: What makes working on a graphic novel different than working on a cartoon for Charlie?
Luz: Nothing. I’m the same person who draws. For me there are no borders, no categories. Maybe because I learned that from “Charlie”. I did everything there, press sketches, reports, illustrations, comics, books. Ultimately, this graphic novel was an opportunity to evoke what I’ve been doing on Charlie and elsewhere for 25 years, most notably my concert sketches of course. By the way, “Vernon Subutex” is a very political book.
It raises the question of what is actually left when a person has nothing left when society simply spits them out. Vernon is a respected guy in Parisian subculture and ends up on the streets. The book addresses precariousness, it tells of what came before. Through “Vernon Subutex” I was able to bear witness to a France that we hadn’t known any other way for an insanely long time. This also includes the concerts that I can no longer go to.
WELT: Because you live under police protection. Do you miss Paris?
Luz: And how. I experienced working on “Vernon Subutex” as a rebirth. It put me back in Paris, right in the middle of life. Paris is like music. In truth, I could live on the moon – as soon as I come to Paris I feel at home again.
WELT: Despentes’ novel Vernon Subutex was published on the day of the assassination. Did that shape your relationship with the book?
Luz: In any case. On the same day, January 7, 2015, Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission was published. I remember it so well because I drew the cover of Charlie along with it and a full page inside as well. But the assassination was a turning point, and I couldn’t read “Vernon Subutex” for a long time.
A panel from the graphic novel “Vernon Subutex”
Source: Luz, after Virginie Despentes
When I finally finished the first volume and read Vernon’s long monologue, I wondered when Virginie actually wrote it: “I’m a lonely man, I’m 55 years old, my throat has been punctured since my cancer, and I smoke a cigar while driving my cab with the window open and I don’t care what faces my customers make… I’m a bum on a bench high on a hill in Paris.”
WELT: That was before the assassination.
Luz: Right. But that monologue made me feel Je suis Charlie, of belonging. I suddenly knew that Vernon Subutex was the book I wanted to believe in. I believe in spirit kinship. You will find some in politics, others in religion, in music, in literature, in art. I try to show and create similarities through my work. It’s not that easy in the times we live in. But that is the core of being human. A very nice core.
WELT: Unlike Houellebecq, in whose mirror people don’t look particularly good or have any hope.
Luz: We French made “submission” a sort of oracle and Houellebecq a Pythia for the weeks, months and years that followed. But I had the feeling that this Pythia is more like Virginie Despentes.
WELT: What does Despentes see that Houellebecq doesn’t see?
Luz: She sees the possibility of the collective, while Houellebecq only sees the loneliness and submission of the individual. Virginie hopes that in the end the group will be what drives us and that we might make it together, and that it might not be so bad to have a utopia as a common goal. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like believing it.
Perhaps utopia lies within a man like Vernon who has become homeless. We’ve learned during lockdown that we’re not meant to be locked down and that we just have to get along with people we don’t necessarily like. We have to get used to walking through a world where we meet people who don’t necessarily resemble us.
Light: „Vernon Subutex“. Based on the novel of the same name by Virginie Despentes. Translated from the French by Claudia Steinitz and Lilian Pitha. Reproduct Verlag, 304 pages, 39 euros