“Writing with my father is still quite strange and unexpected,” says Yann Queffélec, who publishes “Suite armoricaine”

2023-06-08 06:49:02

Every day, a personality invites herself into the world of Élodie Suigo. Today, the writer and sailor, Yann Queffélec. He has just published “Suite armoricaine” with the editions of Cherche-Midi.

Yann Queffélec is a writer and sailor. He is above all a lover of the sea and his Brittany, even going so far as to declare that he was a pirate… But without a wooden leg or wooden tongue. The starting point of this writer’s life, born late and at 32, was navigation.

>> “I haven’t reached the end of my writing”, Yann Queffélec continues his journey and surprises with “Where does love come from”

His first publication was a biography of the Hungarian composer and pianist Béla Bartok in 1981. Then there was black charm (1983) and the Goncourt prize for The Barbarian Wedding in 1985. In 2015, he paid tribute to his father in The man of my life. He just published Armorican suite published by Cherche-Midi.

franceinfo: Armorican suite is a story, a family tale, the reunion, sometimes the reunification of a father and a son. The one with your father, of course. So, what is the Armorican recipe of the Queffélec family?

Yann Queffelec: It’s a Breton recipe. It is the sea that rises and falls, rises and falls also in relationships. There, I am rather in a phenomenon of high tide with regard to my father. I do not renounce in any way the grievances that may have animated me against him at certain times, but today, I am rather in a phase of humor towards myself and his. I tell myself that it’s time to forgive, to see that the glass is much more interesting when it’s half full, so I’m in this fullness!

I almost want to say:Finally, this book exists“. It was necessary to wait to be able to write it?

Certainly. Me, I was not entitled to explanations, otherwise I would have written it before. What is interesting about this book is that it is both a father’s and a son’s book. That is to say that there was a manuscript of my father which slept in a drawer of posterity and it was an intelligent editor and good reader, Jean Le Gall, who, one day, reading this text which belonged to his publishing house, said to himself: “But why not interest the Brittany of the son, contemporary Brittany in that of the father?“and again father and son found themselves this time under the same blanket, which is not ordinary and which, on a psychoanalytical level, is quite exciting.

Writing like that with my father, next to him, in the paternal sensibility, it was all the same quite strange and unexpected.

Yann Queffelec

at franceinfo

You suffered a lot from his lack of love, but I feel like it was a way of saying to him: “I inherited a number of things from you and this is what I do with them today“.

It’s true. And at the same time, I realize that I suffer more and more from what he didn’t give me when I tried to reach him, interest him and love him. It is still an extremely present suffering, but over time, we realize that suffering is also part of life. And you learn not to love the sufferings of yesteryear, but to make of it something that structures you. I am, today, structured by this suffering. I know where it is, I know what it is for me, how it still hurts me and it will always hurt me because despite ourselves, we remain children through all the seasons of life.

At the same time, there is a lot of love in this book.

I loved him carnally. Strictly nothing sexual obviously in there, but I was completely crazy about my father. Everything seemed extraordinary to me about this man who was absolutely not interested in me and who always made me feel guilty every time he took the floor to talk to me. It’s strange.

There was a dramatic element in your journey, it is the disappearance of your mother. It’s 1970. There’s a phone call at five in the morning. Tell it to you in this book. It’s rare that you broach this subject.

It’s incredible. It’s totally romantic and perfectly painful. It’s true, it’s five o’clock in the morning, I’m back from boarding school. My mother is not there. My father tells me that she is resting with friends. I don’t know anything about the disease that is finishing him off. And at five o’clock in the morning, I have on the line, because my father hasn’t picked up the phone, the voice of a little nurse in tears. She tells me : “Mr Queffelec“, I am Monsieur Queffélec,”Your wife didn’t last the night“. At that moment, my father snatches the phone from my hands. He is angry with me for having intercepted, according to him, this phone call. He will never tell me: “you lost your mom“. For him, that’s it, I learned it from the nurse, we don’t talk about it anymore.

Do you love each other?

I think it’s a mix. That at the same time I can’t get bored and at the same time, I tell myself that I have something. But you have to be something to be where you are, to have overcome what you have overcome. It’s true, I can clearly see that I still have, at the same time, a childlike vitality, I like that in my house and as I told you at the same time, I have a lot of things to blame myself for. , but I was brought up in reproach by my father, in guilt.

In guilt. So much so that you never accepted this Goncourt prize because he never got it. You didn’t want to call him.

The best day of my life was the worst day of my life. It was the moment when I had to announce to my father, by telephone, in the most rotten telephone booth in the capital that I had received the Goncourt prize.

Yann Queffelec

at franceinfo

No. I knew he was going to consider this a snub, a stab. I discovered that this man, who was my father and whom I loved dearly, to whom I would have liked to bring this Goncourt Prize as I would have brought it to my mother if she had been alive… Well that man was more of a rival, a writer-rival at that time than my dad.

Is Yann Queffélec the son of Henri or is Henri the father of Yann?

I think it’s a great mix of the two. I’m not kidding because, perhaps, I carry my father a little bit in my own way, by rehabilitating him first, by talking about him today, by recalling how much it would be in our interest to read this man, to read his short stories which are worth Chekhov’s short stories. Finally, all that… It’s curious a family!