The world according to Philippe Besson
In barely five years, but with seven novels already under his belt, Philippe Besson has earned his place in the small group of French writers whose every new book is an event. With L’Enfant d’octobre [October’s child], about a famous and painful news story, he has again created a stir.
Since his first book, published in 2001, Philippe Besson has gone from success to success. A lawyer by training, this lover of cats, Cuba and Marguerite Duras’ novels was destined for a commercial career until he sent the manuscript of his first novel, En l’absence des hommes [In the Absence of Men], to a number of publishers. Having had a positive response from most of them, he decided to become a full-time writer. Even in this early book, where he brings alive a troubling exchange of letters between Proust and a teenage boy who has a loving physical relationship with a young soldier during the First World War, Besson knows how to be deeply moving.
He depicted Les Jours fragiles [The fragile days] of Arthur Rimbaud at the time when, operating as an arms dealer in Abyssinia, he had renounced poetry. In this book he primarily drew a portrait of Isabelle, the poet’s younger sister, an adoring devotee of his work, through her imaginary journal.
A drifting antihero
Besson has confessed to having been deeply affected, when he was eighteen years old, by Frédéric Mitterrand’s novel, Lettres d’amour en Somalie [Love Letters in Somalia]. "I felt intuitively", he said, "that everything that passed through my life was there. The idea of a broken love affair, of absence, of emptiness - and the idea of exile too. That book bore a wound, the sadness of breaking up and regret for time wasted, that structure my life and books today."
His work is peopled with dark antiheroes carrying inside themselves the burden of a secret that the author reveals gradually, in a style that borrows from the roman noir and Marguerite Duras, precise and vague at the same time, as if the drifting of the characters is reflected in the writing.
In Un instant d’abandon [A moment of abandon], in which Besson tells the story of a sea fisherman whose son drowns because of an action of his, sadness was omnipresent, like that English fog that seems to come straight out of Simenon’s novels. But a wound is also at the heart of his latest book, L’Enfant d’octobre [October’s child], a fictional documentary in which Besson slips into the skin of Christine Villemin, the mother of little Grégory, found dead in a river in 1984. An unsolved murder of which she was once accused. A tragic news story and a judicial fiasco that Besson relates as if he were writing any other novel, plunging his pen into the very depths of every wound.
Pub. by Grasset, Paris
• L’Enfant d’octobre [October’s child], 2006.
Pub. by Julliard, Paris:
• Un instant d’abandon [A moment of abandon], 2005;
• Les Jours fragiles [Fragile days], 2004;
• Un garçon d’Italie [A boy from Italy], 2003;
• L’Arrière-saison [Late Autumn], 2003;
• Son frère [His Brother], 2001;
• En l’absence des hommes [In the Absence of Men], 2001.
Didier Jacob
journalist on Le Nouvel Observateur
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