In Sarah, Susanne and the writerthe ninth novel by Éric Reinhardt, a writer tells, before writing it, the novel inspired by the life of a woman who asked him for it.
In 2017 at the release of The spouses’ bedroom, a woman that Éric Reinhardt did not know contacted him on Facebook, telling him that she was experiencing a “painful and silent” story that gave her the impression of evolving in one of his novels. This woman wanted to write to him at greater length.
“A few weeks later, I received a two-page email, under the heading “Inspire”, which impressed, overwhelmed and moved me. I knew instantly that this would be my next book,” says Éric Reinhardt on the phone from Paris.
An itinerary which is reminiscent of the story of psychological violence which was at the heart of Love and forests (Gallimard, 2014), where a reader also entangled in a serious intimate and marital crisis spoke to the author.
“Especially because there was an image in these two pages that I found heartbreaking. That of this woman sitting at night in front of her house, in the shade of a large tree, to watch her family live through the illuminated windows, because she was excluded from her own home. I wanted to make this image exist in a book, to build a novel around it. » These two pages, he says, had “fertilized” him.
As is often the case with the author of Cinderella (Stock, 2007), born in Nancy in 1965, reality and fiction fit together in a disturbing way, feeding off each other. The novelist, a fine explorer of our inner turbulence, immediately wrote to this reader, who only responded to him four years later, when he began to write the novel.
A descent into hell
Sarah, an architect by training, lives in Brittany in a beautiful house, with her husband and two children. She discovers one day by chance that her husband owns 75% of their house, even though she has always assumed the family’s current expenses on her own. An “anomaly” which will completely destabilize it.
However, their life as a couple was harmonious, even if in recent years her husband spent more and more evenings alone in an old woodshed converted to make music and smoke joints. Despite his promises, never kept for years, the man came home later and later, leaving her alone with the children. A friend of Sarah’s suggested that she go and live alone in a small rented house for two months, in order to “scare” her husband, to shake off his indifference.
But the shock will take on unexpected proportions: from one day to the next her husband will never speak to her again. Sarah nevertheless goes ahead with her “radical dispositions”. She will see her children move away from her, their mutual friends will all rally around her husband, locked in an “obstinate silence”, who has become a kind of cold monster that she no longer recognizes.
Unbearable psychological violence which will plunge this woman into a state of deep crisis, culminating in a long stay in a psychiatric clinic.
It is the dark and fascinating descent into hell that is told, in two versions as similar as they are different – that of Sarah and of Suzanne – in Eric Reinhardt’s new novel.
The invention of a form
“I’m not interested in writing a novel if the undertaking is not transcended by an artistic experience, by the invention of a form which brings me a specific pleasure. » It was at this moment that the idea of a trio came to him: a writer tells a woman, whose life he draws inspiration from, about a novel before writing it.
The book thus became a dialogue between a writer and Sarah, to evoke the destiny of a “fictitious” woman called Susanne. “I told myself that with this device, I was going to make this story even stronger, more vivid. And above all that I could convey a lot of new, disturbing and destabilizing sensations for the reader. »
Two female figures who merge, deviate, vary in order to tell, in reality, one and the same story. A story where, he specifies, he himself provides three quarters of the material.
A successful bet, since these parallel stories never give the impression of overlapping. “It was a way of making the heroine even more universal, and more intense and stronger, because there would be two of them representing her. » One in the city and the other in the countryside, one a visual artist and the other a writer, so on. A subtle play on differences which allowed the author to embrace a sort of universal feminine figure.
“Especially since my reader, who has since become a friend, asked me not to recognize her, Sarah, the character given as a model in the novel, is already a fictional character,” adds Éric Reinhardt. A fictional character “squared”.
Often, Eric Reinhardt’s novels take married life as their theme. “The couple and the family are the epicenter of our lives. I’m not so much a writer of imagination, of the great outdoors or elsewhere. I would be incapable of writing a book that would be the polar opposite of my life, set abroad or in another era. I always start from what I have experienced, from what I have felt or from what I know, from what surrounds me, from compelling inner feelings. »
Inner feelings which have already pushed him to explore through his novels issues such as social injustices, the control of financial capitalism over our intimate lives, social segregation, marital domination and even the impunity of the powerful.
Spell machines
In his own way too, Sarah, Susanne and the writer takes us behind the scenes of the making of a novel, from the raw material to the finished product, digested and transformed by his own sensitivity. At the heart of a sort of trompe l’oeil, Éric Reinhardt enjoys mixing once again, to the point of confusion, reality and fiction.
Once again, Éric Reinhardt did not hesitate to slip into the shoes of a woman, and even two women. “Actually, I never ask myself that question. I surrender to writing as a sensitive man and it works. It’s me. It’s like I’m writing my own story. I sink into the skin, the feelings and the sensations of my heroines,” he explains.
Rather impervious to controversy, deeply attached to the novel as a tool for thinking about the world in all its complexity, the writer, for whom creation is a kind of protection against reality, claims more than ever the right to live through the fiction of other lives than his own.
In this sense, the “sensitive” reader is first and foremost him. “I document myself a lot, because it is unbearable for me to be approximate, imprecise, implausible. The pact we make with the reader is very fragile. I aspire to magic, to be able to create some sort of little reading miracles. Like an illusionist, as if I were creating spell machines. »
Well aware that the slightest doubt in the reader can lead him to give up. To derail the machine.