The new novel by the most widely read contemporary French-speaking author in the world, who granted us an interview, plays on a long-term chiaroscuro, placing the action in the heart of Ukraine. There, a small family is caught up in a terrible system put in place by the Russian invader; and its members will move heaven and earth to extricate young Valentyn from this dark machination and bring him back to the light.
Marc Levy seems to cherish the themes of absence and disappearance (we will remember in particularWhere are you ?) and it is today in the theater of burning news that he stages them. In The Symphony of Monsters, taking place in the middle of the Russian invasion, we find a Ukrainian child of around ten years old suffering from mutism. And there is something to be left speechless when discovering the political shenanigans of which he will be the victim. Indeed, after a raid in his school, Valentyn is deported to a distant “orphanage” where, alongside hundreds of other young compatriots, they will try to make him fit into the Soviet mold and then place him with a new Russian family. ; a plan hatched by Putin and others on a large scale.
Valentyn’s mother, Veronika, as well as her older sister Lilya will each try in their own right to come to the aid of the missing person. How will a nurse and a teenager be able to carry out this high-risk task, in a country torn apart by war and without even knowing where the child has been taken? It will be necessary to count on the support of relatives and networks – some of whom have already been seen in Levy’s previous opuses.
Extensive investigations
The Symphony of Monsters is therefore set in a very tangible reality, as highlighted in a message at the beginning of the book, specifying that the novel is inspired by real events. And before launching Veronika and Lilya into their frantic research, the author himself carried out significant investigative work.
It was a long documentation process. I had been informed by contacts that these deportation programs had started a few months before the invasion began, when children from holiday camps in Crimea could no longer return home.
Marc Levy
“At first I thought it was intimidation, but when I discovered it was a systematic kidnapping and deportation program, I started investigating it, because that he touched me enormously. The child is sacred, and I put myself in the shoes of these men and women whose testimonies I had collected, read or heard,” he continues, stressing that he ensured the veracity of the information collected before embarking on writing. And, yes, Ukrainian mothers did indeed set out to find their children kidnapped by the occupiers in order to brainwash them.
Know and let people know
Should we consider this new book as a committed novel? At the very least, Marc Levy sees the situation, beyond the local conflict, as a fragment of a more global war waged by dictatorships against democracies – pitting “those who glorify death against those who defend life,” he said.
“It is not a committed novel like you would see a political tribune climb onto a platform with long tirades, it is a more humble approach which consists of telling a story which will touch and provoke a reaction”, launches the one who also aims to sow some seeds in the Russian camp, since The Symphony of Monsters was translated into Tolstoy’s language for free distribution on the Internet.
The objective? Raising awareness. Thus, the author draws parallels with the dark hours of the Second World War. “When I was a child and I asked why I didn’t have grandparents, it took a while to explain it to me. When I asked “Why did we let this happen?”, the answer that invariably came back was because we didn’t know. So I believe that when we know, and when we make it known, it allows the collective consciousness to no longer be able to hide behind “we didn’t know”. »
Human resistance
Wars may pit States, armies and societies against each other, but they only show their true face on a human scale. The characters in the novel are thus intended to be loaded with symbolism, like the young kidnapped child, who does not intend to give in, even if he is mute and only capable of communicating in writing; a characteristic that is not simply intended to soften the crowds.
Valentyn is a symbol of his country: he sees everything, understands everything, endures everything, resists, and has great difficulty making himself heard.
Marc Levy
Ditto for Veronika, whose nurse’s cap is not limited to a tribute to the medical profession. For Levy, it embodies the core of the novel, individual resistance leading to collective resistance. The doctor she supports rightly points this out to her: “You don’t choose the nursing profession when you accept defeat. »
While conflicts follow one another in the news, and the spotlight is now focused on the bloody events in Israel and the Gaza Strip, we cannot help but ask the writer to find out if he has ever thought about to build a novel around this long-standing belligerence, a very sensitive cord? “Of course I’m thinking about it, but I don’t know if I’d be able to do it, you know,” he muses.
The Symphony of Monsters
Robert Laffont
400 pages