At 18, in a desire to escape, Annie Perreault flies to Russia, a land of fascination, vastness and cold. Several years later, she returned to this immense region of striking contrasts in order to draw the material for Big spaces, his third novel, just published by Alto.
“What interested me, at the beginning, was to write a novel about a crossing which was to take place in a space of vastness, of cold, which was Lake Baikal. And there are plenty of things that have come along along the way. I had given myself a very simple trajectory: a woman crosses a lake, two characters, a single place ”, but the paths have multiplied from space to California, passing through this famous mythical lake, says Annie. Perreault on the phone.
Letting herself be guided by a sort of instinct, the author admits having taken detours to arrive at these Big spaces, to let the unknown and the unexpected arise, to welcome the risk: “I didn’t necessarily think I would go for a marathon on Lake Baikal and, at one point, it became possible, so I went. I thought to myself, “Experience the cold crossing yourself.” Like taking a risk. “
A risk that is akin to creation itself, to this way of writing a little on the sidelines, instinctively, which gropes along in this adventure as unpredictable as the ice of a frozen lake in winter. Interfering in her text under the guise of “that which one does not see”, Annie Perreault thus offers a hybrid form which is similar to a story of oneself, a way of writing between fiction – carried in particular by Gaby , l’Ours, Éléonore, Anna et le Lac – and an intrusion into the author’s reality.
“As luck would have it, most of the readings I have done during the last few months of writing Big spaces were stories in which novelists reflected on their creation in their novel. And every once in a while it just made me convince more to go this way […] That’s what I liked, to see how, in a novel, what you experience can trigger clicks, deflect what you want to write. “
I didn’t necessarily think I would go for a marathon on Lake Baikal and at one point it became possible, so I did. I thought to myself, “Experience the cold crossing yourself.” Like taking a risk.
Letting his reflections and his readings come to shuffle the cards, confuse the tracks of the initial plan, Perreault particularly likes this back-and-forth game between reality and fiction, a frontier conducive to astonishment. ” In The woman of Valence (Alto, 2018), I started from something that I had lived to make a fiction, whereas there, I really started with an idea of fiction, then finally I came to amalgamate things that I had lived. ”
Contrast play
Novel of change of scenery, flight, travel, encounters, The great outdoors is also very much a novel of contrasts. Between the vast geographical expanses and the intimacy of human relations, between the great colds of Russia and the amorous, dazzling passions, the great hopes and the great regrets, Perreault’s novel unites these forces in what turns out to be a quest for warmth and closeness. “Along the way, it did not announce itself like that, but I made the same observation and I perhaps even accentuated it by telling myself that it is difficult to speak of coldness, of large spaces without necessarily speaking also of heat. “
The great outdoors, continues the author, it is obviously the spaces of geographic immensity, but also the spaces between people. Sometimes when we have a very small distance between two people, we can feel very far apart […] or, on the contrary, the people who will pass very quickly in our life can have a dramatic impact. Situating the action of the story on this frozen lake in Russia was thus conducive to confession and reconciliation. Talking about cold in all its forms tends to unite and warm people.
This contrast is also perceptible even in the origins of the author and her impulses leading her to go beyond borders. Coming from a working-class background, not at all interested in the arts and travel, says Perreault, she will be surprised to feel this artistic appeal very early in her life. She remembers the fall of the Berlin Wall as a fascination during her teenage years. “Something was happening,” she said, “it was galvanizing. “Nothing to do with the“ workplace, consumption, more predictable, tidy life ”of his family. “I was the opposite,” she emphasizes.
It is precisely this opposite that Perreault stages through free, strong, paradoxical, daring and dreamy female figures. She thus pays tribute to several women, travelers, friends, people read or heard, who have opened a path, she explains. But behind Anna and her need for escape, behind Gaby, free and daring who flees the suburbs – “this world of mowers, carport and stinking marigolds planted in staggered rows ”- but also Éléonore, dreamy in front of Yuri Gagarin and even this Lake, central character, we find the desire to embrace the cold carried at arm’s length by the author.