“Who would be foolish enough to die without at least going around his prison?” »Makes Marguerite Yourcenar say to the young Zénon of The work in the dark. It is by example that Patrick Deville answers the question, while citing it in the foreground of his 14e novel, adding a new floor to this building under construction of “adventure novels without fiction” entitled Abracadabra. A series started in 2004 with “Pura Vida”, to which four books are still missing.
After having taken us from Brazil to the Galápagos Islands in “Amazonia” (Seuil, 2019), this time he is heading for French Polynesia, first making a flea jump to Easter Island from Chile. From the Marquesas to the Tuamotu Islands, via Tahiti and Bora-Bora, the French writer happily leads us on his quest.
We will agree: there is a worse prison than these Leeward Islands. “Fenua” – a term which means “land” or “country” in Tahitian – freely mixes readings, travels and encounters to reconstitute a space which is both real and bookish.
The almost legendary on-the-go writer once again follows in the footsteps of a few dreamers from distant horizons. Starting with Gustave Viaud, a doctor who was the very first to take photographs in Tahiti, who instilled a taste for the distant into his little brother Julien, a dreamy naval officer who would quickly invent a name for himself and a first name: Pierre Loti (1850-1923).
Victor Segalen followed in the footsteps of the painter Paul Gauguin, who himself followed those of Loti.
Among English-language writers, Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, followed in the footsteps of Herman Melville, sailor aboard a whaler, then deserter before being imprisoned, then escaping from prison and telling the story of his stay with the cannibal Taipei and, later still , to lay his famous Moby dick (1851), says Deville, himself in pursuit of all these ghosts at once.
From island to island, where he sometimes stayed for a long time, Patrick Deville also revisits his Polynesian childhood dreams, early nourished by the expedition of the Kon-Tiki or the bewitching flibuste of Treasure Island.
From book to book, from the five novels published by Editions de Minuit to “Fenua”, Patrick Deville has developed his method. He talks about it at length with Pascaline David in Patrick Deville’s flying carpet, a collection of interviews which appears at the same time. He evokes his “immobile childhood” in the former lazaretto on the left bank of the Loire where he grew up (his father ran a psychiatric hospital there), remembering his decisive childhood dreams: “It was to go everywhere and write books. “
Just as it is not enough to write books to be a writer, to become a reader, he believes, is the work of a lifetime. “