Taking a shortcut, we could say that Sophie Divry’s latest novel tells a love story between two characters who should not have met.
Because in Fantastic love story, which cleverly mixes the genes of the thriller and the love story, adding an effective soap opera side, these are two solitudes that brush against each other and find each other. Which is in itself a kind of miracle, a supernatural and somewhat fantastic coincidence. A fantastically paced novel that is difficult to put down.
“I wanted to write a love story,” summarizes Sophie Divry from Lyon, where she lives. I like to make a novel with things I’ve never done before, I don’t repeat myself too much. »
After two novels built around solitary characters, Three times the end of the world (Black on White, 2018), a sort of “Robinsonade” in which a man finds himself alone after a nuclear explosion, and Curiosity (2021), whose protagonist is a robot geologist on the planet Mars, in the midst of the experience of COVID and confinement, Sophie Divry felt the need to write a romance novel with a lot of life, leaping, filled with secondary characters. “A very romantic novel, which makes me want to dive in with both feet, in a slightly uninhibited way, without snobbery, for the sake of the story. »
“I wanted to put into the novel everything that we couldn’t experience at the time. Restaurant scenes, party scenes, sex scenes, friendship scenes where people could go for drinks. A vital contribution, in fact, which also allowed me to experience it vicariously. »
Behind Fantastic love storythere is also the challenge of making a popular novel, without some of the affects of “slightly snobbish Franco-French literature” which have always seemed a little deadly for the reader’s pleasure.
“I read a lot [Haruki] Murakami, continues Sophie Divry, and that gave me a kind of horizon to create quality literature while giving the pleasure of popular literature, where each sentence is not necessarily a stylistic headache, with a third or fourth level. »
Love obsession
In this story which takes place in Lyon – a “political choice” well accepted by the author – the narration alternates the points of view of the two protagonists, in the “I” for the man, in the third person for the woman .
Bastien, a 41-year-old labor inspector, involuntarily single for two years and a practicing Catholic, has swapped cigarettes for alcohol. One day he had to go to the scene of a fatal work accident: a man was crushed to death at the bottom of a hydraulic compactor in a waste treatment company.
On sick leave and depressed, after this episode he developed an obsession with strange blue crystals seen in the bottom of the machine. Something, something stronger than him, pushes him to go back.
For her part, Maïa is a 38-year-old science journalist who has little interest in investing in a romantic relationship, preferring Tinder and anonymous sex to satisfy her needs. She has a fault: she has “holey hands”, loses objects.
For the purposes of an article on scintillator crystals, materials which emit light following the absorption of ionizing radiation, the young woman visited the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), in Geneva, in Swiss. There she will learn from the gang that an experiment has gone wrong.
The link between the compactor, the crystals, Bastien and Maïa does not appear immediately. And it will take time before their paths converge – well-used pages where we get to know the protagonists, sometimes with a commentary on our times.
The length of the book, the role of chance, everything is done so that this love story – its crystallization, Stendhal would perhaps say – develops in a natural way. Sophie Divry also proceeded in Fantastic love story to a certain reversal of male-female archetypes. Bastien is sensitive, looking for love, while Maïa is a priori more detached, harder.
“I simply kept in mind a concern, which was never expressed in an ideological or dogmatic way,” says the writer, born in 1979 in Montpellier. During the two and a half years that I wrote the book, I always said to myself: be careful not to add sexist clichés into this love story which is very heteronormative. »
An attention which was enough “not to put back a coin”, as Sophie Divry says, particularly in the eroticization of male domination. And to ensure, for example, that the man is not richer, more beautiful, taller or older. “And that the poor girl is not the girl who waits for the man to look at her in order to exist. These are two people who didn’t need to be two people to exist. »
A fantastic material
The novelist addresses love in the broadest possible sense. Love is also friends, work colleagues, the love of God. Everything that “helps us to hold on in our deep existential solitudes”. Dealing with clichés in literature (and love is one) was a challenge. “You need simplicity and a lot of tenderness, you have to love your characters. »
The idea was also to explore what makes the meeting possible. “What can make our solitudes crack? What is the moving flaw, the gap that makes us human and which therefore allows us, not to fall into a compactor where everything is crushed, but into this hole that we have in us and which allows us to move towards the other ? »
Through the adventures, the writer wanted to embody a luminous face-to-face encounter. “On the one hand, there is this compactor which is a kind of black hole which crushes everything, a destructive impulse which is embodied in Bastien’s depression. Faced with this, there is another gap embodied by Maïa, a gap through which light passes and which allows attraction towards others, towards hope, the positive. » All this is nourished by humor and the “vitalist” tone of the novel.
What does this need respond to, in the author of The suburban condition and of Reopen the novel (Black on White, 2014 and 2017), to reinvent yourself from one book to another? “I can’t embark on a new text without telling myself that it will teach me something that I didn’t know how to do before. I always create a text that contradicts the previous one. »
The pleasure of stylistic exploration, the play with tones and shapes are a necessity for her. “I spend my time thinking in terms of literary forms,” confides Sophie Divry. There is also an element of excitement linked to novelty. I am too plural someone to stay in one tone. »
A work inspector friend gave him access to his world, then a short visit to CERN as well as a meeting with a physicist in Lyon formed the hard core of the research required of him in the novel. And when she came across the sparkling crystal, the novelist said to herself that there was no point in going any further. It was then a matter of popularizing and polishing.
“CERN is like that, full of crazy materials, crazy temperatures, incredible speeds. Even without talking about the particle collider or antimatter, there are materials which, as such, are already fascinating if you look at them. There are a hundred novels to be written every second at CERN. »