In a few words, Lightning tells the love story between a man and a woman whose husband is in prison. A beautiful and cruel love novel where the saturated air of the Jura mountains blows, a mixture of freedom and savagery, but also confinement.
It is in the heights of this massif which borders Switzerland that the narrator of Pierric Bailly’s seventh book, Julien (whom everyone calls John), solitary and a little wait-and-see, works in the summer as a shepherd and in the winter as a ski instructor. In a relationship with an English teacher, Héloïse, he plans to follow her after her transfer to Reunion, in the Indian Ocean.
While reading the newspaper, John discovers one day that Alexandre, a long-lost high school friend who has become a veterinarian and animal rights activist, has killed a young man from his village with a blow from his board. Stunned, he contacts Nadia, the wife of this gentle colossus, also a former high school friend, to try to understand how the unthinkable could have happened. During the trial, and in the years that follow, Julien and Nadia, mother of two young children, will become closer and develop a passionate love story. In the shadow of the Jura mountains and in a secret that will become heavier and heavier.
“I grew up in a very small village lost in the middle of the forest,” says Pierric Bailly, 41, contacted in Lyon a few days before his first visit to Quebec, as part of the Montreal Book Fair.
“I think that my childhood wandering the spruce forests, climbing along the waterfall which was at the bottom of the village, exploring the caves, totally shaped my imagination as a novelist today. It continues to be an inexhaustible source of decorations for me. I find an intensity in this place, perhaps because it is a place that is wild, which also has something dark, quite black. »
The writer featured the Jura in several of his books. As in The man of the woods (POL, 2017), an autobiographical story where he recounted the mourning of his father, who died accidentally in the forest. Conducting his own investigation into this absurd death in his own way, the author wanted to “question the landscape” in his own way.
Question the landscape
It is in this mountain landscape of Haut-Jura that Pierric Bailly naturally camped Lightning. Without lyricism, without ever judging its protagonists. The Jura, its rural proletariat and its unique fauna – lynx, wolves, sheep, shepherd dogs and patous, these large protective dogs which only obey the logic of the herd. A corner of France that is sometimes nicknamed “little French Canada”, recalls the writer, in a shorthand that makes you smile and which evokes preserved nature, the forest and the abundance of lakes.
Pierric Bailly grew up near Lake Ilay, at an altitude of 800 meters. He did not study literature, he explains, and began to write while he was doing replacements in factories, in supermarkets, on construction sites. Under the influence of certain authors who talked about their odd jobs, such as Hubert Selby J1r. (Last Exit to Brooklyn), which meant a lot to him.
“I have not experienced the complexes that one can have regarding entry into literature when one has sometimes read too much. I allowed myself to tell what I was experiencing in texts which, at the beginning, did not have the form of novels. » But at 25, after he had published his first novel, The Punch (POL, 2008), his life changed. “Because I was expected by at least one great reader, who was Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens [son éditeur]. And since then, I haven’t stopped writing. »
The writer, who says he likes to get lost in the forest, today divides his time between Lyon and the Jura, where he purchased a small house. A return to the sources which surely nourished his writing, as he immerses us with great realism, but far from clichés, in the daily life of this shepherd.
Universal stories
“I make stories which, in themselves, are universal and could be situated in any environment, but I make them with peasants, with workers, with unemployed people, whom I do not reduce at all to their social status . » Stories of love and friendship, passion, truths and lies.
Or stories of love triangles, never banal, as in Lightning or in Jim’s novel (POL, 2021), a novel which will be the subject of a film adaptation in 2024. Stories where Pierric Bailly each time offers us an implicit reflection on masculinity: in the two novels, the narrators are men who compose with their fragilities and their doubts.
“I find that it is from the flaws of the characters that we feel them exist,” he believes. There’s something about John. He is someone who is not sure of himself, and whose relationship with others is quite complicated. He is not a hero who is decided, who knows where he is going. I’m interested in creating these kinds of characters. »
Which would be enough to make him an intimate writer. “I take responsibility for that. I could even claim it, says the novelist. That can sometimes be surprising coming from a man. Men should take up the major issues of the world, geopolitics or terrorism. Me, I am a writer of intimacy, of family, of human relations, of everyday life, of love, of friendship. » Much more than major “masculine” subjects, he believes.
“The challenge is quite exciting to try to make melodramas that are not weighed down by pathos, to play on feelings without being mawkish or simplistic. » He believes he achieves this by paying particular attention to language, in order to make situations and characters come alive.
And the language in Lightning — tinged with a certain orality, it is pointed out to him — it is the fruit of influences and readings that were important to him, such as those of certain American authors or Samuel Beckett. “ Molloy and all of that was something very important to me. This thought which advances while searching, and which doubts, which returns, which corrects itself. »
This is what first-person narration offers, it seems to Pierric Bailly, a way of telling which allows a personality to be conveyed and felt in a book. To stay as close as possible to the narrator, to what he thinks and what he feels. By measuring the oscillations of the heart and mind. And that’s a bit what Pierric Bailly does, like a seismologist.
At the SLM, Pierric Bailly will participate in the round table “Settling scores? » with authors Louis-Daniel Godin and Emmanuelle Pierrot, Saturday November 25 at 10:30 a.m., at the Palais des congrès.