In a perhaps not so distant future, marked by climate change and the uncontrolled proliferation of artificial intelligence, which has caused ignorance and stupidity to surge, humanity has suddenly entered “inverted time”.
Visited in his sleep by “an active intelligent entity”, Paolo, a Parisian in his forties, professor of mathematics at the university, will be forced to notice, after seeing a mysterious rallying sign in the street (” J-780″), that his strange vision is more reality than nightmare.
Because, just like him, other chosen individuals have been contacted by extraterrestrials to save humanity from extinction linked to an imminent natural disaster. These “Called Ones”, like several hundred million men and women, will have the possibility of migrating to another planet.
From the first rallying sign to the “final gong”, the narrator of Live. Countdown tells us about these two pre-apocalyptic years. Faced with this threat and the prospect of a planetary exodus, we imagine that humanity, fragile and disunited, will be able to offer a united front. Not so fast.
If Boualem Sansal pretends to believe that our salvation could come from space, like a miracle from above, it is to better highlight our dissensions. And the dystopia that he imagines at the heart of this new novel, his tenth, a mixture of science fiction and apocalyptic anticipation, brings to light the malfunctions and fanaticisms, both old and new, which still plague the world. humanity.
Reached at his home, in Boumerdès, a coastal town located 45 kilometers east of Algiers, the country’s capital, the writer, born in 1949, continues a remarkable work in French. “I am Algerian, I live in Algeria, French is part of our history. I was born French, at a time when Algeria was French. I express myself in the language with which I am most comfortable, and my books could not be published in Algeria, so I published them abroad. It could have been in Belgium or Canada. These are the coincidences of life. »
Knowledge and pain
The writer had already indulged in dystopian anticipation with 2084. The end of the world (Gallimard, 2015, Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, before being named best book of the year by the magazine Read). An Orwellian fable through which he denounced the excesses of religious radicalism which threatens our democracies.
An engineer trained at the National Polytechnic School of Algiers, Boualem Sansal also holds a doctorate in economics. A former senior civil servant in his country, he was dismissed in 2003 for his critical positions against the power in place. From The Barbarian Oath in 1999, a “bitter chronicle” of the years of civil war in Algeria, he questions in his own way, through his novels and essays, the world in which he lives.
However, does he approach literature as a scientist? “I remained so,” confirms Boualem Sansal. I have a real passion for mathematics. I’m still working on my math. I don’t feel like I think like a literary person. I have very linear reasoning. » Facts, causes, a result. Moreover, the writer admits to putting very little emotion into his novels, instead trying each time to analyze things coldly, as one examines a physics or chemistry problem.
However, naming things well makes them dangerous, the narrator reminds us, before quoting theEcclesiastes : “He who increases his knowledge increases his pain. »
On a scale of 1 to 10, in relation to what he thinks he knows about the world, where is the pain that the writer would experience? “It’s very big,” replies Boualem Sansal without hesitation. She is really very big. There is a hierarchy of causes, it is certain, but beyond his little person, we see clearly that the world is very sick. And that is real suffering. With global warming, economic crises, wars breaking out almost everywhere, we live in suffering. »
But it is a suffering that can be “reasoned”, he adds, still believing that there are solutions to deal with natural disasters and dictatorships.
“Ignorance, as George Orwell said in 1984, it is also freedom. If I don’t know, I live quietly. But knowledge is not everything. We are all aware, revolted, but how many act? How many have courage and determination? » Very little, he replies, taking as an example all the governments which, since 1990, seem to have turned a deaf ear to the warnings issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The art of (not) living together
How should we proceed to select those who will be lucky enough to be saved? By “drawing lots, at feeling, on study of the file, by quotas”? Paolo and his group, in the novel, will consult representatives of the great monotheisms. For an imam, “all land in the Universe is land of Allah, dying here or elsewhere is equal. Allah decides the time and place of our return to Him.” And if Allah sends a ship to save men, it is to the Muslims that He sends it. According to the equally stoic rabbi, it “is the destiny of Jews to be scattered throughout the world”.
Even well into the process of the final countdown, Paolo remains lucid: “Never, to our knowledge, has a man on Earth been killed by any celestial misfortune. The real threat is domestic, our Earth will die from its own diseases or the turpitude of its inhabitants. »
Islam, religions in general, schools and universities, and even Wokism, are entitled to several blows in the novel. Boualem Sansal, just like his narrator, believes that “man is his own limit, the more he advances, the more he accelerates his end”.
In the novel, the end of Earth and humanity is the result of external, stellar or extraterrestrial causes. But in reality, ours, the threat is indeed human. That is to say, it emanates from us, from our behavior and our ways of thinking, from our impossibility, it seems, to live together.
Today, would humanity even be capable of “saving” itself, of “remaking” itself, without “celestial” intervention? Knowing, as it is said in the novel, that “we know the man of tomorrow, it is the man of today who is the son of his ancestors”… “If humanity had this capacity , he continues, she would have already done it. But the suffering has only increased, it’s quite desperate. We are our own executioner. »
It is on this fertile soil, Boualem Sansal recalls, that all religions have sprouted, which offer everyone the individual and reassuring prospect of being saved after death.
A fiction in which, for his part, the novelist refuses to be drawn into: “People will believe in miracles until the last minute. »