The ant is Bernard Webber. In Memoirs of an Antthe whimsical French novelist dissects his childhood to extract the key moments that inspired his main works.
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In particular, we learn that the novel The War of the Buttons influenced Werber’s cycle of Ants, “by his offbeat vision of the normal world around us”. Or when at 8 years old, a school essay was entitled “Memories of a chip”.
He then discovers Isaac Asimov and the importance of suspense, and travels to the United States, whose militaristic mores inspire him with another aspect of Les Ants. As a young journalist, he meets a “Lilliputian woman” who inspires his novel The micro-humans. Werber’s freshness, a mixture of naivety and iconoclasm, bursts forth in all its splendor in the first half of this autobiography. Until he hit his mid-twenties, in fact, and started compulsively listing the ups and downs of his life as a budding and then successful writer.
These mystical-detailed descriptions of his states of mind as a writer echo the somewhat artificial division of the book according to the tarot cards, the deeper meaning of which is briefly described before each chapter. We learn all the same in passing that he had 111 reincarnations, of which only 11 “really worthy of being told because these lives had participated in [son] evolution “.
This attention to detail, so charming when it is turned towards people encountered in childhood, unfortunately becomes heavy when it becomes solipsistic. But we close the book saying, all the same, what an imagination!
Memoirs of an Ant
Bernard Weber
Albin Michael
425 pages