“Literature falls on us like a love story, that is to say when we least expect it. Oscar Lalo is as wise as he is feverish when he discusses his relationship to literature. A love he proposed to the narrator of his most recent novel, The living roomwhose existence is turned upside down by the encounter with literature. The duty met the Geneva writer in the offices of his distributor, during his visit to Montreal.
You would think he was hesitant at first, but it is not so: the man of letters leaves no word to chance. His speech is chiseled, resonating the bass of his voice and the musicality of his sentences. It must be said that he has been juggling for a very long time — and in many ways — with the language. An immense reader, he admits, not without a smile, to have taken no less than fourteen books for his stay of a few days in Quebec. To choose between a few extra underpants and this precious book of a conference by Jung on Nerval, in particular, the choice seemed obvious to him.
Past lives
If reading is part of a natural impulse for him to write, the publication of his first novel nevertheless arrived late – he published The broken tales at 51 years old. To publish a book constitutes in his eyes a very serious commitment, and he took time to assume the process: “Art has no meaning if it is not totally indispensable to the one who accomplishes it. The shift to publishing happens when you really feel like you have something to share. It’s a big responsibility. »
It would be silly not to recognize, in any case, all the richness of what he calls his “past lives”. With a hint of regret, perhaps, he notes that writing has always been there, like an irresistible call: “Through this multiplicity of professions that I have practised, all professionally – I have been a lawyer, a law professor , singer-songwriter, playwright, screenwriter, director — I think subconsciously all I was interested in was the act of writing. Except that I managed — I think out of cowardice — so that my finished product was not pure writing, but on the contrary diluted by music, advocacy, staging…”
Fortunately, this hesitation seems to belong to the past: “I have an ineffable joy in writing. Total joy. We can believe that the success of his novels contributes to projecting him into a future where he writes, “always by hand, by a necessity of craftsmanship”, since he is already considering his next two novels, which must publish test his “capacity to graze the precipice between what must be written and what can be written”. It promises.
A mighty weapon
In The living roomthe protagonist and narrator, orphan of mother and emasculated by his authoritarian father, awakens to existence at the height of his 39 years, after having bought, by a blind desire, a copy at one euro of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, by Gustave Flaubert. Certain circumstances invite him to make himself vulnerable. He finds himself overcoming his fears, apprehending then the ordinary man in him. His transformation is enhanced by his discovery of literature and, with it, invites his “attention to these tiny shows with no apparent links to [son] existence “.
Thus, literature changes a life. It can, one might think, change the world, too. But is it all safe? “Literature can be dangerous”, maintains Oscar Lalo, “because it corresponds to an expectation. Each time you buy a book, you expect to come out of it better, one way or another. And I want to say, Madame Bovary, it’s us. Because we all have, like Emma, this aspiration to escape our condition by picking up a book.
This subject burns his lips, and the author adds, with the same fever that made him sing the praises of literature: “Emma and her illustrious ancestor Don Quixote both have the desire to achieve this completely delirious goal of conforming reality to what they read in books. Instead of using literature for a better understanding of reality. Now, should we remember: “They both kill each other. »
From the heights of the offices that welcome us, Montreal seems motionless, as if struck by the writer’s words, which still resonate. Decidedly, with Oscar Lalo, literature, whether magnified or taken to task, is not an easy task.
We could still bathe in it, in this nimble speech where the great texts that have preceded us swim freely. But time is running out, the page is full, and then fourteen books, curled up between shirts and socks, are patiently waiting to bring about their revolution. Because, as the narrator evokes in The living room : “A page has just been turned noiselessly. The great changes are perhaps made in silence. »