Are our lives the result of chance, unexpected encounters, fortuitous incidents? In Paris-Briancon, Philippe Besson is the puppeteer of the destiny of a handful of characters who find themselves aboard the same night train, but will not all come out alive. We reached out to tell him about this striking new novel.
Posted at 7:00 p.m.
A night train that takes a dozen hours to connect the French capital to the heart of the Alps? The ideal setting for a camera, thought Philippe Besson when he learned some time ago that night train lines were going to be reopened in France. A perfect place for unexpected encounters, conversations “until the end of the night” and an imposed promiscuity that brought back distant memories with a certain nostalgia…
Among the passengers we meet on board, there is this doctor who wanted to try the night train, perhaps to delay the moment of reconnecting with the territory of his childhood; this young man who missed his TGV and had no other choice; this mother who travels with her two children; or even this couple in their sixties who goes to the Alps for the Easter holidays. So many characters who would never have met otherwise.
And from the first pages of the novel, we know immediately that some of them will never arrive at their destination.
“They are neither heroes nor bastards, they are very simple people, but they all hide a secret, a lie, a denial, a flaw, a fear, an anguish, a repressed desire… And all of a sudden, all of that can finally be expressed because they are surrounded by darkness and because the other opposite is still a stranger, a stranger who you think you’ll leave in the morning and who can take our secret with it,” says the writer.
roll of the dice
Over the course of their conversations, we dive into their intimacy, as the suspense grows, until this event that will derail their existence. What path would she have taken if they hadn’t been on that train? This is precisely what the writer would like us to think about. Because everything is played, according to him, on a roll of the dice of chance.
Philippe Besson is convinced that if he had not met Thomas Andrieu, at 17 – a story he tells in stop with your lies – his life would have been entirely different. That if he hadn’t been ill at the age of 22, if he hadn’t spent six months in the hospital and met “a certain Paul Darrigrand”, he would have been a different man.
“There are things that we choose – we can choose our profession, we choose the person with whom we marry, we choose to have children… But we are the plaything of things that are beyond us”, he says with conviction.
And if it weren’t for this virus which, one day, arose when no one believed in it, he adds, he would not have left Paris very recently after having spent the last 35 years there. his life.
“I experienced the first confinement very badly. This confinement made me absolutely sterile when I was convinced of the opposite… I said to myself: it’s going to be wonderful, locked up at home, in silence, it’s exactly the dispositions I need to write. We write in solitude, in silence, in a form of confinement, but in fact, between chosen solitude and imposed solitude, there is a world. And you are absolutely unhappy in the imposed isolation. »
And this novel, therefore, would perhaps be the expression, in his opinion, of this throw of the dice which brought him back to the land of his youth.
“I believe that our life is decided on chance, on unexpected encounters, on incidents, on accidents which, in essence, are involuntary, unpredictable, and which we did not seek. I’m convinced that our existences follow trajectories because there was a pebble in the shoe, because we suddenly deviated without having had anything to do with it. And I think we are made by all that, ”says Philippe Besson.
And precisely, because nothing is decided in advance and “the dice are rolling without us”, he believes that it would be in our interest to become aware of the fragility of our existence.
“Perhaps the moral of this fable is this: the death that arises makes our life more precious. So, rather than always wanting more or something else, maybe we have to look at what we have in front of us, there, with us, in the moment, and know how to take advantage of it because it can escape us from hands at one point or another. The lesson could not have been clearer.
Paris-Briancon
Philippe Besson
Julliard
208 pages