five years later The truth comes out of the horse’s mouthan admirable novel told from the point of view of a prostitute from Casablanca, which had earned her the competition for Le Goncourt, the Moroccan-American author Meryem Alaoui shows the same virtuosity in her second novel, Sweet Chaos. Inspired by the two years she lived in Brooklyn, after having lived in California and Washington, she invites the reader to meet the fascinating colorful fauna, a kind of intergenerational and multicultural extended family, of a building in the Pikes Low district.
“It’s very easy in cities like New York, like Brooklyn, to find inspiration because there is absolutely everything, confides the novelist, joined in Morocco, where she has returned to live. I talk to people a lot, I make a lot of friends. When I’m at the café, I talk to my neighbors, so inevitably, I collect a lot of stories, data in my head. In a city where an individual has the opportunity to express themselves in all that they are, in their eccentricity, it’s pretty colorful because there’s no need to conform to anything. either. In fact, conformism is not the most widespread thing. »
From the first pages, where he meets the endearing main characters, including Riley and Graham, a young polyamorous couple, Jolene, a 50-year-old drunk on the dive bottle, Clara, who has his roommates damned with his chronic instability, and Ethan, who spoils his neighbors in drugs of all kinds, the reader will have the impression of being caught up in a vortex from which he will not want to extricate himself, as if he were drawn into a state of trance, so seduced will he be by the density of the writing , by its bewitching musicality and by the vivacity of the dialogues.
“There is also a form of trance in writing, at least for me. It seems like I’m going completely out of myself and reaching a level that is a form of trance. In my head, I had the impression that I was composing a musical work, that is to say that the words made sentences that made a story, but I lived it as a composition. Which is a little surprising, by the way, because in the first novel, I had moments where I felt like I was playing a tennis match — yes, it’s weird! — and to hit balls; when I wrote a word that satisfied me, I felt like I was earning a point. »
choral novel
What is also remarkable in Sweet Chaos, it is the way in which Meryem Alaoui inserts the dialogues into the narration, as if the voices of the characters formed a choir singing sometimes in unison, sometimes in total disagreement. Spontaneously, the novelist claims to have found the writing of Sweet Chaos much more difficult than that of The truth comes out of the horse’s mouth.
“At first, I had a problem positioning myself and the characters. I didn’t want to be the classic narrator, so I created a buffer narrator. Once I found myself in his shoes, I told myself that he was the one who was going to write and see things from his perspective. After finding his voice, which was the hardest part, I didn’t need him anymore. So I had found the balance between storytelling and getting inside the character’s head, integrating the character’s dialogue and thoughts with the narration by the narrator. I then felt that there was a form of logic and coherence; so I was able to continue writing. »
Meryem Alaoui reveals that she was so carried away by the stories lived by her characters that the first version of Sweet Chaos was twice the published version, which explains why as the story progresses, the writing becomes more airy, the chapters get shorter and the relationship to time becomes less breathless.
“I had developed another universe, that of the bakery, where there were many more characters, and then everything more or less took turns. Now that I see it with hindsight, I see that it was a little too abundant. We would never have found it! I had no trouble dealing with 40 characters because they were real to me, they were people I knew in my head. So I pruned and cleaned up, and it’s true that I kept the beginning because I wanted to keep those characters. I had grown attached to them, so I didn’t want to take any more away. »
liberal america
While she tackles polyamory, pansexuality and consent head-on through the sexual and sentimental tribulations of the various characters of the teeming New York building, Meryem Alaoui seems to sketch the portrait of an idealized liberal America totally out of step with that of today, where the right is increasingly intolerant and conservative.
“It depends on the environments in which we gravitate. New York State is completely on the left, but it’s true that when I was in Washington, it was a very different, more conservative mentality. We felt the difference between Republicans and Democrats. In New York, the Republicans are diluted, we do not see them. In fact, New York is not the United States, it’s Babylon, an international melting pot that has its own culture, its own madness, its own logic… and besides, it’s quite chaotic as a city itself. if the chaos is organized, it is violent and very particular. »
And Brooklyn compared to other New York boroughs? “Brooklyn is much softer. There is a village life, if only because the buildings are lower, the streets are narrower, you can see more of the sky and there is a lot more greenery. We are in an environment that is more human-sized. People express their originality there, assume their difference, and me, that’s what I liked too. »
Dreaming that The truth comes out of the horse’s mouth And Sweet Chaos be the subject of a feature film and a series respectively – where she could devote herself to developing the characters of the bakery where Lily works, who forms a trouple with Riley and Graham, and Eduardo, who loves parties given by Ethan —, the American national is rather positive about the future of this country to which she remains deeply attached.
“I’m not politicized at all, so I’m not going to take a political look at America today. By nature, I am optimistic and I tell myself that it is a wave and that not all the States are concerned by these anti-abortion, anti-LGBT laws, etc. There has been a lot of progress and there is a legal framework which means that we cannot go back completely, but it is true that it depends on the States. Texas and California are very different states, so I choose to say that California is going to win. »