“Tata” by Valérie Perrin

Another captivating and moving story by Valérie Perrin. Like in a film, she has the art of telling and making eras twirl, with a sacred “Auntie” whose voice we can almost hear, and whom we are not likely to forget!

After The Forgotten of Sunday, Change the water of the flowersAnd ThreeThere Tatathe new novel by Valérie Perrin which has just been published by Albin Michel.

Three years later”Colette is dead again. This word does not exist anywhere. : There is no such thing as dying again”…

Yet, this is exactly what Agnès, a depressed successful film director, learns since her husband and favorite actor left her for a “young girl” and who is surviving thanks to the love of her daughter Anna. The one who is “redead” is her Tataher aunt Colette, with whom Agnès spent all her childhood holidays in Burgundy, in Gueugnon, historically renowned for its steel factories, and now also for its shoemaking, that of Colette. So it is she, Tatafinally, the heroine of this incredible intrigue, a discreet woman, single and apparently – at least before dying twice – without a story…

One could also be mistaken at the start, and think that it is just a fantastic story with this second death. But in fact, it is the pretext to approach the childhood of Colette and her brother Jean, therefore Agnès’ father, who is a piano virtuoso, and also the childhood of her friend Blanche. And then, in another register, the broken childhood of Lyèce, Agnès’ childhood friend whom she finds again in Gueugnon. Transmission, childhood wounds are definitely her favorite themes.

“Abandonment, adoption, ties of the heart, of blood, are very important to me… I like to understand that, to delve into that, I like to ask myself questions. And then I like to be as close as possible to people who are no longer characters. In fact, for me they are close to me. Whether it’s Colette, whether it’s Agnès, whether it’s Pierre or Blanche, Lyèce too, it doesn’t matter, I feel very close to them, and it’s true that I like to ask myself questions about the human race.”

Valerie Perrin

to franceinfo

Moreover, we, the readers, also feel, as we go along, as we read the pages, very close to the characters. There is a kind of intimacy that is created, especially since everything, or almost everything, is conveyed through voice in this novel. The voices on the cassettes recorded by Colette, and those of some other characters that we will not name, are at the heart of the investigation. And it is thanks to these recordings on Agnès’ old tape recorder that we gradually understand this incredible family story.

A story that goes back to the Second World War. We can’t help but think that Valérie Perrin shares this with her partner Claude Lelouch, the art of storytelling, and the talent for making eras twirl. We read and we’re there too, in the film! Valérie Perrin:

“I build my stories like films, I know that they are very visual and that they are extremely dialogued… Then, I believe that my novels, apart from the fact that they are built like detective novels, so I often stick to a very strong plot, there are a lot of investigations, so readers like that and at the same time, it’s as if the characters were familiar to them. I think there is a kind of strange mixture in fact, a mixture of fiction, but also a lot of reality. That’s what I’m told, I bring the word of life, but through fiction, maybe that’s it…”

Valerie Perrin

to franceinfo

Tatait is also of course a beautiful tribute to the town of her youth, Gueugnon, and to her parents, as she herself says:

“A tribute to my father, who actually arrived with my mother in this small town, I was one year old, to play football there since he was a professional footballer. At the time, it had a very particular status called “semi-professional”, and the players worked in the factory in the morning and trained in the afternoon and played on the weekend. That’s why I grew up there.”

Tatait is a novel of more than 600 pages. If it weighs heavy, it is because it contains lives! Extraordinary lives, those of artists, which rub shoulders with “ordinary” lives in which everyone can recognize themselves, or find a loved one through the characters. A novel like all those of Valérie Perrin that we struggle to put down!

Note the adaptation of his novel Change the water of the flowers by Jean-Pierre Jeunet is currently being adapted… Just a little more patience before seeing the film on screens one day!

The full interview with Valérie Perrin (13 minutes) can be found at the top of this page.