Here we are lost in the heart of a huge glazed living room which overlooks the gardens of the Gallimard house, its publisher. Masks quickly fell, we soon understand that Karine Tuil, who has just published decision (in bookstores in Quebec in February), works as a novelist like a reporter. And that makes experience boomerang and echoes of closeness when she says she likes rubbing shoulders with otherness and immersing herself in waters other than those of her ordinary river before starting to write.
These encounters feed her and sometimes even exalt her. She says, “I love hanging out with people from all walks of life. “She advances in the open:” I do not hide, I say who I am and what I want to do. She points out: “Sometimes I get things that the person in front of me doesn’t know they have in them. She likes to go into various fields, that of the legal world or Islamist terrorism, the war of the sexes or social networks that sabotage reputations.
She has spent time with “anti-terror” judges and injured military personnel, intelligence agents and court-appointed lawyers. As she also has a daily life as a mother of three grown-up children or orders for freelance journalism, she frequents media glories and big bosses, lost teenagers and failed writers, not to mention the friends and girlfriends around. But this interest in others is also a well-honed defense mechanism.
Sometimes I get things that the person in front of me doesn’t know they have in them
She never lay down on a couch for fear that the analyst would betray her secrets. And the admirer of Tom Wolfe, Philip Roth and Jonathan Safran Foer can well salute the work of Christine Angot, there is no question that she sacrifices to autofiction or personal testimony. Hence her hesitation to engage in the exercise of the portrait, so much does she prefer hiding on the other side of the barrier, confidante and concealer, rather than unpacking packing and exposed desolate. Which we totally understand, but let’s go anyway.
Digging the palm of the news
His parents grew up in Tunis. They weren’t 20 when they joined France, bridgeheads of a family exile. His father set up and grew a furniture business. Karine Tuil describes him as follows: “It was Groucho Marx. He was funny, dressed up, took nothing seriously. “She herself is quite laughing, although it is hard to imagine her telling jokes.
His mother is the executive secretary in a baccalaureate box (a private educational establishment aimed at preparing for the baccalaureate, which does not sign a contract with the State) and seems to have been the figure of authority. “She was pretty smart. She borrowed books from her high school library. As a teenager, she made me read Vian, Kafka, Camus. Then we talked about it together. On the other hand, in the pavilion of Joinville-le-Pont (Val-de-Marne), the two girls are ordered to close their eyes when they kiss in the Sunday evening films.
She is a teenager when she begins to worry about her Jewishness. Until then, the desire for home assimilation has prevailed. She discovers the Holocaust. She recalls: “You don’t understand why your people were executed. You wonder what, in your identity, poses a problem. Since then, she has not become a practitioner, but studies the texts. A reader of Lévinas, she explains: “It’s intellectual mechanics that interests me. »
“Little traveler”, she does not seek to “be out of place”, but would go and live a year in Israel. The attacks in Toulouse, committed by Mohammed Merah, left a lasting mark on it. This only chromed his will to “try to understand contemporary violence” through his fictions. Manuel Carcassonne, one of its first editors, describes its logic thus: “It has a guiding thought and an elaborate romantic reflection. Patient, she is aware that nothing is done in a day. But she is determined and knows where she wants to go. At first glance, however, it seems undulating, ductile, accommodating. His line of force, which has nothing to do with a line of chance, cuts little by little, a furrow digging the palm of the news.
She started with law studies to reassure her world, held six months in a job as a lawyer. Strong today of about fifteen publications, it rowed to impose itself in a literary universe where it had little relay. Her husband, a doctor whom she married young, supported her. The law is important to her, and she would have seen herself as a magistrate. She keeps more distance from litigants, and not just because speaking out has long disturbed her. Gamine, her mother nicknamed her “French justice”. And one is surprised to think that his accommodating listening and his engaging appearance are deceptive, that his sword must be able to cut and his arm not tremble.
Cherish her loneliness as a feather worker
His psychological thrillers describe the balance of power that tears society apart. Clear about her vision of things, she nevertheless makes sure that her “trap-readers” do not close the debate. She applies herself to writing for and against like an examining magistrate. She believes that there is a literary truth as one speaks of judicial truth. She quotes Jaurès: “Courage is seeking the truth and telling it. » She did it in human things, sold 250,000 copies and adapted for the cinema by Yvan Attal. She details the differences in perception and sensitivity that keep the sexes apart. And how these misunderstandings are reinforced by social and cultural differences.
In this confrontation, which ends in court, the young man from a good family thinks that the problematic sexual relationship was consensual, while the less advantaged, more religious young woman believes that she has been raped. Talking about it again with her, we realize that Karine Tuil is leaning towards the plaintiff’s version. Although after the reading, one had the impression that the judgment rendered was rather that of Solomon. If she is reluctant to report her past votes, she ends up letting go that, this time, she would gladly join Taubira.
She has a sense of the collective and can easily bend to constraints. The health obligations related to COVID-19 have moderately disturbed her, as her fatalism sweeps away all hypochondria. Happy with her independence as an artisan of letters, she did not become a filmmaker as it may have been. She who loves Martin Scorsese, James Gray, Vincent Cassel and Al Pacino vaguely regrets not having staged Léa Seydoux, whose personality inspires her.
But above all she cherishes her solitude as a worker of the pen, a maker of fiction. Constant in her rituals, she admits “going to work with pleasure” in the maid’s room which adjoins the apartment purchased in the Vand district of Paris. She hesitated to become a landlord. She was afraid of shackles, afraid of not being able to flee in a hurry. This mountain walker and desert visitor has recently learned that she lives near the high school where her mother worked. As if anchoring was possible where the first ink had been cast?