Claire Berest. “How can we destroy the one we chose to spend the rest of his life with?”

after nothing is black (Grand prize for readers HE: 2020), dedicated to the mythical love of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and Gabriel (Grand Prix de l’Héroïne Madame Figaro 2018), written with her sister Anna Berest and dedicated to her great-grandmother Gabrielle Dubuffet, who married Picabia, Claire Berest is interested; hair thickness to a seemingly ordinary couple. Etienne and Viv work in a publishing house and a cultural association and lead a quiet life, punctuated by openings and outings with friends, enjoyable despite their tight budget. On this Monday morning, nothing suggests that Etienne is going to kill his wife three days later… As the countdown begins, the novelist hears precisely the path that leads the man to the irredeemable. Interview:

In the video, love and foreststhe teaser

Miss Figaro. – What prompted you to write this novel, which can be thought to be inspired by a news story?
Claire Berest. – I have a guilty passion for various facts. I collected them when I was little, I compiled files on big cases, serial killers. And as for Frida Kahlo, I waited before incorporating her into my work as a novelist. The idea of ​​swinging, with a couple, is also a recurring theme in my books. However, there is an area of ​​darkness in the area of ​​spousal homicide, particularly among offenders without a history of violence, that I wanted to approach as closely as possible. We are not here in the context of domestic violence, where husbands are repeatedly abusive and one day the gestures are too many. Hair thickness It follows a man who had never laid a hand on his wife before, and in order to better understand the territory I was talking about, I chose to adopt the perspective of a murderer who is shaken.

Do you document a lot?
I devoured the scientific literature, the other’s body By Joel Guillaume, in: The barbarism of ordinary men, By Daniel Zaguri, who deals with crimes of passion, femicide, drumming; a terminology that has evolved and says a lot about our relationship with this type of murder. On such sensitive subjects, it is absolutely necessary to gather the real so that we can put the fiction in good stead. But when we have filled these notebooks with data and facts, we forget them so that the truth of the writing will emerge… Following the trials, I have noticed that some defendants can be very prolific when they speak. a matter of telling their story, recalling their childhood or everyday life, but their words crumble when questioned about the crime itself. We’re facing a black hole beyond the unspeakable Hair thickness trying to put words.

A couple is this third entity, composed of two individuals forming a body.

Claire Berest

How did you build this pair?
A couple is this third entity consisting of two individuals forming one body and creating a third sound without anyone knowing whether they will make it joy, cage, pain… I had to understand who these two souls are, who had met and deeply loved each other. Because it is unimaginable there. how can we destroy the one we chose, more than his family or friends, to spend the rest of his life with? The beautiful thing about a couple is that we endure, in the best sense of the term, the transformations that each of us undergoes over the decades, because we are never the same person at 20, 30, 40… Etienne and Viv have been together. ten years when we discovered them, and it was on purpose; In the early years, marital homicides were rare. The term crime of passion is therefore paradoxically associated with the long term. We know from the second paragraph that Etienne is going to kill Vive.

“And if? It is an endlessly romantic spring. Some call it mektub the fate of others…

Claire Berest

Why did you decide to announce it so soon?
I wanted to build one hell of a car, but I didn’t want a macabre suspense where the reader would wonder if the Vive was going to make it or not. I love thrillers, but the reading contract there was different. he’s not going to run away from it, we know the frame is set on the first page and the writing can begin. This allowed me to think of a construction whose tension would be based on the breathing of the characters, these few days of suspension and the game of dominoes falling on each other. Why does this person who wakes up on Monday morning end up ruining everything? It is because of endless little things: money problems, recognition, humiliation, a word said at the wrong time, and the tragedy of marital murders is that otherwise one little thing would be enough to kill. It’s all within a hair’s breadth. “What if?” It is an endlessly romantic spring. Some call it mektub the fate of others…

Could there be an outburst of violence simply because of an increase in micro-circumstances?
These men, statistically, they are usually men, have nothing planned. They take advantage of the “weapon of opportunity,” to use the term used, and sink into a murderous trance which may lead to what the Anglo-Saxons call;over perform – thirty, forty, fifty stab wounds, signs that a person has left the area of ​​rationality. It was as if the pain of deprivation possessed these people like a demon. very often, moreover, they do actions to keep the other, and we talk about the “crime of property”, with the idea that even if dead, the other will remain mine…

I wanted to look for the ordinary in these extraordinary women

Claire Berest

Can we say that after exploring the extraordinary (with figures like Frida Kahlo or Gabriel Dubuffet), you are now bound to the ordinary… which turns out not to be the case?
Novels, for me, are ways to deeply question normality: you, me, everyone, Mr. and Mrs. But sometimes I have to make deviations. In Gabriele and Frida, I was drawn to the remnants of normality, so to speak, that bind us all together. Frida, who would like to have a child and can’t, Frida who is sick of love for Diego, who makes her suffer because he cheats, Frida who paints because she is hurt by an accident… I followed these women for what they are they say about us. , small domestic gestures to cope with a terrifying and exciting life, regardless of age. I wanted to find the ordinary in these extraordinary women, just as I wanted to find in Etienne’s hyperintelligence the extraordinary that would stamp reality; they are two sides of the same coin.

“Hair thickness», by Claire Berest, Ed. Albin Michel, 240 pages, €19.90.