At once a family fiction, a rural saga that limits and celebrates the connection between man and nature, Serge Joncourt’s new novel resonates as an ode to life.
Back Human warmthSerge Joncourt suggests continuing Human nature, the very beautiful novel that won her the Femina Award in 2020, the year of her detention. It is this period that serves as a framework for confronting the threat of the epidemic: the dispersed family; Human nature – the peasant parents, Alexandre, the eldest son who stayed with them, the sisters who had made their lives in Paris, Toulouse and Rodez, found themselves reunited despite their original farm. An opportunity for the writer to hold an open-air closed session while presenting a spectacular photograph of the French countryside (but also, indirectly, the cities) in XXI.e century where ecological issues are now central.
Madame Figaro. – What does Lot represent for you, who seem to be a full actor in this novel?
Serge Joncourt. – My partner is from Lot and I have been going there for thirty years. Knowing that my parents live in Nieuws, which is a bit similar in that they’re areas that aren’t talked about much. There is a shortage of doctors and hospitals, no TGV, and a seven-hour train ride to reunite with family is no small feat when today you can get to New York in the same amount of time. It is a place that exists, but about which the French know little, and outside of Cahors or Saint-Cirque-Lapopie we imagine green hills, good food, a kind of fantasy… It is a preserved countryside with sounds. tractors, two horses and mopeds that form an eternal soundtrack for me; an intermediate area, hilly without being mountainous, agricultural in the valleys, wilder on the hills and very green in the north, where we are on the border of Korese. Through its syncretism it constituted rural France, or what I wanted to portray, a dreamlike projection.
I’m an outside writer
Serge Joncourt
The family portrait gallery you paint was also about society as a whole.
Yes, if only by profession of sisters: teacher, merchant, worker with new technologies. Moreover, I have placed them in Toulouse, Paris and Rhodes, three typologies of the city within the country, where the capital crushes all that is often perceived as dominance and arrogance. One is divorced, the other is still married… Basically, all this is copied from life. For my husband, who is first of all a “yellow vest”, but also a trader at the head of the cafe, who wants to restart the business, I started with close people. There was such anger and, at the same time, such a need to find oneself… The Yellow Jackets movement sometimes turned into charity work, Emmaus style, sometimes into unfettered revolutionary impulse. Anger used to be channeled through strong ideologies. We must remember the anti-nuclear movements of the 1970s and 1980s that blew up PS offices and EDF offices… This violence is now toned down, more universal and less acute. In the 1980s, it made sense to vote for Mitterrand or Chirac, they were the bearers of the social project. Today, there are no more ideologies or outstanding figures embodying them. As a result, everyone said that it could be, and the “yellow vests” were so many leaders…
Composition: Human warmthSerge Joncourt’s book. Press
The novel is a sediment of reality, life and history
Serge Joncourt
What does the character of Alexander represent in this context?
An anti-class breakaway, unlike her sisters, and someone who allowed me to discuss how we see farmers in a broad sense. They were hillbillies first, then welfare recipients who took all the money from Europe with CAP subsidies, and then, for a moment, because we started talking about global warming, then we remembered, with the epidemic and the pasta rush that we needed. wheat, and that this wheat was produced by farmers, the view changed; This summer we talked again about water and drought problems, while twenty years ago it was unthinkable to open a news story about wheat not growing at 8:00 p.m. … The farming profession has been delayed at the heart of our concerns, and Alexander: A symbol of this phenomenon, who sees her sisters’ point of view evolve.
Doesn’t the novel also bear the imprint of your ecological concerns?
I am a writer from abroad. At Laurent Mauvignier, you can go outdoors like Continue, for example, but it is a reinvented reality. Its main purpose is not to report the sensations felt on the spot, while I want to be accurate about how, for example, the cows behave when they are only on grass and no longer in the stalls, like the nature of the meadows where they graze. , or the way the soil supports them depending on moisture. Simply because I observe and report what I observe. With land in the lot, we see landscapes and vegetation transform, foliage becomes less dense, birds less frequent. Reading the IPCC reports on global warming makes ecological disasters seem abstract. But when we see the boxes, which are symbols of immortality because they are always green, dying by the thousands because of a moth from Asia… Human warmthI set my characters outside on a three hundred hectare farm; I incorporated them into the ecosystem. The coronavirus reminded us that we were one of the players in this ecosystem, like a bat in the depths of Laos… We depend on this environment, which we have altered so much that we are facing serious problems. there may be other epidemics, and these are the things I have to consider, as opposed to those who may be called insiders, who have less to worry about…
Can we say that you write to document the world?
Yes, to fix memories when we tend to forget things. Take Florian Philippot’s statements (Former FN Number Two, Editor’s Note), who today insists the lockdown was a serious mistake, while at the time he was constantly tweeting that the government was weak, unwilling to clamp down, and that it was a scandal. I followed it because I’m a procedural type, and it’s these types of tracks that I create books from. Only novels can truly record history, the real thing. Of course, we have the newspapers and the INA, but no one is going to look for the news of 8 pm on July 13, 1978… The novel is a sediment of reality, life and history. It can be said that I am engaged in documentary work, focusing on language as well as personal desire and aesthetic research, but without prioritizing these researches. That’s just the bare minimum. And then sometimes, for some images, to picture the goldfish on the bottom of the water where the cows will dip their heads to drink in the reflection of the sun, you have to work on it. When you make a documentary, you record pictures; we must describe, propose, specify…
“Human warmth», by Serge Joncourt, Ed. Albin Michel, 352 pages, €21.90.
Source: Le Figaro
