Sylvain Prudhomme. “I’m talking about how the secret resists, and when we start looking, how the family splits into two camps.”

It is the story of a man who discovers a huge secret: his grandfather fathered a child with M., in addition to his grandmother, with a German woman whom he fell madly in love with the day after World War II. That’s the story A child in a taxi, Sylvain Prudhomme’s very beautiful novel. As is often the case with writers, the narrator then embarks on a journey whose destination he does not know. Does it really make sense to follow in this child’s footsteps when the rest of the family has so conveniently written him off? Is this a way for him to bounce back from his divorce or to survive it? The author with delicacy and melancholy Near the roads (Femina Prize 2019) tells the story of the uncertain paths we take in the hope of finding joy again.

Madame Figaro. – “ I would like to live in a world where you can say things face to face, face the truth “, you write. Does literature have anything to do with privacy?

Sylvain Prudhomme. – This is the heart of the novel. the pretext is the existence of this hidden child, the revelation of the secret that sets the book and the narrator’s quest from the beginning of the story. But I wanted less to explore the establishment of facts – to know exactly what happened in 1945 between this man and this woman, who belong to two enemy nations, than to say how much the secrecy, the silences that surround it, resisted. and when we begin to look at how the family is divided into two camps. those who are interested in silence and those who fight against it do not endure it, each time for personal reasons related to their own history, their own suffering. I wanted to talk about all these obstacles, how they are created, and ask myself why a secret is a secret, what justifies it, where is the shame…

Normally, the questions are asked by the person who is directly concerned with the secret. Not here. For what ?

The narrator, who is the grandson and not the son or daughter of the man with the hidden child, is actually not the most wronged in this case. He sympathizes with this child because he has just separated from his wife and finds himself in a new loneliness. I wanted a less obvious relationship than, say, a relationship of retribution or revenge. Perhaps we can talk about intuitive solidarity. she seeks answers to her own loneliness from this abandoned child. It is rather an intimate belief, a feeling of necessity, rather than an objective injury or stigma that he will bear. I often relate to certain irrational quests that actors only find justified in the end. This matches my desire to believe in signs as well as correspondences…

I am interested in the marginalized people, as I like to tell about forgotten corners, unsafe places, villages where there are no more cafes.

Sylvain Prudhomme

During this investigation, information is coming in by way of side roads… Was this intended?

Doors open in response to family sanctions, with characters who turn out to be allies, and, somewhat like life, not always who you imagine helping you. He is a relative by marriage, the “patch” that reveals the secret, and he is a great uncle, who we first think of as being in the family orthodoxy, breaking the ban imposed by the great mother. Through them, things are repaired. In general, I am interested in people on the margins, as I like to tell about forgotten corners, deprived places, villages where there is no cafe. The idea that truth can come out of the light fascinates me. It seems to me that our freedom is expressed in strangeness, strangeness, even the arbitrariness of the search. We must dare to pull the strings that life allows us to glimpse. My romantic projects are often born like this. they allow me to escape the decisive, the predictable, and take me where I didn’t know I needed to go. Like the narrator, I’ve found myself in Foreign Legion locations or in the alleys of a village north of Lake Constance, and I like to end up in places where nothing was meant for me to join. It’s like vertigo, a happiness that’s all the more intense and full because it’s unexpected and because I’m confused about being there.

The novel opens with the love scene of M.’s parents, which takes place as a result of the Second World War. Then you leave it to the modern age. For what ?

It’s a fantastic scene, an original scene, which I immediately wanted to place at the beginning of the text, because it has a great power of attraction. That’s what we keep coming back to, what the narrator has already told in the previous book – which is actually, I’ve actually already written this scene in another novel, which is where the book flows from. It is reconstructed, it is fiction, but I left this mode at the time, because I did not want to create a novel that resembles a costume film. I was interested in putting it at a distance to focus on knowing, its reality, the impossibility of attaining truth, and the fact of giving it up. I documented much of these forbidden loves by reviewing archival images, photos of mutilated women, and other French-German couples after the armistice. I also point out that there are 400,000 kids like M and that they get on the site and then the focus expands. But in general I have greatly reduced the accumulated historical material, because the narrator feels closer to the hidden child than to the grandfather and his love story…

All of my books are about overcoming adversity, acknowledging brokenness and resilience

Sylvain Prudhomme

Like Proust, are you interested in the “enlightened life” in literature?

Yes, I am trying to clarify the narrator’s attraction to this child, this story, this past; what is there in this brotherhood of abandonment and solitude? I believe that we write to better understand, to relive, to “re-inhabit” the feelings that upset us. We don’t just copy, we seek to deepen our knowledge of people. Literature is like an additional reality. We are looking for ultra-modern, ultra-technological forms of the latter, but everything is already written, which allows us to listen again, spend time with a magnifying glass, review things. Trying to restore himself after a painful separation, the narrator notices that M. All my books are about dealing with adversity, recognizing that adversity, and being resilient. We pay attention and continue on our way. Joy is neither carelessness nor fun. He cannot be blind to gravity. he defeats himself again. Back A child in a taxi, I tried to find a way to hear and share the story woven from the silences. To give him a place among us, I like to find my place in relation to him.