His youth, his passion for chess, his calling as a writer… Back Treasury, Jean-Philippe Touset presents a funny and disturbing autobiography in this nested story.
Back Chess boardJean-Philippe Toussaint offers us, under the guise of the chess game he persistently played, a kind of double autobiography, factual and textual; , which I note or quote, integrating here and there sentences extracted from them, erasing them, which will allow them to be connected too easily, as if I could flow them into a new stream…” facts, by Philip Roth, years, By Annie Erno The wordsby Jean-Paul Sartre, other shores, by Vladimir Nabokov The truth about Mary returns with the finesse of the pen and the art of circumvention that characterized him in the episodes of his youth, while maintaining the chronicle of the book set against the background of epidemic and incarceration.
Madame Figaro. – Why did you choose chess as a general topic?
Jean-Philippe Toussaint. – It was not deliberate, it happened while writing. When the pandemic hit, I had a busy schedule of outdoor activities, travel, and book-talking trips. I quickly felt that all this would be undone, and to curb the anxiety of idleness, I decided to carry out an old project: the translation of the text. I set my sights chess player by Stefan Zweig, and I began keeping a journal that would include thoughts on the translation as well as the pandemic. I started writing every day without re-reading myself, which was a completely new practice for me. The subject of chess eventually came up through a friend, Gilles Androuet, a former French chess champion who had been killed and who was a kind of blind spot for me; I had always told myself that I should write about him, and at the same time, compared to what I usually do, the subject was too obvious, too obvious. I didn’t want to focus on what was, a priori, obvious: the circumstances of his death, what could lead to it, etc. The book was finally shaped by this common thread of chess and also the way it revolved around autobiography.
Did you immediately want to give the book the shape of a chess board?
This came to me as I began to describe the black and white tiled and contemplative hall of Robert-Katto of Athens, my elementary school in Brussels. The passage, which had something very Proustian about it, was in the middle of the text. I moved it to the beginning, thinking that this book would be the chessboard of my memory, and then I decided to change the original structure of three parts, to divide the book into sixty-four chapters corresponding to sixty-four squares. A chessboard as I subconsciously recall my first novel, The bathroom, where the paragraphs were numbered. I wanted to suggest an appearance of extreme rigor, while the restriction was hardly restrictive; the boxes are elastic, sometimes wide, sometimes compact, and all this remained very loose. I was more interested in the illusion of geometry than the actual geometry.
Failures are associated with death
Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Why come today to a story tinged with autobiography?
I always had the temptation of an autobiography in mind, and with age this desire became clearer and more natural and urgent. “If I had to write an autobiography, how would I go about it? “I asked myself: I ended up going back to my childhood and my adolescence, isolating a period that has nothing special that is more like me than dealing with “theme”, a period that stretches back to my graduation from Sciences Po, then , when I entered working life as a French teacher in Algeria, and that happened to be the period when I met Gilles Androuet. During this somewhat empty period, two things came together in my destiny: the meeting with Madeleine, who determined my romantic and intimate life, and the fact that I started writing, this last moment is connected with my father, whom I manage through the book. connect with chess, writing and chess, having in common that they are a shield against the wounds of the outside world…
Death is very present in the text. Why do you think?
Starting an autobiography is a sign that you see death, or at least in perspective. Failures are also associated with death. The death of the king, the death of the opponent, the death of the father, but also for those who are not just amateurs, a symbolic death embodied by a clock that measures the time allotted for the game, which is reduced to skin grief. . The flag rises little by little, and when it falls like a sword of Damocles, that’s it. However, writing is also about time; we can select, edit, extend or shorten moments. Generally, I try to start with prosaic things. it can be seen in such titles The bathroom, Camera Or Television – without ever losing sight of the big questions: time, death, love…
How much did you want to keep the records of the detention?
I deleted a lot of passages that referred to this because they didn’t fit in the book when it came to me. I have often thought of Emmanuel Carr, who knows how to make literature out of what happened to him. I was particularly interested Yoga , where he fulfills the contract during the first part until the book becomes another book. Readers often relate to the plot and characters; I’m all about the concept, and what pleased me conceptually was that I offered a creation and its origin at the same time. Since then I have had to talk about detention. Then it was the detention that forced me to translate The chess player, which is a story of detention. everything fits. To which is added an editorial suggestion, with my translation of Zweig, which is published alongside Chess board under the titleChess…
Chess board Is it, as you say, not the title, but the permission, the story of becoming a writer?
Writing a book means moving toward clarification, and writing allowed me to clarify that I didn’t actually have a title, but I did have permission. My father, who dreamed of writing, forbade me to beat him at chess, without him or me ever expressing it for thirty years. But also, and most importantly, he empowered me, without encouraging me, to become who I am today with this sentence uttered at dinner, the importance of which he probably did not understand for me: “I would like to have a writer. son »
Source: Le Figaro
