Nicola Mathieu. “In the beginning, my Insta posts were a way to show my love to people, because that was impossible in real life.”

With his new job, Open skyNicolas Mathieu has taken and reorganized texts first published on social networks to give them a new form and give them a new color: a collection of micro-narratives, micro-prints highlighted by illustrations by Aline Zalko. The 2018 Prix Goncourt is unveiled in a unique way, with a pen that is both lyrical and precise. “At the end, with small, sensitive, pointillist touches, à la Seurat, it is a portrait of love from its birth to its end, but there is more to it than that. If love is a common thread, we also have travel, solitude, love for parents, love for children, melancholy, sense of time… We will disappear, those whom I also love, and if we don’t write. below, it becomes very heavy,” assures the author Connemara and: After them their children. An interview with a man who says he lives in the past, “with the feeling that everything is predestined to ‘be,'” something that has nothing to do with the writer’s calling, either poetic or political.

Madame Figaro. – The story of this book is special it was born from texts published on social networks. tell us
Nicholas Mathieu. – For six or seven years I wrote very regularly about events, situations, things that affected me. Instead of keeping a diary or a notebook, I made these texts that I posted on Instagram, and slowly it became a whole love story, with its beginnings, its wanderings, its downfalls, its routine. Because originally it was really a way to openly show my love to a person because it was impossible in real life. It was a secret correspondence, but it was fraught with how people viewed it. Readers have been asking for all of this to be available somewhere. However, I met the publisher Emmanuel Ley, who ran a collection of books at Flammarion, which combined texts and images; he did one with Anne Le Brun and another with Mona Chollet. The idea was to collect these writings so that they would not be lost, so that they would escape from the stream of social networks, because by accumulating they eventually disappear, and to make a book where we would find lyrical expressions, intimate, but where people could recognize themselves.

Why did you add drawings? ?
Fantasy should mix illustrations and poetry, as in some of Eluard’s collections. I wanted something that you could find in a library but also put in your pocket that wasn’t too expensive, in short a beautiful book that wasn’t a coffee table book. The drawings are like stained glass in a cathedral, they are produced with these “bricks”, sometimes dark, and this is the quote from Victor Hugo at the beginning: “I belong irrevocably to this dark night, ‘We call it love’ – a kind of glow, a light… I noticed Aline Zalko’s paintings on the covers of thrillers published by La Table Ronde and his works, his colors really wanted me. I felt that there could be a real game between the image and the text.

You admitted that you are “addicted” to social networks. What is your relationship with them today? ?
I consider them “pharmacon” – both medicine and poison, it all depends on the dosage. It’s a space where I like to express myself, where I can put down what’s going through me, a space that also provokes these texts. Without this place, it is not said that they would exist. The narcissistic gratification of people reading directly also plays its part. It fills the voids, gives pleasure, dwells in solitude. Many of these texts are about moments I spend on trains, in hotels, on tours. Social media also keeps me company. Therefore, my relationship with them is ambivalent. Yes, there is exhibitionism and narcissism, but not only that. Without them, this book, which is very close to my heart, and which is not an opportunistic act at all, would not exist.

The rhythm of your novels is different…
I’m not so sure. In fact, I have the impression that working on these very dense blocks eventually influenced the writing of my novel. Perhaps the main unit of the novel for me is the paragraph. For Flaubert it is the beautiful sentence, for others it is the page or the chapter. my own atom, my building block, is the paragraph. These texts served as a laboratory and workshop for me. Many elements were involved Connemara, for example, without being a conscious process. You have to imagine that I’m on the train, that I feel a strong emotion, which can be a wave of love or anger, and that it translates into text, because it must come out. We are possessed by emotions that overwhelm us, stories that exceed our strength, and writing allows us to sublimate them, that is, to find a way out from above for everything that haunts us. By putting things into words, it makes them acceptable, applicable and accessible. What was only one’s own becomes ordinary, personal emotions are condensed into a literary object. At heart, I’m a wording machine. Whether they are intimate texts or political texts, until they are written, they remain nebulous. I don’t know exactly what I’m thinking or feeling until I put it on paper or screen.

I consider social networks to be “pharmaco”, both medicine and poison

Nicolas Mathieu

How is this book also political for you?
It is inherently collective, because once these sensations are written, we can transmit them, and people can project themselves into them, people can say to themselves: “But that’s madness. I’m talking.” Often, whether it’s these texts or my novels, people come to me to tell me that I found the words to express what they thought, lived, felt. This is one of the functions of literature, to formulate things for others, and it is obviously a political issue. Then, when we are overcome by very powerful effects, we live life with such intensity that we can no longer bear the fate that has been dealt to us.

What do you mean by that? ?
When you are madly in love, or deeply depressed, or caught in extreme melancholy, you realize how unbearable it is to have to take the RER eight or ten hours early in the morning to work; how unbearable are the misery of social organization and the constraints imposed on us. This is how we access other levels of consciousness… Anne Le Brun calls this lyrical rebellion; we experience intensities, forces of existence that make us revolutionary on an individual scale. Everyone can say to himself in his corner. “My God, I only have one life. I must escape from meaningless demands. I must exist rather than not exist.” We are so caught by the throat with all kinds of obligations, the time that is always lacking, the children, the debt system, everything that we owe and we are suffocating… So much so that the motto basically boils down to one sentence. You only have one life, protect it.”