the french writer Franck Bouysse, which presents two of its latest novels within the framework of the BCNegra festival in Barcelona, Born of no woman Y The devil does not live in hellbelieves that “The writer’s first job is to be a reader.
In a meeting with the press, Bouysse, a biology teacher who became a late writer, confesses that as a reader he likes to be surprised, but also as a writer he likes to be surprised. “The writer gives space to the characters so that they can explain what they want”, points, and that’s how he left his hand to Rose in Born of no woman.
In Born of no woman (Anagram in Spanish and Periscopi in Catalan)a priest recalls an event that happened 44 years ago that changed his life: they asked him to go to a mental hospital to bless the corpse of an inmate and someone warned him that, among the clothes of the deceased, he would find a manuscript.
In this text emerges the story of the teenage daughter of a family of poor peasants, whose father sells her as a maid to a man who lives in a castle with his mother, his wife, who never leaves her room, and a stable boy. . The man is obsessed with having an heir that his wife cannot give him and the young woman has been taken to the castle for that purpose.
The manuscript unravels that atrocious story, with episodes of extreme violence and cruelty, but the author’s approach is to leave unanswered questions: what was the fate of the child conceived in such terrible circumstances? How did the young woman end up in the asylum? Did everything happen as described? Are there still hidden secrets?
The devil does not live in hell (Alrevés in Spanish and crims.cat in Catalan) places the reader in Les Doges, an idyllic landscape deep in the Cévennes, near Montpellier, where Gus lives.a lonely and silent middle-aged peasant who he spends his days isolated in the field, with the cows, the wood and repairs of all kinds, and with the only company of his dog March; and Abel, a neighbor with whom she fraternizes and maintains a good friendship.
His life is quiet until Abbot Pierre dies, the day unusual things begin to happen, with some unexpected visitors.
Bouysse immerses himself in this case in a rural “noir”, with a poetic narrative full of metaphors and dialogues, set in a cold atmosphere and in some spectacular mountains.
Regarding his novels, Bouysse assures that he never plans or makes a previous outline: The book is born when it decides to exist; and at this point he recalls the words of Dostoevsky, who said that he had no imagination, that “imagination is the art of reconstructing memory.”
The memory of his childhood in a French rural environment is what has led to these novels over time, he points out, as it would happen to him if he were a painter, sculptor or musician, which would have led to a painting, a sculpture or a musical composition.
Leaving those questions unanswered, “those doors open or ajar” is, in his opinion, “trusting the intelligence of readers.”
“I write what I am, at the risk of disturbing myself, but I also write as I am”has summed up Bouysse, who perceives his works as “an organic and carnal narrative”which is rooted in the world from which it comes“in which everything belongs to the human, animal and vegetable part”.
In that world, Bouysse behaved like a “sponge” and it took a few decades for what he lived through in those years to end up in “memories embodied in books, although memories usually lie.”
His attitude towards literature is born from the first readings, with Verne, Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Alejandro Dumas, “the pamphlet, the purest and hardest novel”, which sowed a seed, which over time grew with new readings of “authors very eclectic” like Faulkner, Shakespeare, Mallarmé or Dostoevsky.
“As a writer -he confesses- I wanted to reconcile that residue left by those novels with my own style, which they say is sad and a little hard”.
Bouysse understands that there is “coherence between the two novels” that he is presenting in Barcelona, since both “are the result of lived emotions, and the works always come out of childhood obsessions”, however, he does not understand the literature in its therapeutic value, because “Literature does not heal” and, in fact, he never thinks of the reader, as a “sign of respect” and from the conviction that “fashions are not important and the only thing is to be honest”. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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