Jean Echenoz: "None of my characters is worthy of esteem"

After failing as a flight housing and then, as a private detective, Gérard Fulmard is a boy for everything in a strange political party, where the knives fly and the low passions unleashed.In the life of Gérard Fulmard (Anagrama/Raig Ver.From his home in Paris, the author answers by phone the questions of this newspaper.

What was your first idea?

I started with the idea of resuming the shape of the police novel, which I had practiced a long time ago, in my beginnings.I wanted a character that was not positive, no hero, and who worked in a Parisian region who had never addressed and knew very little.And write it in the first person, what I had never done in my life.

What region do we talk about?

From District XVI, it is the most classically bourgeois neighborhood in Paris.It is very quiet, a little marginal.Until now, some of my novels took Paris stages as decorated, here it becomes an actor.These residential neighborhoods, with sumptuous mansions, do not normally interest writers because they are very dead.

He has his first person narrator but also another in third...

The first person allows me to develop a frustrated character, who has failed in his professional, sentimental life, and so on.Someone ordinary, prosaic, little educated and little courageous, as well as naive.Live covering the file, performing trades in which it is nothing brilliant.But I could not keep the first person constantly.From time to time, there is a game between two narrators: the main actor of the action is going to take something and I appear myself, that I can explain what happens in another way.We are moving away and approaching the action, depending on whether he speaks or me.

Despite the title, it is a very coral novel.

Fulmard is involved in an adventure, a huge political entanglement, which demanded many characters.I wanted to show them as silhouettes, not necessarily cartoons but I did tenderly drawn.

In the 60s and 70s I started as a police novelist because French literature was sick, because of the 'Nouveau Roman' there were no stories "

The only one drawn with depth is Gérard.He was born on May 13, 1974 in Gisors (Eure region), measures 1.68 m, weighs 89 kilos, he has brown eyes and lives on Erlanger street...

Being the narrator, he performs a certain self -analysis.His last name, Fulmard, refers to a marine bird that, when he feels in danger, vomits about his aggressor.I had already appeared fleetingly in me and maybe it looks like a little, vaguely, to the Eugène Tarpon of two novels by Jean-Parick Menchette.

To parody the genre, do we have to dominate it before?

I don't know if that would be my case.In the 65-70 years, the police novel was my passion, I read it constantly, think that at that time the French novels were not very good, heirs of Nouveau Roman, avant-garde, in them the narrative was not important.Literature was sick, no stories were told.So, in my beginnings, I wanted to write black genre as a reaction to that pathological state of the French novel.My first books play with the police formula, rather than strictly following it.Then, for similar reasons, I made adventure and espionage novels.Later I already felt free to do other things.Now I return to the origins.

Here shows the power, that of the rich, that of politicians.But it's not your world, right?

Nerd.But I was interested in counting the diverse and contradictory sources of power.The party that I describe, the Independent Popular Federation (FPI), is very confusing, we do not know well if it is extreme right or what, it is a Loser match, a little ridiculous, such as the same protagonist, a born loser for which I feel a lotappreciation.

Did you want to make political criticism?

In France they believed that it was an allusion to the extreme right party, the Rassemblemento National, but it was not the idea.I worry that the right -wing extremism rises, of course, but I didn't want to do that.My FPI is an amalgam of radical ideas of right and left, it is a small contradictory formation, without any ideological coherence, such a confusing and failed training.It moves only the ambition of power, not ideas, are a machinery to conquer power, with compromised dossieres, struggles for succession, rivals elimination...

At the beginning, Fulmard is installed as a private detective, but it does not become, fails.

It is the metaphor of your whole life.Thus the novel travels to referents as Raymond Chandler, in all that part in which he opens his own office.Before he has been a flight attendant and he doesn't know very well what to do with his life.

Sex and power are going very close.There are characters with problems about it, such as the president of the party, Frank Terrail, who feels powerfully attracted to his stepdaughter, and that frequents certain sordid places...

The novel is built on the transposition of a classical play, Racine's fedra, investing the sex of the characters, even included four or five textual quotes, which go unnoticed.I wanted to resume the argument of one of my favorite works, maintaining the relationship of power and loving that this work establishes.Fedra is crazy with love for her daughters Hipólito and, here, that analog and innoble passion is the basis of the love and sexual adventures of Frank Terrail, an unfortunate character, as practically all, whose interest is to see how she manages her love disappointment, thatattempt to satisfy a little in the sexual field, all added, of course, to the kidnapping of his mother and general secretary of the formation.One of the recurring themes in my works are the unattered passions.

The singer Mike Bant looks like fiction.

Nope!What does it say?It was a total star in France between the 60s and 70s.Everyone sang their themes: Laisse-Moi t'aimeeer...I wanted everything to happen on Erlander street where he committed suicide in 1975, but in which other very violent events have also taken place, such as the actions of Japanese Cañíbal that I describe.The novel is the story of this street too.Mike Bant was an Israeli boy who had considerable success when he arrived in France, became a mass idol that sang to happiness and love but was someone very unhappy, with several previous suicide attempts.

"All the French are very pissed off"

This novel is so literary that it is impossible to take to the cinema, right?

I have received some propositions sometimes to adapt my novels.Up to two films have been made, Cherokee in 1991 and one year in 2006.They are failed films, you have to recognize it.I would like to adapt more works of mine, I would give me money but maybe it is not a good idea, for what I have told him, that as I try to cause intimacy and sound, create visual atmosphere, I already built them as movies directly, the movieIt is already made in each book because I have generated cinematographic visions in each reader.Well, we are not going to discourage filmmakers who want to accept the challenge.

What do you work with?

I have spent the health crisis with a project that has to do with antiquity, a radical change of stage.But it is still embryonic.

How has the pandemic passed?

I left Paris and spent a year and a half in the field, where I worked on this project.I have no hobbies, I work in the morning and that's it, anywhere.