“Fluidity is a politeness towards the reader”, according to the Antibois Guillaume Musso, whose 20th novel comes out this Tuesday

We may be accused of chauvinism, and yet it is not so. The new Guillaume Musso is excellent! Rhythmic, surprising, breathtaking, full of suspense and twists. Simply addicting! The Antibes author renews himself, while keeping the recipes that make him successful: an almost cinematographic writing that awakens all our senses, complex characters who offer us their darkest side but obtain our empathy, a plot that carries us away and does not reveals its outcome only at the very end.

Angelic begins in a hospital room, in Paris, with the meeting between a gruff ex-cop, Mathias Taillefer, and Louise Collange, a teenager who plays the cello for hospitalized people. She asks for his help to demonstrate that her mother did not commit suicide but that she was murdered… For five days, which will end in Venice, the fate of these two will be linked. On their way, the Angelic disorder, which gives its name to the novel…

On the eve of the release of his twentieth novel, “happiness and pleasure take precedence over stress”confides to us, on the telephone, the writer from Antibes who, in addition to being for twelve years the most widely read author in France, has received praise from the New York Times in the United States orEl Mundo in Spain, as well as the prestigious Italian Raymond Chandler Prize, following other great masters of suspense such as Margaret Atwood or Henning Mankell.

The construction of this book is original: in three parts, with three different narrators…

We always want to try to do things we haven’t done before. It’s a voluntary constraint that I set myself: to have a somewhat sophisticated and surprising narration. Readers are demanding. TV series in particular, which often have very well constructed narratives, have accustomed people to this sometimes slightly offbeat way of telling things. And I also thought it served this story. I was very attached to this subjectivity, the novel evolves better according to the gaze of the protagonist that we follow.

There is a flashback, in the second part, which makes the reader know more than the characters…

There was this will, a bit like in an episode of Colombo, that there is an asymmetry of information between the reader and the characters. And how to make it very breathless all the same, with suspense, when fairly quickly we know the nature of the character of Angélique. That’s the challenge: to put constraints in order, ultimately, to be even more inventive and surprising.

We find your very cinematic writing…

This fluidity of writing is really due to the work, to the artisanal side, to the fact that writing is rewriting and rewriting again. I have always considered the flow of my stories to be a courtesy to the reader. It always pleases me when people tell me that my novels are accessible, because it’s an accessibility that is very elaborate, very well thought out. I like this idea of ​​total literature, that the reader is really embarked, torn from his own life to evolve in my story. The sensations are described, the climate, the light… I often quote the words of Simenon: Do you mean it’s raining? Say: I’m wet”.

You write: “Even angels have their demons”…

It is the essence of the character of Angélique, which is drawn towards a darkness. I’m a big reader of Patricia Highsmith, who has always portrayed her characters as villains we love to hate, like Mr. Ripley. I wanted to create a character like that and it was complicated. I wanted to make Angélique speak in the first person and, for a long time, I thought I couldn’t do it because I hadn’t found her inner voice. From the moment it started, there was jubilation to write his part.

In this part of the novel, your writing is different from the rest, but also from your usual writing style…

Yes. And it hasn’t been easy. It’s not that we censor ourselves but it’s that we’re used to a certain rhythm, a way of arranging words, of saying, of not saying. I rewrote it a lot, this passage. As he is a transgressive character, you must accept a transgression in relation to your writing habits. This is the novelty of this book, its originality, and I hope it is pleasant to read, to be in its head.

This is the first time that your book has been anchored in the news, especially on the Covid…

It’s not a book about the Covid at all, but the explosion of this period was so strong that, in the end, it was difficult not to reflect it in fiction. It happened quite naturally, there was no premeditation. The book was very structured from the start, but I didn’t know it was going to be so rooted in the times.

Your novels seduce more and more. For twelve years, you have been the most widely read author in France and you now have international recognition…

It’s very gratifying, even if it’s always difficult to explain that the same story brings together very different audiences. For the same book, I’m going to receive a letter from a Korean teenager, a Russian librarian, an Egyptian airline pilot, a French teacher… It’s quite disconcerting, disturbing in the good sense of the word. . After all, you shouldn’t have that in mind when you write, because it’s impossible to want to write something that will satisfy such different readers. When I write, I lock myself away for ten months and, in my head, I erase all that and I start from scratch each time.

Just like last year, Guillaume Musso will be present at the Mouans-Sartoux Book Festival, just a few days after the release of “Angélique”. It will be Saturday October 8 (from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m., Léo Lagrange room) for a meeting and a signing session.

We should also soon discover the adaptation of The Girl and the Night (published in 2008, whose action takes place on the Côte d’Azur, in particular in Antibes) on France 2. “It will be broadcast during the fall. I have seen the six episodes, it is a series of very good quality, which respects the spirit of the novel, its roughness. It is not a simple setting in images. Even if you’ve read the book, there are different things. Readers have to watch it trying to forget the novel. What makes a good series is not absolute fidelity to the facts of the novel , but a faithfulness to the spirit. And the series is faithful from this point of view.”

“There is a good chemistry between the Anglo-Saxon and French actors, and also the duo of investigators made up of a municipal police officer and a journalist from Nice morning, which is quite funny. The series is really illuminated by Ivanna Sakhno, a young Ukrainian actress, who plays the role of Vinca. This project scared me because I thought we wouldn’t be able to find a Vinca as described in the book, but we succeeded.”

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“Fluidity is a politeness towards the reader”, according to the Antibois Guillaume Musso, whose 20th novel comes out this Tuesday


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