The translator of the craziest France abandons Shakespeare's language to tackle her new novel, Cosmoz. Literary summit meeting to discuss Snow White, Hitler or Nosferatu. If this seems incongruous, read! Everything will seem much more ... Claro
How did the idea of propelling the fictional characters of the Wizard of Oz in the first half of the twentieth century to draw your new novel Cosmoz ?
I decided to take the characters from the Wizard of Oz , mainly because Frank Baum's novel was published, according to the will of the author, 1 January 1900. It is a kind of inaugural novel. I made the characters move from fantasy to full acid bath of the century. Rather than a fiction where the characters would escape the book, I decided to feel they are real, they are amnesic. As a result, only the player knows where they came from. Their goal is to remember their roots and find their destination.
Why the twentieth?
Cosmoz part of a larger project. I wrote in 1997 Book XIX, told that the 19th century using all the styles (the soap opera world exhibitions ...). So I walk in time with Cosmoz. With the 1900/1950 period, which begins with enthusiasm and ended with Hiroshima, we enter a period marked by the notion of permanent end of the world with nuclear. There will be a sequel to this novel, which will run from 1950 to 1980. But the more one approaches the contemporary, is more dense.
In your opinion how is the changeover between the Old (Europe) and New World (USA)?
When Hitler invaded Poland, the USA return to war and usher in the future division of the world. A priori, one turns from gray to a world dated to something more gay. But ultimately it is almost the opposite. The striking color is blood red.
Some chapters are proving a bit difficult to read as Prologue biography of Baum or the long list of dwarves. Why these choices?
In France, little is known about Baum's book. It is not our folklore. Reveal his biography can show the genesis (the whole book is built on the idea of the origin). The man who throws himself into raising chickens, and the theater and journalism ... It can be distilled from the beginning of the motives which reappear throughout the novel. For lists, it's almost a genre in itself. And then it forces the reader to ask questions. Is what it reads or not? Can we skip the block? The real effect of these 122 names also foreshadows the duty to remember the face of extermination. As a monument to the dead.
Towards the end of the novel, you mention Auschwitz, sometimes with humor quite devastating. How did you write these passages?
These are the most difficult chapters to write. For the "jokes", these are things that I heard, Jews who were laughing. Keep the humor is to preserve the last shred of humanity. When you write about the camps, you must be extremely careful. This is the book that authorizes you to say certain things. Cosmoz deals with the extermination of undesirables, by what process they are discarded. Of the exhibition (the Freak Show) erase (concentration camps).
"They will make it a museum, I'm sure. And they will pay the entrance. Yes, but half-price for the Jews. "
Your novel consists of short chapters immersed in a dense story and unbreakable. Why this choice of structure?
I wanted to lose the characters and not lose, as a movement of an hourglass. Some characters had to disappear for a few years back and had to fit into the story without flashbacks. The story follows an unavoidable, the novel was too. And when the loop is closed (reunion of the "tribe"), they must again to separate to go individually to the other end or beginning another.
Cosmoz is very cinematic in its references (Fleming course, but Murnau, Griffith, Browning ...). Do you think it could be adapted to film?
It would be complicated and very expensive. More of Tim Burton's Claude Berri. The cinema was very important for me because the heroes are gone matrix matrix (from the book to the movie, the movie to the book). They are projected on the backdrop of history like a Zellig . The twentieth century is the art of cinema and structure our imagination today. When you describe the First World War, do you base on documents (letters of soldiers, archives) and for the first time on film. Verdun, Vision of History, The paths of glory ... You can not be ignored. Wars exist in archives and fiction which mixes.
You blithely mixes noble language and trivial. Why these choices away from "guns" of French literature?
My style is built on affinities with literary and distrust that this style is not navel gazing. Let style mocks itself. I'm often told that I am an American novelist, but my literary tradition is Rabelais, Celine, humorous novel of the seventeenth.
"The white dog named Fuchsl, made several times around Toto, climbed on the penetration, ejaculation, put a paw on his back and turned around while remaining in him, a tricky maneuver, but in war as in war ... "
What meaning do you have on your characters?
These are not my characters, they have a life frozen in time on page and screen. He had to give them an interiority that exists in this disorder themselves (I am a fictional character?) and the events they undergo. I looked into these stereotyped heroes of creepage. As for Dorothy, to Baum, it is not that naive, she's stubborn, it is that drives the other. It is a guide as in fairy tales.
"... Convinced that the place where she sleeps does not become the place where she dies, say how Dorothy is young."
Speaking of story, you do a parallel between Snow White and Dorothy. How did you get that idea?
By the same facts. When MGM decided to adapt The Wizard of Oz is to counter Disney. They wanted to fight against the hegemony of Snow White by reusing the same archetypes, the witch, the dwarfs ... Obviously, it was to trade issues, but Disney takes a European folklore, the fact that the film is a favorite of Hitler ... He was put back in the American myth, to find an equivalent Alice in Wonderland .
"Baum dethrone Grimm, color become inseparable from the dream, and Dorothy wipe with a snap of the heels of the maid floured boil the seven dwarfs."
There are disturbing concomitants in your novel, as between the first film and the Anschluss. Info ou intox?
99% of what is written is true! In searching for the project, I found the coincidences and that's great for fiction. For example, Oppenheimer and his associates chose the nicknames of the characters of Oz. And after you create bridges. The tornado, for example, more you do the work and it looks like a mushroom cloud. The code refers to the radium emerald ...
The Land of Oz is it a metaphor for America?
No. The Land of Oz is absolute fiction. Confused with right or wrong with the question of origins. When you're a fiction in reality, a utopia. Oz is rather Auschwitz. The search for origins necessarily confined to horror for them unless they agree to become something else. They also found their stuff when they agree to deny their origins (the straw man who sacrifices himself ...)
Finally Baum's characters undergo a session of rationalization.
What happens to them in reality is even crazier than their original universe. The reality surpassed fiction and prolonged, but with a very rational horror. The movement of extermination was justified by science, reason. In the twentieth century, we must have a clear conscience.
many passages are very musical. How do you work this musical?
I'm not in the psychology of the characters, little in the dialogue (unless embedded in a paragraph). I rely on the materiality language. The plot of a book is the plot of the language. This is the book the reader learn to read. It must be installed in your grammar. If you succeed, you can give her emotions, not by position but by the language.
"In the waters of the Vistula their ashes are paid. For the four chimneys smoke escapes. Their bodies are burned. The flames are fanned. Their bodies are thrown into the oven. The trolley makes their body to the crematorium. A bullet is fired in their neck. Their bodies are nourished for some time. We brought more and more. We brought more and more. Their bodies are nourished for some time. A bullet fired in their necks. The trolley makes their body to the crematorium. Their bodies are thrown into the oven. Their bodies are burned. For the four chimneys smoke escapes. In the waters of the Vistula their ashes are paid. "
The French language folds she easily stylization?
It is like all languages, as flexible. English is more monosyllabic, like notes. It's easier to make the "jazz" with English. The French style, with its sequences, its ternary rhythm is more restrictive. But readings, you enrich your own vision of your tongue.
We can say that your work departs from the traditional romantic "bourgeois novel, right?
What is important is not the kind, but the style. The bourgeois novel just wants to tell a story, a psychology. The language does go anywhere. In France, when you write novels cross, it tells you that you're overdoing it, you're in excess. As if the style was too much. We are witnessing a race to the medium.
Posted on: Snatch Magazine.
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