THE SCRIPTWRITER
François is a novelist. He goes on to become a scriptwriter following a series of circumstances which he views as fate. He is not someone who steers his life. He makes do with what comes along.
Literary circles and the world of film form the setting for this book. The country-raised girl who François falls in love with works in Paris, in publishing. In order to live with François she brings a brutally quick end to her relationship with an ageing writer who is driven almost mad by this abandonment. But François is to ignore all blackmail and threats.
His mother settled in Algeria after it achieved independence, for ideological reasons, to be of use to this new nation. She returned to France in 1974, when her son was five.
François has never known who his father was. His mother never revealed his identity. She was someone who spoke little. François has taken his own stance on this secret. He has a huge appetite for happiness. He puts the things that torment him in the stories he writes. They are just transpositions of real life, more a quest for what may have happened or what could have happened, a sort of parallel world. François makes no calculations in everyday life. He lets chance and his own whims carry him: life isn’t serious. What is serious is what he invents.
From Fort Saganne to Beau rôle, from L’Aurore des bien-aimées to La Baie d’Alger, Louis Gardel has built a unique, diverse and particularly novelistic body of work. With The Scriptwriter, he is opening another door into his world: a novel of behaviour and of love.
Une partie du roman se déroule aussi en Algérie, où François est né. Sa mère s’y était installée après l’indépendance, par conviction idéologique, pour se mettre au service de ce peuple neuf. Elle est revenue en France en 1974, quand son petit garçon avait cinq ans.
François n’a jamais su qui était son père. Sa mère ne le lui a jamais révélé. C’était une femme qui ne parlait pas. De ce secret François a pris son parti. Il a un grand appétit de bonheur. Ses tourments, il les met dans les histoires qu’il écrit. Ce ne sont pas des transpositions de la vie réelle, plutôt une quête de ce qui est peut-être arrivé ou qui aurait pu arriver, une sorte de monde parallèle. Dans le quotidien des jours François ne calcule rien. Il se laisse porter par ses désirs et par la chance : la vie n’est pas sérieuse.
Ce qui est sérieux, c’est ce qu’il invente.