Inhabiting Literature

I do not believe a novel has the mission of teaching a truth. Imposed truths age quickly. Great works, on the other hand, continue to question us long after their publication. They do not close questions: they open them.

It is that kind of literature that interests me. A literature that seeks neither to convince nor to judge, but to explore.

Every existence is fraught with contradictions. We are capable of courage and weakness, fidelity and renunciation, generosity and selfishness. No human being can be reduced to a single facet. The novel possesses this precious freedom: to embrace complexity without trying to simplify it.

The novel interests me precisely because it offers this freedom: allowing multiple truths, multiple perspectives, multiple contradictions to coexist, without reducing them to a single conclusion.

In a world saturated with speed, immediate reactions, and hasty certitudes, literature offers another temporality. It allows us to slow down, to doubt, to dwell for a moment in ambiguity rather than rushing to resolve it.

This is perhaps its greatest strength.

A novel does not change the world on its own. On the other hand, it can transform how we look at a person, a situation, or ourselves. It invites us to inhabit, for a few hours, a life that is not ours. This quiet experience fosters a form of empathy that few other arts achieve with such intensity.

Literature is also, for me, a way of keeping alive what time threatens to erase.

Individual memories, family histories, historical events, silences passed down from generation to generation nourish narratives and shape beings. Writing often means trying to understand what remains alive in what we thought was over. It is not seeking refuge in the past, but shedding light on the present.

Places, families, eras, and silences leave traces. The novel can welcome them without turning them into archives: it restores their living presence.

This memory is not turned towards the past for its own sake. It interests me for what it continues to produce in the present.

I am wary of novels that claim to explain everything. Life resists definitive explanations. It remains unfinished, contradictory, sometimes mysterious. Literature gains, I believe, by respecting this share of the unknown.

A book changes when it leaves its author and meets a reader.

Everyone enters it with their own history, memories, wounds, and convictions. Two people will never read exactly the same novel, because they will not recognize the same things in it.

It is this encounter that gives literature its full power.

When a book is closed, what matters most often begins. A phrase comes back a few days later. A character reappears in a conversation. A scene suddenly illuminates a lived experience. The novel then quietly pursues its journey in the reader's memory.

This is undoubtedly why I never consider a book an isolated object.

Around it can arise exchanges, encounters, interviews, chronicles, shared readings, or prolonged reflections. Literature does not end at the cover of a novel. It continues in the dialogue it opens.

This conviction also nourishes the various initiatives I develop around my books. Whether it is the interviews of Face au Texte, radio chronicles, articles published on my blog, or the Beyond Novels space, all stem from the same idea: a work only truly reaches completion when it meets readers and opens a dialogue.

Inhabiting literature is not merely writing. It is accepting to enter this conversation, listening to the readings of others, discovering what they saw that the author had not perceived, and acknowledging that a book continues to be written in the minds of those who read it.

Deep down, perhaps that is literature: a dialogue that never ends. And it is in this dialogue that I choose, book after book, to inhabit literature.

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