Literary encounter with Jean Echenoz

A literary event organised jointly by Château Mercier in Sierre and Lycée-Collège de la Planta in Sion.

« Il me semble que la condition du plaisir de lecture, c’est quand même le plaisir de la fabrication, de la mise au point, de l’écriture, de la forme. » Jean Echenoz, Interview with Eva Bettan, Livre Inter, 11 May 2020.

It all begins with a catastrophe: "A large fragment of an obsolete Soviet satellite [has] just crashed into the Auteuil shopping centre". Then a second cataclysm: the kidnapping of Nicole Tourneur, the wife of the honorary president of the Fédération Populaire Indépendante (FPI). When a freshly qualified private detective, Gérard Fulmard, is assigned to this case, we expect the thrilling pace and twists and turns of a detective story. But the man, with no experience, no destiny, almost no qualities, draws us into his failures and pitiful failures which, if they didn't make us laugh, would be fully tragic. Jean Echenoz's latest novel, Vie de Gérard Fulmard (2020), with its minimalist, chiselled style, offers a 'geographical' plunge into the upmarket 16th arrondissement of Paris, into the spheres of power, and even into literature as a whole - we come across Racine, Michon, Manchette... In this work, the extreme precision, even conciseness, of the words and sentences gives rise to an "abundance of figures, an abundance of situations, an abundance of encounters, and even an abundance of information in the smallest of paragraphs" (Tanguy Viel)... The pleasure of reading is undoubtedly the same as the pleasure of writing, and you'll never tire of it.