Clara Reads Proust is a book that makes you smile, that makes you inevitably immerse yourself in the writings of Proust, but also in all the great works that are good to escape and have the power to make a life change. We caught up with Stéphane Carlier in France to talk about his latest novel.
Posted yesterday at 9:00am
Clara’s life wasn’t very hectic until a customer walked into the hair salon where she works and left a book there. Were it not for the mysterious and fascinating aura of this artist that surrounded the man, she might never have put this novel down. In Search of Lost Time.
On a dreary Sunday in March, the young hairdresser lets herself be sucked into the world of Marcel Proust… and doesn’t come out again right away.
“We needed a great book, a great author. A mighty book… a masterpiece of world literature,” says Stéphane Carlier, who delved into the seven volumes of La recherche for this novel. “And maybe that’s why I made this book,” he adds. Maybe deep down I wanted to rediscover the world of Proust, which seemed very different to what I had read when I was 21. »
He admits that at this age it’s hard to read The Research and find out everything. It takes a certain maturity to recognize what he calls the genius and magic of Proust. “The shock wave that’s always there when you close the book… Really, we don’t see reality the way we saw it before we read it. »
In his opinion, Clara is one of those people who follow a predetermined path when they are predestined for something else. The further she reads, the more she realizes that “the small world of Cindy Coiffure” and her companion, for whom she no longer feels like it, are no longer enough for her.
“It’s the story of people who aren’t in their lives. In this book, she reveals herself,” says the French writer.
Life throws us somewhere, we think it’s a permanent place because we’re here, we don’t want to make an effort, we don’t have the curiosity, it’s much more comfortable staying in the place than fate tells us to look elsewhere … And I am sure that there are many people who would be much happier in a slightly different life.
Stephane Carlier
Books, “better than life”?
As she reads and immerses herself in Proust’s universe, Clara eventually believes that “books could be better than life,” writes Stéphane Carlier. “A sentence à la Truffaut,” notes the man who describes himself as a great admirer of the French director.
And from that moment the click occurs. Luckily, the young hairstylist meets another avid Proust reader who also “doesn’t fit in” and who says her writings saved her because after reading them she no longer felt alone. .
Stéphane Carlier also points out that in his next novel, an ‘polar comedy’ entitled La vie n’est pas un roman de Susan Cooper (to be published next fall), he writes that his definition of hell is ‘ a world without literature, where books would not have been invented”. “You can’t find in TikTok or in video games what you find in books. »
He recently delved into the books of Christian Bobin, who died at the end of November, with great joy – “and it feels really good”.
Books that do good are his “hobby” as a writer, he adds. “I’d love to write more serious books, but I’m so happy to be writing comedy. »
Clara reads Proust
Stephane Carlier
Gallimard
192 pages