Pierre Lemaître: "It was an ordeal to write about how a child is sexually victimized by an adult."

Pierre Lemaître (Paris, 1951) published his first book when he was 56 years old and became the king of crime fiction. However, he explains that he has never enjoyed writing as much as he is now with the feuilleton sagas. He won the Goncourt Prize in 2013 with the novel , the first of an interwar saga that continued with (2018) and His account of the 20th century continued with a new documentary series: (2023), (2024) and now , all published by Bromera with a Catalan translation by Núria Busquet.

Lemaître continues the story of the Pelletier family in a new adventure set between Paris and Prague in 1959, at the height of the Cold War. Lemaître speaks to journalists via videoconference from his home. Next to him are a stack of notebooks.



The small ones are the ones he takes when he travels. "The big ones aren't comfortable to put in your suitcase. I'm a big snob and have them custom-made, 300 pages long, with yellowish paper and a spiral.

For "It took two. The pen is Japanese and red, and I self-published it with the first copyright," he says, showing pages full of diagrams and notes. Lemaître, very concerned about climate change, explains that the France he describes, that of the late 1950s, was a happy country in terms of climate change, but back then we were lucky enough not to know about it.

Now, no one can turn a blind eye to climate change." The older the author gets, the more nostalgic he feels: "I can have a certain nostalgia for a period when we were unaware of the misfortune we were about to cause, but I try not to fall victim to that nostalgia." ~BK_SLT_ In this new novel, the children of the Pelletier couple, each with their own (the eldest has a tendency to kill women), have achieved a certain stability and have had children.

One of the scenes that has been most difficult for the French writer is that of one of these daughters, Colette, when she is being abused by a neighbor. "The novel was published just when there is a . For me it was an ordeal to write this scene, and when I think that this man was capable of abusing 299 children.

.. it's something I can't understand.

" Throughout the three novels, Lemaître has touched on many themes: the Indochina war, the disappearance of peoples...

The writer is especially sensitive to two: abortion and the atomic bomb: "I am part of the first generation of feminist men. I was 17 years old in May 68 and abortion was the fight for many women. On the other hand, I am also part of the generation that witnessed the atomic bomb explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki," he says.

The Pelletier couple and their children, in the first novel of the saga, lived in Beirut (Lebanon). In this third, they are all in Paris. They are colonists, because France has a colonial past, and I wanted my characters to be part of that colonialist dynamic.

Now we see how violence with colonial overtones is reborn; we are entering a new dynamic of colonization. It's as if history has captured me, and for a novelist, this is a drama," he says. He has one wish.

He cannot predict with certainty when the saga will end or if he can guarantee a novel every year. He would like, however, to be able to outlast Trump's term. "I would like to continue publishing after Trump and put my saga on.

...