“A father who is both model and anti-model”
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“La Nuit des pères”, by Gaëlle Josse, Notabilia, 192 p., €16, digital €13.
As Towards violenceby Blandine Rinkel, Father’s Nightby Gaëlle Josse, depicts a brutal father and his relationship with his daughter, questioning the traces left by this upbringing. Here, after years of absence, the narrator returns to the alpine village where she grew up, at the request of her brother, who had remained with their father, who is beginning to lose his memory. In the past, this man, a mountain guide, terrorized his family, to whom he refused his tenderness. Over a handful of days, the ninth novel by Gaëlle Josse (who came to literature through poetry) orchestrates the waltz of memories and their erasure, resentment and forgiveness, observes the intertwining of feelings.
What led you to write “La Nuit des pères”?
Father’s Night is not an autofiction, but it is a text that is extremely personal to me, the most lively of those that I have written. The subject of the father figure has been present in me for a very long time, it has been pointed out to me that it is found in almost all my books… And then one day, you have to stop circling around things, go dig in the hard.
The big question I was asking myself relates to the ambivalence of feelings: did my father build me up or destroy me more? But this is not the way to ask questions: the two answers can be as true as the other. It was therefore a question of embarking on the exploration of this tangle of feelings and memories. And then other things came to aggregate and develop there. First, the relationships in a sibling, this idea that we believe we have experienced the same thing when not at all. And then, the question of the end of life is important to me. It is from all this that was written Father’s Night.
The violence of the father in your novel relates to what he experienced as a conscript in Algeria. By setting this historical framework and evoking “fathers” in your title, did you have in mind to tell a generational story?
In this case, it happens to be linked to my experience: the Algerian war, which stole two years of the life of my father – but also of my uncles – partly explained his behavior. The Shameful Silence Surrounding Colonial Wars left so many traces…
I belong to a generation where the rule was silence on family stories. We find ourselves heir to a story that we do not know and which does not belong to us, whose shock wave propagates for an extremely long time. But when we finally know a story, another question arises: does understanding allow us to forgive what happened?
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