Monica Sabolo on the edge of literature

We would have to invent an adjective to describe the novelist Monica Sabolo: an appearance that suggests a certain assurance, and yet, from the first words, we feel a woman inhabited by doubt. At the end of the conversation – whispers, we should say – we understand that it is precisely these doubts that drive it forward. A single certainty: she lives by and for literature. Her new novel, The Clandestine Life (Gallimard) illustrates this wonderfully. Initially, she thought of writing a book on Direct Action and its four members to the disastrous notoriety after having assassinated, in 1986, Georges Besse, then CEO of Renault and father of a family. Of course, it is about this emblematic terrorist association of the 1980s, a subject that the novelist thought was very distant from her, but the most exciting part is undoubtedly what the writer discovers about herself, in this powerful, explosive and at the same time very fine novel. The Clandestine Life turns out to be three…