“Palimpsest”, by Alexis Ragougneau: post-truth, romantic material
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“Palimpsest”, by Alexis Ragougneau, Viviane Hamy, 308 p., €19.90, digital €14.
A man who knows how to identify the center of gravity of the world could, by attacking it at this precise place, bring it down, reverse history, “exactly like in a judo fight”. For Alexis Ragougneau, it all started with this image gleaned from a novel by Gonçalo M. Tavares, A young girl lost in the century in search of her father (Viviane Hamy, 2018). The Portuguese writer cites several cities that, according to him, represented this tipping point: Moscow in 1917, Berlin in 1961… Today, where would be the place to aim for to turn everything upside down?
Alexis Ragougneau took it into his head to find him. “I wanted to write a novel about the manipulation of history”, tells the “World of Books” the 49-year-old author, very worried about the rise of “post-truth” and the totalitarian threat. After more than two years of work, Palimpsest, his fifth novel, is one of the most original and captivating texts of the season. A long confession from a certain Simon Kaas, employee of a “fake news” factory and rebellious troll. On the one hand, it spreads false information to re-elect a populist president. On the other, out of sight, he searches for the truth about his own father and his family history. The two opposing missions will collide.
A key character
In search of the world’s center of gravity, Alexis Ragougneau first turned to Putin’s Russia, unsurpassable in terms of political misinformation. ” You know Yuri Dmitriev ? » On his phone, the writer shows a photo of this historian, shaggy hair and pop beard. “A figure of a novel. He spent decades locating mass graves and exhuming the remains of Stalin’s victims. This did not please those in power, and he found himself accused of pedophilia, then sentenced to fifteen years in prison. » The expert on Soviet repression, member of the NGO Memorial, dissolved in December 2021, provides the novelist with a key character, that of the historian who digs into the memory of his country, finds former places of detention, leaves to risk his life. He will become the narrator’s father.
Ragougneau, however, did not decide on Moscow. “I didn’t feel like writing a Russian novel”, he confides, judging himself too far from his European bases. So here he is shifting his story to a slightly vague country, borrowing from Hungary and Poland, and choosing “Europa” as his working title. But again it blocks. And if the famous center of gravity resided somewhere in France, quite simply? “It was the moment when the national novel became a political issue here, and when Zemmour, de Villiers and a few others presented visions of history largely marked by fiction. »
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