Interview
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Interview with the American author around “Abondance”, a novel whose main character is a homeless person.
At the beginning, Henry has 89.34 dollars in his pocket, which will be quickly dissipated: a Big Mac + a Walmart toy + a night in a hotel rather than in the pickup truck to celebrate Junior’s 8th birthday. It’s a party that day, but the modest fireworks display barely hides the misery. Plenty describes the downfall of Henry, who was unlucky, often made the wrong choices but who was driven by the desire to do well. It’s a road movie of destitution, a pecuniary and cruel marathon, an incandescent and unvarnished account of the America of the left behind. Interview with its author Jakob Guanzon.
What vision presided over Plenty ?
Money was on my mind a lot when I was studying literature at Columbia University in New York. But being in an elite venue for the first time, I didn’t feel comfortable writing about it, and I was in a more experimental vein at the time. After my studies, I felt freer for a text like Plenty. In New York, I was chasing money myself, working outside of class, and I was hungry. One day, I will never forget, I was in a supermarket on the Upper West Side, a very posh area of Manhattan. I was at the checkout, the line was not moving and people seemed upset. A visibly poor and homeless woman was counting her coins one by one to pay for bread. This moment of violent hostility towards a very vulnerable person broke me