The prolific French author returns to bookstores next week with “Nouvelle Babel”. A novel of anticipation whose plot takes place in 2097, a thousand leagues from his previous works.
Michel Bussi, geographer turned novelist, started out as a local writer. After 15 years of success, he tackles science fiction because, “in popular literature, it’s interesting to break genres”. In New Babel (Presses de la Cité editions), which comes out on Thursday, he who usually likes to walk his characters between past and present is therefore transported to a distant future.
This Norman refuses the labels that would remain with him from his previous books: regionalist author, thriller, sentimental intrigue… This new intrigue takes place in 2097. A revolution has changed the entire human condition: teletransportation for all. The planet is now just one state, without borders. Everyone lives where they want. Spanish is the language of humanity.
“My status as a writer who sells a lot gives me immense freedom. I don’t know if Nouvelle Babel would have been accepted by a publisher in another era. Not only is it, but it will be defended. Few books by science fiction will benefit from a launch like this. And me, it’s the novel I believe in, “comments the author.
“I’m not going to do the fake Houellebecq”
On this ground where we did not expect him, Michel Bussi ties up a political intrigue. His science fiction novel begins with an inexplicable attack. We suddenly think of Annihilate by Michel Houellebecq. But the comparison stops there.
“I wrote before confinement and, since then, we have seen, as in the novel, people who teleworked desert the cities”, notes the geographer. However, “I’m not a visionary, I’m not going to do the fake Houellebecq”.
Michel Bussi, unlike the other writer Michel, grants journalists all the interviews they request. His novels are almost ignored by academics, and rarely commented on by literary critics. And he does not pretend to feed the political debate on the future of Western civilization.
Even when you sell like him 721,000 copies a year (fourth best-selling author in 2021), “we are not recognized in the street, we have a completely anonymous life”, he explains to AFP. “In my neighborhood, I can get my bread quietly”.
To be left in peace, he gives only a few details about his life. For example on his journey before his 40th birthday, the age at which he published his first novel, when he was a researcher at the CNRS, an expert in electoral geography.
“Not a fan of the autobiography”
The various portraits of him in the press allow us to know that he comes from “the middle class”, the son of a teacher “who raised him alone” after the “brutal death” of his steelworker father, when he was 10 years old.
If the question of filiation haunts many of his stories, he does not want to dwell on the subject. To his fans, he will hardly learn more in The Suspense Factory, the first title in a collection of Le Robert editions where writers talk about their method.
This native of Louviers, who then grew up in Pont-de-l’Arche, describes himself there as marked by this region of Rouen, “working class countryside” where “one passes in a few steps from a castle tower to a chimney factory”.
“I made myself”
In this book to be published on March 3, where he details his plot twist technique (“the art of the twist”), “I wrote the biographical part with a little less pleasure, I stayed at the surface of things, because I’m not a fan of autobiography”.
“I understand that this is what people want to read, but it’s not what I want to write,” he continues. Just know that “I was in an environment where there were not really models in literature. They did not impose classics on me. As a reader, I made myself”.