Écrire quand même

Abstract

The pandemic has abruptly suspended the writing of my novel in progress, Ce que c’est qu’une existence. Apart from worrying for my loved ones, which impaired my concentration, I felt like all my drafts belonged to a “world before.” How obsolete they had become. And I relate here the solutions I found to “write anyway:” Write a writing journal or rather non-writing journal (in which I pondered the pressure of the news, the necessity of not being deaf to it, all the while refusing a utilitarian position); write a fantasist novel from the perspective of one of the two protagonists from Journée américaine, which I claimed to be translating, and which had thus been written in the “world before;” start writing Ce que c’est qu’une existence again through the characters’ memories; make minute changes to account for what we were living (delicately place a mask on the faces of Dorris and the flight attendant, for instance); and finally include my inquiries in the novel itself. Bring my reader inside my workshop.

Keywords:

• Écriture
• pandémie
• actualité
• monde d’avant
• journal d’écriture
• adresse aux lecteurs

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Montalbetti

Christine Montalbetti lives in Paris. She has published ten or so novels, taking on very different topics (news items, the last space shuttle flight to the SSI, an ancestor, the western genre…), all of which interested in the complexity of the moment and implementing a special relationship with the reader. She experimented with the genre of the short story with Nouvelles sur le sentiment amoureux and Petits déjeuners avec quelques écrivains célèbres. She also writes for the theater. Apart from a radiophonic play and short plays written for festivals, she has published two monologues, Le Cas Jekyll and Le Bruiteur, as well as La Conférence des objets (which received the Prix Émile Augier de l’Académie Française), which she staged at the Comédie Française. In the United States, four of her novels have been published in translation by Dalkey Archive Press.