Jean-Claude Mourlevat: Life’s Great Battles

In the past ten years, Jean-Claude Mourlevat’s books have become eagerly anticipated events for French people. Young and not-so-young readers alike wait for them, look out for them, hope for them, and worry too: will the next one be as good as this one or that one? Social realist novels, epic fantasy, comic tales: Jean-Claude Mourlevat always manages to produce unexpected works, and stubbornly refuses to walk down the avenues he himself opened with his previous successes.

Mourlevat is an expert in small, untrodden paths. He was born in 1952 in Ambert, a large village in the French region of Auvergne. His father was a miller and his mother looked after the farm and the six children in the family. The Mourlevat family was full of games, mutual understanding, and joy, but had very few books. The rural world in which Mourlevat grew up has sharpened his sensitivity to the here and now: “My childhood culture is not bookish. It was transmitted to me, rather, through ‘real life.’ As a very young child, I experienced dark nights, huge snowfalls, spring brooks, the depth of the forest” (qtd. in Ricochet). At boarding school, his first great literary encounter occurred with Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: “I felt like a voice was coming out of the book—like someone was speaking to me” (qtd. in Lecture Jeune). This revelation marks the emergence of young Mourlevat’s fundamental principle: a book is a voice. However, at this point in his life he still did not know anything about his own voice. Following another path, he met Kafka’s discourse, and lectured about him for a few years. He became a happy but atypical teacher—the kind that likes, above all, to see his students laugh, so he decided to be a clown. For 12 years, he roamed the world with this new character. His audience, children and adults, followed. Little by little, though, Jean-Claude Mourlevat started to feel somewhat trapped: “I was an ‘average’ comedian, what I was most interested in was the staging process: I liked guiding comedians, imagining the set, the music, etc.” (ibid). He became a stage director, but these words already hint at the organisational work of the novelist. One little spark would be enough for him to start writing, and a friend of his, an oral storyteller, lit it by asking him for a few stories. Mourlevat wrote five of these stories, and after three of them were published, he launched his career as a writer.

In 1998, he published La balafre (The Scar), a semi-historical, semi-fantasy novel. However, critical success came a year later, with L’enfant océan (The Ocean Child). Readapting the tale of “Hop-o’-my-thumb,” Mourlevat weaves a contemporary social saga, dark, uncompromising, but shimmering here and there with beautifully humane passages. The narrative premise is particularly audacious: each chapter of the story is delegated to one of the characters, each viewpoint mingling and reflecting within the multifaceted whole. Mourlevat was perfectly aware of the originality of his project: “L’enfant océan was a risky literary endeavour, and that novel was a true turning-point. I kept asking myself, ‘Is anyone else in the world apart from me going to be interested in this?’” (ibid). Apparently so—the novel has so far sold over 800, 000 copies.

From then on, the audience grew, and Mourlevat continued to entrance his readers. In 2000, La rivière à l’envers (The Reversed River) offered a radically different universe. In an allegorical, vibrant world, two young protagonists go on a quest for enchanted water to save a bird. Here again, the voice is split: Tomek (volume 1) and Hannah (volume 2) both tell the story which leads them to each other. But here the voice is not the scattered, vertigo-inducing kaleidoscope of his earlier novel. Instead, the reader is taken to the...