L’Écriture ou la Vie

“When I returned from Buchenwald, at the end of April 1945, I was a little over twenty. Since the age of seven, I had decided to be a writer. As soon as I returned, I therefore wanted to write about the experience I had just lived through. A few months later, after writing, rewriting and destroying hundreds of pages, I realized that, unlike other experiences — notably those of Robert Antelme and above all Primo Levi, who freed themselves from the horror of memory through writing — the exact opposite was happening to me. To remain in that memory was certainly not going to lead to a book, and might well lead to suicide. So I decided to abandon writing in favor of life — hence this title, and this ‘or.’”

The title came to him seventeen years later, on a Saturday in April, while he was writing Netchaïev est de retour: “I was telling a scene in which one of the novel’s characters goes to Buchenwald to try to find a fellow resistance deportee. It was all supposed to fit into two pages. That day, the writing veered completely off course. I found myself writing, in the first person, another book entirely: these were the first pages of L’Écriture ou la vie. My unconscious, or something, had played a curious trick on me: that Saturday, 11 April, was the anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, and the first news I heard the next day was the announcement of Primo Levi’s suicide… Under these circumstances, I obviously had to see this book through to the end.”

A fine copy with a distinguished editorial provenance: Sylvie Genevoix, a journalist for Le Figaro and L’Express, was literary director at Éditions Albin Michel, which she had joined in 1992. She was also the daughter of the novelist and Academician Maurice Genevoix, author of Raboliot and Ceux de 14.