Thomas Schlesser

In bookstores, people are now asking for "the latest Schlesser." What kind of reception have your books received from the public?

Thomas Schlesser – It's a bit dizzying: over a million copies for Les Yeux de Mona and 39 translations! As for the Gardener's catIt has just passed 50,000 copies sold in France and is already planned for release in 16 languages, including Spanish and Italian this fall. But I like to remind people that I've written many books that haven't been commercial successes (laughs). My first novel, The Immaculate VirginIn 2003, it had very little success. Some of my essays have often been met with indifference, sometimes even contempt. So I see this publishing success today with humility and as the result of a long journey.

What did you want to express through Les Yeux de Mona ?

T.S. – This book has a somewhat sad personal origin, which led me to create this ideal little girl in my mind. It is therefore a work of healing, of resilience, dealing with the question of family and childhood. It also carries a more intellectual ambition: to raise awareness of the fact that art serves life. Mona is threatened with going blind, so her grandfather takes her to Parisian museums for a year. However, it is less a novel of initiation into art history than an initiation into life through art. Each chapter raises a theme, such as love, the animal condition, the experience of death, the passage of time… To put it another way, with Robert Filliou: “Art is what makes life more interesting than art.”

And for The Gardener's CatIn your latest novel, what is your central theme?

T. S. – This is the story of Louis, a taciturn and solitary gardener. His life collapses when he learns that his cat has a tumor. His new neighbor, Thalie, a retired literature professor, will help him rediscover the joy of living by having him recite the works of great poets, past and present, in front of the trees—from the Greek poet Sappho to Léopold Sédar Senghor, by way of Neruda, Kipling, Rilke, and Brontë. Poetry allows us to put words to the most contradictory emotions. It knows how to make opposing sensations coexist, like the desire to live and to die at the same time.

This cat lived in the Var hinterland in the 1980s, a landscape that is familiar to you…

T. S. – I know the Var region like the back of my hand since my parents live in Salernes. I actually lived through two terrible fires there: the one in Tourtour in 1983, where the ashes reached our garden; and another, even more terrifying one in 1990, when I was barely a kilometer from the fire, in the house with my grandmother, with the water bombers flying overhead. It made me terrified of fires. And so, in The Gardener's Catr, Louis is also afraid of fire (Laughter).

At what age did you begin to take an interest in art and poetry?

T.S. – In my family, what we call the fine arts weren't really present. I just had an aunt who painted – and very well, I might add. I came to the world of museums quite late, around 20-25 years old. Much more out of intellectual interest than a genuine emotional connection. Today I love art passionately, but initially it was more of an interest in the cultural aspect, and I wrote a thesis on the political reception of Gustave Courbet. Poetry is different. It appeared earlier in my life. I started reading it around the age of 12 without understanding a thing. It saved me, because I was a terrible student and I hated academic standards. Poetry allowed me to improve; it opened a path for me. It gave me a feeling of freedom, of liberated language, thanks to the free use of words found in great lyric poems.

For those of you who love to recite verses, which poets accompany you?

T. S. – René Char, because he possesses this marvelous way of returning to the harshest aspects of reality, he who came from a peasant background and retained this archaic attentiveness to our surroundings. There is also a little-known Italian poet, Gaspara Stampa, and another, more contemporary Russian one, Marina Tsvetaeva. These are late discoveries, whereas in my adolescence I was reading Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine… If I start listing them, I'll never stop!

Tell us a little about the foundation you run and where you live in Antibes…

T. S. – I arrived here in 2014 and this sublime place overwhelmed me with its beauty. Originally, it was a somewhat secretive place, reserved for a few researchers. I undertook to open it to the general public in 2022, and it has since presented an exhibition every year. The idea was also to raise awareness of the couple formed by Hans Hartung (1904-1989), who lived through the 20th century.^e century to develop an immense abstract body of work, and Anna-Eva Bergman (1909-1987), who wanted to evoke through her paintings a feeling similar to that of entering a cathedral. She is the very image of the independent female artist, and I am proud to have written her first biography, Anna-Eva Bergman, Luminous LivesThe foundation recently acquired its Star from 1956. With its irregular shapes made of gold leaf, it seems both stable and on the verge of exploding.

One last word on paintings and poetry?

T.S. – We don't realize the extent to which art has the power to change lives. Because life isn't simple, and we all make do with our existence. But when we become aware of the works that surround us – those of musicians, painters, poets, filmmakers, architects… – they are extraordinary allies that bring meaning, even if sometimes through humor and absurdity. All of this is precious; it's a small political struggle rooted in faith, and I believe in it. So it pleases me to see that people, sooner or later, encounter the best that humanity has to offer. We tend to give in to our somber passions; it's the easy way out. But art also gives us the means to reach out toward what is most luminous. The works of great artists are like thousands of outstretched hands.