Lorraine Fouchet organized a writing workshop for a week on the island of Groix in the Morbihan. The six participants were Daniel, the 86-year-old elder, Luchino, the “playboy” with slicked back hair and big wallet; Arzur, the rebellious teenager; Cassandra, the hearing-impaired thirty-something; and Léon, the Corsican actor who wants to launch into a one-man show.
The latter, she rightly notes, is not the privilege of a few. All the subjects have been covered, all the stories have been written. If the novel is a palimpsest, each voice is unique, she writes. The writer distils his writing advice and his vision of literature. She knows what the anxiety of the blank page, overwriting, the difficulty of pruning a text are, and that’s what makes reading his novel joyful.