Leroy, Gilles 1958-

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LEROY, Gilles 1958-

PERSONAL: Born December 28, 1958, in Paris, France; son of Andre and Eliane (Mesny) Leroy. Education: Attended Hypokhagne, Khagne.

ADDRESSES: Office—c/o Mercure de France SA, Editions Gallimard, 26, rue de Conde, F-75006 Paris, France. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer.

AWARDS, HONORS: Prix de la Nouvelle, Nanterre, 1992, for Les Derniers seront les premiers; Prix Valery-Larbaud, 1999, for Machines à sous.

WRITINGS:

Habibi (novel), Editions Michel de Maule (Paris, France), 1987.

Maman est morte (nonfiction; title means "Mother Is Dead"), Editions Michel de Maule (Paris, France), 1990.

Les Derniers seront les premiers (short stories; title means "The Last Shall Be the First"), Mercure de France (Paris, France), 1991.

Madame X (novel), Mercure de France (Paris, France), 1992.

Les Jardins publics (novel), Mercure de France (Paris, France), 1994.

Les Maîtres du monde (novel), Mercure de France (Paris, France), 1996.

Machines à sous (novel), Mercure de France (Paris, France), 1998.

Soleil noir (novel), Mercure de France (Paris, France), 2000.

L'Amant russe (novel), Mercure de France (Paris, France), 2002.

Fragiles (novel), Mercure de France (Paris, France), 2003.

Grandir (novel), Mercure de France (Paris, France), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Gilles Leroy has drawn from his childhood growing up in a working-class and middle-class family in the suburbs of Paris to create novels and short stories. His first novel, Habibi, revolves around the tragic passions of two adolescent boys. It was followed three years later by the nonfiction work Maman est morte, an account of the author's grief over the death of his mother. Gerard-Julien Salvy reported in Le Figaro Magazine: "Maman est morte is an unusual book, for it says something truly new: allegory has given way to the feelings that exist beyond the facts. Without sadness somehow, Gilles Leroy has written an astonishing book."

In Les Derniers seront les premiers, a collection of nine short stories, Leroy portrays the marginalized in society: children and adolescents, the lonely elderly, little-known writers, the poor, and singers of forgotten songs. Leroy explained to a contributor to Figaroscope, "In less than ten years, I lost my entire family. I wanted to pay my respects to all of the people I loved. They became the characters in my book. I wanted to reconstruct a sort of legacy." In the title story, the narrator is a reporter assigned to interview stars whose careers are on the wane; in "Les Coups et blessures," Leroy describes the relationship of two teenagers; and in "Hors la loi," he recounts what happens when a father discovers his son shoplifting. In "La Compagnie des femmes," he depicts two young women sharing their secrets with each other while riding a train home from a blackmarket venue, then describes them many years later when they accidentally encounter each other and find that their roles of "needy" and "satisfied" have been reversed. Les Derniers seront les premiers garnered good reviews. "This is a sensitive collection—grim, tense, and compassionate. With a knowing eye and sparkling style, Leroy has created a spellbinding work," declared Laurence Vidal in Le Figaro. J. M. Mi also praised the work in his review for Lire, stating, "the stories of these characters whose fate is sealed are very moving. Gilles Leroy proves here that he is a talented writer."

The short novel Madame X revolves around an aging "sexaholic" who holds court in a dilapidated movie theater in Paris and the narrator who becomes her friend, known only as the Sentimental One. At one point, the two meet for drinks at a bar and the narrator invites Madame X to a bowling alley, where she tells the story of her lost true love, an American businessman. James Kirkup, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, called Madame X both "extraordinary" and "strange and unclassifiable, with a subject at once pathetic and shocking." He concluded, "This is a sharply observed little tale about the death of our simple human joys; its language, like its heroine, is discreet, classic and poignant."

Leroy once told CA: "I spent my childhood reading all the books I could get my hands on. When I was ten years old, I discovered literature with The Red and the Black by Stendhal, which I read in a single night. I believe that night I began to write, without setting a pencil to paper, without even being aware of my desire to write. Ten years later, I made another important discovery: William Faulkner and his novel Sanctuary. Several days later, I wrote my first novel. Was there a link between these two aesthetic 'shocks' and the books I write? I don't know. I believe they have in common the search for truths that neither the sciences nor ethics can teach us. These truths take the form of violence and metaphor: Julien Sorel's crushed head in The Red and the Black and the cornstalk sword in Sanctuary are what might be called unforgettable images, and perhaps for me the foundations of writing.

"A book is always wrested from chaos. To write is to engage in a battle to create a part of the world, to take from it some flashes of insight. The chaos in my life was to have lost my entire family in several years. I found myself still a young man and all alone, deprived of my origins, which are also social references, landmarks from which to move forward. I felt as if I were not the heir but the depository of a history that while inevitably personal was also the history of the century. It is a concrete history, lived by people 'without history' as anonymous lives are called.

"Both sides of my family lived in Paris, in the outlying, rural suburbs that are part of the suburbs today. Among them were small business people—furriers, butchers—and workers in metal, clothes manufacturing, and printing. Inspired by their circumstances and destinies, I felt the need to create in my recent books a certain world: my own topography (imaginary settings, a little like Yoknapatawpha county in Faulkner's works) and my own 'society' of people who go from one work to another. This is still the kind of novel that I write today and should be with Les Derniers seront les premiers and Madame X, the final part of a trilogy.

"Finally, I want to say that I do not believe in the idea of a 'writing career.' Today that is the greatest danger for anyone who writes books. Writing is a vocation, not a job. To want to make a career, which many authors do, is to take part in spite of oneself in the system that wants to make the book a product of consumption like any other. In my [unpublished] novel L'Aviateur I evoked the life of one of my great-aunts, who worked in a printing factory. Sometimes she brought home from work books that were damaged or soiled and thus couldn't be sold, so they were left for the workers. She solemnly put them in her library to give to me later. She was very proud of her library and realized, I think, that she belonged to a sort of worker's aristocracy that took part in the development of knowledge. It was as if the product of her labor transcended her modest condition. And for me, who received these works, the feeling of respect was too strong for me to be able today to call the books products, that is, to imagine readers as clients. The only true danger for a writer is to want to please."