Good evening everyone,
I am extremely impressed and intimidated to receive tonight the laureate of the Pulitzer Prize 2025 and the National Book Award 2024 Percival Everett for this book,
James,
published in the Olivier edition.
rewriting of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
the novel by Mark Twain,
published in 1884.
This restaurant was already opened.
It's already old.
This restaurant is older than Huckleberry Finn.
And your idea is to take a character from Huckleberry Finn,
Jim,
the slave,
and make him the hero.
Or the anti-hero of your book.
Well,
it's not a very original question,
but how did the idea come up in your mind?
Well,
I wish I had a romantic answer for you.
For years it was burning inside me.
You can lie.
But it was not.
The truth is I was playing tennis.
So,
it's romantic.
Well,
you don't,
not with my partner.
And
I hit the ball sort of out of the court.
And as I watched the ball sail,
I thought to myself,
has anyone ever told the adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim?
Point of view,
yeah.
And that's how it started.
You know,
there are many
French writers who are rewriting.
masterpieces of the past.
Recently,
I had a guest in this show,
Adélaïde de Clermont-Tonnerre.
She rewrote the Three Musketeers from the point of view of Milady the woman.
Yeah,
and also there is another famous
French Franco-Algerian writer,
Kamel Daoud,
who rewrote
L'Étranger de Camus from the point of view of the Arab who is killed.
So it's in the air.
How do you explain that,
the desire to give new versions of great classics?
Well,
I think some of us see these stories and see the voices that are missing.
Mark Twain was writing a novel about an adolescent white youth.
And he was not psychically or culturally equipped to write a novel about an adult black man experiencing America.
So it wasn't his job to do it.
But his depiction of the...
The enslaved Jim is deficient.
It's not a fully rounded character.
And so it's my attempt to have this,
to allow this character a vehicle for his voice.
Yeah.
And it's more the original idea also that you had is to show a different Jim.
Jim is supposed to be simple minded.
He speaks like...
the slang of that era very simply,
and you make him very clever and very literary.
How did you decide that?
Well,
you know,
the depiction of enslaved people,
enslaved Africans,
was that they were simple-minded and superstitious.
But being human beings,
I'm sure there were some who were simple-minded and superstitious,
but
There were many who entertained complex ideas despite their lack of literacy and education,
wondering why are we here,
what are we doing,
why is this happening to us in ways that were more than just eating and sleeping.
And so those characters are never given a place in the story.
And so I'm just trying to...
The translation is extraordinary by Anne-Laure Tissu,
because it was an impossible job.
Jim speaks like in slang and how she recreated that in French.
I don't know if you read French.
Well,
I don't read well enough to appreciate what she's done.
That's certainly true.
But she's a fantastic translator.
For example,
in
American...
Jim speaks like that thing,
that thing,
things like the,
for the.
In French,
she found an idea to erase all the R's.
The
R's become...
Really?
Disappear,
yeah.
So it's like the African accent that is caricatured in,
for example,
Tintin au Congo.
You know Tintin au Congo?
Yes,
yes.
So the
They don't have the R's in the...
So she used that,
and it's perfect.
That's great.
It's great because you're always,
like,
shocked and laughing at the same time.
And really,
it's amazing.
You are describing the white world of this era with both comedy and fear.
Am I correct?
Yes.
In other words,
the American experience for black people.
Because you are,
yeah,
it's rare to laugh,
cry,
and be afraid at the same time that often in a book.
You know,
you're always laughing and crying at the same time.
It's like in the soul music,
I guess.
Is it a caricature to say that?
No,
I don't think so.
There's something to that experience of the absurdity of life and viewing the world that you've been presented with,
ironically.
Because slavery was surrealist,
was something absurd.
Oh,
it has to be,
yes.
In a way,
when I was reading James,
it was like reading a science fiction book,
you know?
It's so crazy to imagine that this really happened.
And it makes you laugh.
When you write,
you always tell jokes about this horror.
You know what's funny about that is...
I never think I'm being funny.
I know I'm ironic,
but
I don't think I ever tell jokes,
but
I hope that the humor is in the story.
Because Mark Twain was a humorist.
Yes,
very funny.
It was important for me.
I read
Huckleberry Finn when I was
13 or 14.
I don't know how it is in...
in the United States,
but here it's a book for young adults.
It's not read by old people.
So
I remember it was really a fun book with a lot of adventures and action,
and you kept all of this.
Your book is full of dialogues,
action,
it's moving all the time,
they are in the river,
they are in a boat.
You kept this tone of something that goes very quickly,
easy to read.
Oh,
good.
I worked very hard to not adopt
Twain's prose,
but I wanted to...
I owed an allegiance to the world that he'd created.
And so that was the...
the truth that I sought.
There's also a big irony in the scene of the black face.
So Jim is a black man,
and he's pretending to be a white disguised as a black.
Yes.
Which is,
maybe it's happened.
I don't know.
Oh,
well,
there are two answers to that.
Well,
of course it's happened.
And maybe it's always happening.
Yeah,
well,
it's interesting because it's also the subject of this book,
Erasure,
Effacement,
who is published now with a new translation in France by the same publisher.
Yeah,
actually,
that's the same translation,
I believe.
Ah,
okay,
I thought it was a new one.
Okay,
yeah,
it's the same.
Okay,
sometimes I'm wrong.
but not very often.
I've heard that doesn't happen a lot.
Thank you,
thank you.
Coming from you.
No,
Iraje is the story of a black writer,
monk,
who pretends...
to write slang and to please the white.
You know,
it's like doing...
But he's doing it as a gag.
Yeah.
But he has a lot of success with this.
Yes.
He writes a novel full of stereotypes,
clichés,
caricatures,
and it works.
And it's like
Jim in James 2.
Yes.
So...
You knew what you were doing.
You knew you would have the Pulitzer Prize.
I didn't know that.
No,
but it's...
You see what I mean?
Yeah,
I do.
You are too cultured not to play with all these expectations of the reader.
the foundation of my interest in fiction is to exploit.
expectations to create meaning meaning out of what people want to see by having them reevaluate it even if they don't know they're reevaluating at first and also you you like to play with general like
you wrote Western you wrote thriller or detective novels and now you rewrite Mark Twain here it's it's a writer who
writes the novel that people expect from him.
Why do you need this canva?
Comment dit canva,
Margot?
Canva?
Okay,
the same.
You need canvas to make your imagination work?
No,
it's more that I'm fascinated by...
people's presumptions and expectations,
not only of a particular genre,
but of particular characters.
And sometimes genre will allow an avenue to those stereotypes that won't exist in a more realistic kind of...
So
Jim likes to talk to Voltaire.
Who wouldn't?
In his dreams,
he's having conversations with Voltaire.
But do you know that Voltaire is cancelled in France now?
I didn't know that.
There is a statue of Voltaire right next door of this place.
And it has been vandalized because
Voltaire made money with La Compagnie des Indes,
who had slave trade.
So,
Voltaire.
of course was against slavery,
but he took the money from slavery.
And that's sort of the story of slavery.
The
Northern States,
the Civil War in the United States really wasn't about slavery.
Though there were abolitionists,
many of the abolitionists
were profiting from slavery.
Slaves,
people carried mortgages on slaves.
And so banks in Europe benefited from slavery.
So being opposed to the institution outwardly really didn't say much unless you were divesting yourself from it.
But do you think this civil war still goes on?
Today,
when you see that there was a guy shot and killed yesterday...
Well,
you know,
we don't know who shot him.
He was obviously a disturbed person.
But the right wing,
of course,
in the United States will politicize this and attempt to show that it's the left attacking the right.
The opposite exists also.
Yes,
but strangely it doesn't get the glamour that this is getting.
Just today my friend Margot mentioned the Pulse nightclub killings in Florida.
Yeah,
exactly.
That's a political killing.
When someone goes in because they hate gay people and they start shooting people,
that's political,
but that was never called a political killing.
It should have,
and
I think there still is a problem,
but not only in America,
maybe everywhere,
like civil war is still going on.
Well,
we've lost the capacity for political discussion,
for political discourse.
What passes for it is polarization.
Exactly.
So,
the taboo question.
You received all these awards.
Was it calculated?
You know,
I have problems with awards.
The invidious comparisons of works of art is a bad idea.
I know,
having served on so many of these juries,
that...
If the committee had met on a Thursday rather than a Wednesday,
someone else would have had the award.
That's just the way they go.
It doesn't make the book any better than it is.
The only thing I can say is
I would love to win an award every week.
It feels good.
But more people have come to the book because of it.
What I'm excited about is this novel,
at least in the U.S.
and in the U.K.,
has received a lot of attention.
It's a literary novel that's received a lot of attention.
I would be happy if it was any literary novel.
It just happens to be mine this time.
So that's kind of exciting.
Mark Twain,
maybe in a way,
is like Voltaire,
because
Jim escapes because of his white friends.
They help him.
In a way,
they save him.
But then he makes
Jim talk like,
in French we say petit nègre.
I don't know how you would translate this in
American. I don't know.
Best not to.
So it's ambivalent.
Mark Twain was,
maybe he was for freedom,
but he also a little bit despised this character.
Well,
he was a product of his period.
Yeah.
What is more distressing to me is that I always thought that
Twain was basically a decent person,
not having benefited from another 140 years of so-called human evolution,
but having read more,
in particular from a book by a woman named
Carrie Driscoll,
about
Twain's opinions.
Regarding Native Americans,
he's fallen in my estimation.
He was an incredible bigot and prejudiced and without any sympathy for the plight of
Native people.
And so
I have been reassessing my feelings about Twain.
Maybe,
I guess,
he was nicer to the black because...
Uncle Tom's Cabin was published 30 years before Huckleberry
Finn. Well,
you know,
the difference between those works like that one and other narratives was that,
and what makes
Huckleberry Finn an important American novel is that it's a novel about an enslaved person,
but it's not a novel about slavery.
And that's a distinction to be made.
So in that way,
it's a more true work of art.
I said it's amazing how you make fun of such a painful history.
But you're also very good at action scenes.
The weeping of a boy,
running in the woods,
shootings,
dialogues.
Swimming in the Mississippi River.
And
I've heard that Steven Spielberg might buy the rights to make a blockbuster of James.
Is it true?
Well,
it's certainly true that Steven and I have signed contracts and we're trying to make a movie.
Whether it will be a blockbuster,
we'll see.
I mean,
a spectacular action,
because it's full of...
suspense in this book.
It's a guy who's trying to escape and escape death.
Well I'm very excited because if we make it I get to blow up a riverboat.
And there is a horribly moving scene about a pencil.
Pencil,
faber and faber.
Owning a pencil was a crime in those days.
It was because...
Was it because it's a symbol of freedom?
Well,
it's a symbol of literacy and therefore a symbol of threat to the status quo.
And the pencil has an important role because you say...
Wait,
I lost everything in my paper...
Ah oui,
you say,
with my pencil I wrote myself into being,
and the translation by Anne-Laure Tissu,
avec mon crayon je me suis mis au monde par l'écriture.
It's beautiful what you think that writing gives birth to a human.
Yes,
well,
one's voice is how we exist in the world.
And literacy,
the ability to express ideas and to receive them is...
I cannot understate,
I cannot overstate the importance of that.
Because you're a professor at the University of
South California,
professor of English.
I am.
But that's not why I say it.
Because it's simply true.
So Jim is saved because he's reading and writing.
Yes.
I think that's fair to say.
I have a game in my show.
It's called
Guess Your Own Quotes.
I'm going to read you.
Well,
I have to tell you that I forget my books as soon as I finish them.
That's what they all say.
I'm going to do terribly.
No,
no,
no.
You have to tell me in which book you wrote this sentence.
Oh,
man.
Are you ready?
Okay,
let's try it.
No,
I'm sure you will be good.
Read,
always read.
No one can take that away from you.
You're right,
sure.
I am not Sidney Poitier.
I'm not Sidney Poitier.
I was close.
It was a book I wrote.
You're reading,
you're teaching literature,
and you think reading is disappearing in America?
I don't think reading has ever had a huge presence in America.
You know,
a few weeks ago I was...
speaking in an auditorium,
about
2,000 people.
And they'd all shown up because of books.
And in talking to them,
I said,
you know,
don't be seduced by this.
We're all in here,
we all love books,
and it feels really good.
But we're a fraction.
tiny fraction of this culture.
When,
if my publisher sells 50,000 copies of my book,
it's a success.
It's great.
On the other hand,
if I were to record an album and I sold 50,000 records,
I would never record again.
Yes,
that puts it into perspective.
Yes,
it's true.
Okay,
another sentence by you.
Okay.
Which would frighten you more,
a slave who is crazy or a slave who is sane and sees you clearly?
Well,
that's pretty easy.
Yeah.
James,
James.
Another one.
There is a trap.
What's the use you learning to do right when it's troublesome to do right and it ain't no trouble to do wrong?
I have no idea,
I don't even remember writing that.
It's Mark Twain in
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Now you're,
well,
two answers to that.
One is,
you told me the rules of the game were these were from my book.
Yes,
it's true.
I told you it was a trap.
I am totally not honest.
But I have to say that
I read
Twain's novel.
many times in a row,
so that I would forget all of the texts,
and I don't remember any of that book either.
It doesn't matter.
Don't worry.
Now,
another one.
The world demands that you introduce yourself twice,
first as you are,
and second as you are told to be.
Aha.
But you know,
my English is so bad and my accent makes you...
it's more difficult for you.
Oh,
thank you for the excuse,
but...
What is that?
Oh,
is that from Eurasia?
Yes,
it's from Eurasia.
You must introduce yourself twice,
first as you are,
and second as you are told to be.
Oh,
that's right there on the cover of the book.
Also,
another sentence by you.
It's incredible that a sentence is ever understood.
I'm going to guess that's from Glyph.
Erasure.
Erasure,
OK.
I'm really winning all the time,
and it feels so good.
So,
oh yeah,
another one.
Oh,
it's from the same.
Oh,
okay.
She worried about how she looked while making love.
I love this.
She worried about how she looked while making love.
And you define this as postmodern fuck.
Yes.
The postmodern way of having sex is to deconstruct sex,
right?
During sex.
Yeah.
Another one,
I stopped torturing you after.
I was a fighter of windmills.
I was a chaser of whales.
There is an actor's name in the title.
Oh,
is that I am not Sidney Poitier?
Okay.
But maybe now after
Mark Twain,
you could rewrite Moby Dick.
With the whale seeking revenge.
I just talked to a young writer who was doing this.
Oh,
really?
Yes.
I won't say his name because I don't want to jinx it for him,
but he is a talented young man.
Or you could rewrite
Donkey Shot.
Oh,
yes.
With Sancho Ponsa is the winner.
Yes,
that's very true.
So I have a...
Different questionnaires to end this conversation.
One is about you,
because you're an important professor,
about your favorite books.
Can you tell me the title of a book that makes you cry?
The Way of All Flesh,
Samuel Butler's novel,
which is one of my favorite works,
and the tenderness that he uses in describing a certain relationship in the novel.
And it's also,
but it's...
I find it's like listening to music.
Sometimes
I will cry,
not because of the circumstances or what happens to someone,
but just the language itself.
And it can be a small turn of phrase,
something that I hadn't thought of.
I cry because it moves me.
I also cry because I didn't think of it.
But generally speaking,
I don't cry and I don't laugh at things that are really funny.
I find them really funny,
but
I don't laugh.
Me,
the last sentence of your book made me cry.
Mon nom est James.
James quoi?
Just James.
Because finally,
Jim has another name.
Like he was...
Well,
that makes me very happy.
And as a writer,
I never get to feel those things,
because I'm living with this story every day for a couple of years.
And the kind of emotion,
all the emotion,
even though I wanted to be there,
is taken out for me,
because I've already imagined it by the time I've written it.
Well,
I am more lucky than you because I read it and he didn't write it.
So,
a book to stop crying.
Does it have to be fiction?
No.
A book that,
after reading
Butler, you read that and you stop crying.
Well,
another book that makes me cry is...
Again,
for the beauty of it,
it's Chester Himes,
If He Hollers,
Let Him Go.
But a book that makes me stop crying is one that's going to make me sound like the nerd that I am,
which is actually a logical text.
It's
Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's
Principia Mathematica,
which
I find beautiful.
It's a gorgeous book.
and if I feel
sad in any way,
I read that because it's hard.
And it occupies my brain.
Yeah,
you have to concentrate.
Yeah,
exactly.
A book to brag in the street,
you know,
you walk in the street,
you want to look cool.
Oh,
look cool?
Any of my wife's novels.
People think I'm cool.
No,
I don't know.
The famous photograph,
of course,
is Marilyn Monroe sitting,
reading
James Joyce's Ulysses.
Yeah,
Ulysses,
you look more than cool.
You look like someone who likes to suffer.
Well,
ever since that photograph,
you look like a jerk.
No,
I can't think of any book like that.
Well,
a book that makes you clever.
Oh,
that makes me clever.
Not makes me perceived as clever,
but makes me clever.
Which would be
Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.
Ah.
A book to seduce a woman.
I know it doesn't exist in America anymore.
Yeah,
I know.
It's forbidden to seduce,
but...
Gee,
I think if a woman were to come in and see me reading this book,
she would think,
oh,
this guy is great.
This guy is so sensitive.
I think it would be something like The Velveteen Rabbit or some other children's book.
That would at least give me the appearance of being innocent.
A book that I regret having read?
I don't regret having read any book.
There have been many books I've read and did not like them,
but I've learned something from everything
I've read.
As I get older,
there are books I will not finish,
because life is too short.
I don't think there's such a thing as a bad book.
No,
but I mean,
some people answered to this question,
Mein Kampf,
for example,
I regret having read Mein Kampf,
you know.
Why regret?
It explains a lot to me.
Again,
I learn from everything.
I come away reading the back of a cereal box.
I come away knowing something I didn't know before.
Okay.
the books that I wish I had written?
Oh,
that's a question for a younger writer.
And there are plenty of works I read,
and I think that's beautiful.
But I learned this actually sitting with...
A friend of mine,
an Arapaho friend of mine,
a native man,
who,
and this,
and I'm sorry to tell this kind of boring story,
but we're sitting in his kitchen,
and in his house,
when I would stay with him on this reservation in Wyoming,
I would feel a cat move through my body.
And I'm not spiritual at all,
but I would feel this cat move,
a large cat.
And it was weird,
but it was only when his niece was away,
I would use her bedroom.
It was only in there.
And they did not own any cats,
but I would feel this large cat move through me.
And so I told him about it.
He was the medicine chief of the Northern Cheyenne,
happened to live with the
Arapaho people.
And we talked some,
and he asked me about experiences with cats.
large cats,
and I told them about a panther,
a black jaguar that I had seen come out of the brush when I was camping in Central America,
maybe 15 or 20 feet from me,
three meters.
Oh,
no,
not three meters.
What was it?
What?
Close.
Yeah,
five meters,
six meters.
And it stopped and it looked at me.
And I was terrified,
and it walked on like I didn't matter.
The first thing he said,
without any thought,
was,
that was an Indian.
And I said,
what are you talking about?
He says,
that was an Indian.
And he said,
and this was the thing,
he said,
without any envy,
without any jealousy,
only as a matter of fact,
they are very powerful down there.
And it was that wonderful clarity that he had.
He didn't want to be that person with that power.
He just recognized it and admitted it,
and it was a truth.
And so now when I see things of great beauty,
I don't desire to have made them.
I'm just glad that they're in the world.
Long answer,
but nice conclusion.
Thank you very much for coming on this place,
in this place,
La Perouse.
It's quite a place.
One of the favorite places of Victor Hugo.
Victor Hugo and
Honoré de Balzac and Marcel Proust,
they were coming here to have dinner.
And maybe they're still there also.
Maybe they're inside us.
I just felt,
I just felt walked through a cold spot.
So thank you very much.
And of course,
I order you,
je vous ordonne de lire James de Percival Everett aux éditions de l'Olivier,
et aussi pour encore mieux comprendre le livre et comment le professeur Everett joue avec la littérature et la séduction qu'elle exerce sur les lecteurs,
Effacement,
qui est paru il y a quelques années et qui est réédité aussi aux éditions de l'Olivier.
Les deux sont traduits par un leurre tissu.
Merci beaucoup de continuer à nous suivre,
de nous commenter,
de nous liker,
de faire tout ce que vous pouvez faire avec vos doigts sur des téléphones.
Et puis,
n'oubliez pas.
I'm going to say it in English.
I say this every time at the end of this conversation.
Read books or you will become idiots.
Good night.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
That was a tough game.