Si long chemin - conversations avec maurice chavardes (Un)

by Henri Troyat

French

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Troyat was a French author, biographer, historian and novelist.

Troyat was born Levon Aslan Torossian in Moscow to parents of Armenian descent. His family fled Russia in anticipation of the revolution. After a long exodus taking them to the Caucasus on to Crimea and later by sea to Constantinople and then Venice, the family finally settled in Paris in 1920, where young Troyat was schooled and later earned a law degree. The stirring and tragic events of this flight across half of Europe are vividly recounted by Troyat in 'Tant que la terre durera'.

Troyat received his first literary award, Le prix du roman populaire, at the age of twenty-four, and by twenty-seven, he was awarded the Prix Goncourt.

Troyat published more than 100 books, novels and biographies, among them those of Anton Chekhov, Catherine the Great, Rasputin, Ivan the Terrible and Leo Tolstoy.

Troyat's best-known work is La neige en deuil, which was adapted as an English-language film in 1956 under the title The Mountain.

He was elected as a member of the Académie française in 1959. At the time of his death, Troyat was the longest serving member of the Academy.

From Wikipedia

Reviews

[Veronica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henri Troyat (1911-2007) has always been my favourite French novelist, so it's lucky that he was both prolific and popular -- a real old-fashioned character-driven novelist. I've never found a second-hand bookstall in France that didn't have a few elderly Troyat paperbacks (this one cost me all of 90 centimes!). I knew the basic biographical details -- that he was born in Russia and his family fled to France in 1917, when he was six -- and it was clear he'd used some of his own experiences in his novels. I was always curious to know more, but he never wrote an autobiography. This is the next best thing: a series of conversations about his life and work tidied up into book form and arranged into a more or less chronological life story. It's perhaps inevitable that the early parts, covering his childhood, flight from Russia, education in France, and his unexpected winning of the Goncourt when he was only 27, are the most interesting. But there is plenty of evidence that much of his life went into his works. I was particularly pleased to see confirmed my belief that the vivid scene on a rooftop at night when Paris is liberated, at the end of La Rencontre, is entirely based on his own experience. And then surprised, given his expertise in the scenes set in Mégève in La Grive, that he has never skied or indeed lived in the Alps except for a few weeks while doing research.

That said, it's still astonishing how Troyat gets under the skin of his characters even when they are far removed from him. One of the things I love about him is his incredibly acute portrayal of the experiences and inner thoughts of a teenage girl (Elisabeth in Les Semailles et les Moissons). In 1948 he married his second wife, a widow with a ten-year old daughter, and in this book he says that he based Elisabeth on his experience of living with Minouche, but I still find it remarkable. In his historical novels he has that trick that Mary Renault had of doing mountains of research and then making it disappear. He set long series of novels in Russia, even though he never returned there after the family's flight. And for good measure he wrote biographies of Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Gogol, immersing himself in their lives until he felt he could understand them like the characters in his novels.

It's interesting to compare Troyat's method with the recently read Docherty, also a family saga. As I said in my review, McIlvanney is too didactic, intent on telling the reader what to think about his characters and their actions. Troyat sees his characters as independent beings, who sometimes do things he doesn't expect. Above all he refuses to judge them; he presents their actions and inner monologues and leaves it up to the reader to decide what to think.

I never think about readers when I am writing a book. [...] What determines my work is not the demands of the public, but those of the characters I have inside me. They are a burden in my head, they demand to come out, to live.

And then, in contrast to the ghastly The Buried Giant where ideas trump character:

I am only at ease with concrete representations of life. In my novels, abstract ideas are embodied in people and take on the temperature of their character. In other words, it's my characters who think about abstract problems, not me.[...] If a revelation emerges from my story it has to be, in a way, without my knowledge. Any other way of doing it turns the story into a demonstration, and the characters into living arguments.

Should you be tempted, my favourites are the two sagas Les Semailles et les Moissons and Les Eygletière (five and three volumes respectively), but I also enjoyed his short, punchy earlier works, especially the Goncourt-winning L'araigne. He has a very classic style which I find easy and relaxing to read.