Your first books were political essays. Is that what led you to writing?
It's actually the other way around: writing led me to politics. As a child, I lived in an environment where we read and watched a lot of movies. I never really separated the two; I loved stories. Very quickly, I preferred adult books to children's literature. At that age, I immersed myself in Hugo, Tolstoy, and Cohen. Back then, we read romance novels like The Thorn Birds. I also read the newspapers. There was also a family influence of politics and unionism. My father was involved, and we went to demonstrations. I read the culture pages of L'Humanité. When I was a student in preparatory classes for the French competitive entrance exams to the Grandes Écoles, I used to sell a newspaper called Révolution in Avignon, and I discovered people like Jack Ralite. I was an activist for popular culture. It was through social and cultural narratives that I came to politics.
Is Literature Activist?
Literature can influence social relations. When you read books like those by Nicolas Mathieu, his descriptions of deindustrialization, of the generational divide between people who were teenagers in the 80s and 90s, as I was, and today's youth in the rise of startup France, are frankly much more powerful and profound than any political speech. When you put words into debate, you structure ideas and you set people free. Setting people free means allowing them to think.
Is this the heart of Arcane 17, your publishing house?
Arcane's history is built on short stories, poetry, and politics. Political books allow us to achieve financial independence, which we reinvest to move into novels through the crime genre, which is somewhat of an intersection between storytelling about a society in crisis and what we call "plain" writing—literature in its most direct form. We create literature that, at the very least, questions something, but is never despairing. We tend to write about people who want things to get better, who sometimes get angry, and sometimes tell a different story.
From political books to surrealist short stories, that's also your journey!
Yes, that's true, I've followed the same path. I've written political books. I haven't really dabbled in crime fiction because it's not the kind of writing I'm drawn to. But the short story in "Ce n'est pas une pipe" (It's Not a Pipe), called "La sirène mécanique" (The Mechanical Siren), allows me to write fiction for the first time.
What does it mean to be a publisher in Tarbes?
It's a publishing house rooted in the region with a national reach. Tarbes and the Occitanie region are in our DNA. Because Arcane 17 has a popular feel that also reflects the social fabric of Tarbes. I wanted to combine a local project with the literary project because it's a way of passing things on. Here, because it's my city and it was where I felt best able to explore this question of social relations. Here, because there were people who could help me. And a publishing house in a region where literature isn't very prominent seemed to us to be a valuable addition to our love letter to the people of Tarbes and the Pyrenees.
But also a national ambition?
Yes. It's not a regional publishing house because I don't do regionalism. We have writers who come from Paris, from abroad. From Tarbes too, but each time the story they tell is exportable and on par with any other story. Diego Arrabal lives between Tarbes and Toulouse. But when he goes to a book fair in Paris or Vitry, we don't talk about him as a regional writer.
What are your plans?
We're working on a book fair. We already did a trial run last year with about fifteen events in the Hautes-Pyrénées. And we're continuing. At the heart of the Arcane project lies the idea that literature isn't confined to publishing houses, bookstores, and libraries, but that it can also be brought to unexpected places, like a bistro terrace, a community organization not typically focused on books, or a working-class neighborhood. This is why the book fair we launched last year exists, and why we want to develop what we call "itinerant" events over time, through cultural partnerships between Arcane and venues that are integral to their local communities. This is both the very essence of Arcane and a distinctly Hautes-Pyrénées identity.