Professor of Letters at Le Teil, Laurent Salipante publishes his third novel: D’eau et de Sang (Marathon editions).
After years of teaching in French Guiana, it’s been three years since Laurent Salipante set down his suitcases in Ardèche. Today professor of Letters in Teil, he resides in Mirabel with his wife and two daughters. And if the decor of his third novel, Water and Blood, released in January by Editions Marathon, resembles the geography of southern Ardèche, this is not by chance. But then nothing at all.
A first life
This 42-year-old teacher and author – Water and Blood is his third work – has, in a first life, lived on the image. “As a teenager, I dreamed of myself as Stanley Kubrick”, he confides. Laurent first worked as a cameraman-editor for about fifteen years, during which he directed several short films and directed many plays. It is therefore no coincidence that “I am often told that my writing is very cinematic.”
Of course, as a seasoned filmmaker and bulimic cinephile, and with, according to the accepted expression, a lot of things to tell, it is first towards the seventh art that Laurent turns to express himself. However, it is an art “too complex, too expensive … I tried, but the heaviness of the machine frustrated me.” And then if he likes the image, perhaps he appreciates the words even more. He discovered the power “and freedom” when he was a child, on the typewriter his parents gave him and with which he wrote his first texts, “without ever having them read, it was just for me.”
Finally, the first novel
A passion for literature, stories full of head, messages to pass, reflections to lead … it does not take more to make a writer. But if the seed of letters grows in him from an early age, it is around his thirties, after winning a short story competition, that – well, one might say – the click occurs. Put in confidence by this success, and a good news never arriving alone, he then connects the texts. “I wrote scripts, plays, and above all a lot of short stories, many of which have been published”, until he allowed himself – finally, one might say – to embark on the romance adventure, “I felt cramped in the short format, the novel called me.” He got down to it, finished his first long text, but “when I reread it, I thought it was bad. I put it in a drawer.” It was not until his first and most ruthless reader, his wife, secretly entrusted the manuscript to a colleague, so that the latter, full of praise, persuaded Laurent to send it to a publisher. In 2019 is therefore published The Denatured City (Plume Solidaire editions).
Thinking about the future
His thing for Laurent is science fiction. And it is to a French author that he owes it, “Pierre Boulle and The Planet of the Apes … a reading I did when I was young, it was a shock!” Of course, when it comes to science fiction, it’s hard to miss the Asimov, Bradbury, K. Dick … that he knows by heart, the Drômois Barjavel “which I find a little outdated”, or Robert Charles Wilson, “an author whom I really like for his very humanistic vision of science fiction.” So many essential authors who have given their letters of nobility to a genre which, according to Laurent, is too often poorly regarded, “when we talk about science fiction, we think of Star Wars, blockbusters”, whereas it is for the Ardèche writer the ideal support when it comes to thinking about the future and the world, and especially thinking about them in a global way. With in particular the place that the human will occupy there, the other object of fascination of Laurent Salipante. “I have two children, the future of the world and of man feeds my questions a lot.” And if he writes it is precisely for that, to ask questions to which, by way of answer, he brings a few hundred pages of well-crafted intrigue and well-conducted reflections.
A world without water
A great reader of scientific journals, “I realized that drinking water is a resource that is becoming increasingly scarce, without being more interested in it … What would happen if one day we had no more water? on tap? Could Man keep his humanity? ” This is the starting point of his latest novel, Water and Blood, a post-apocalyptic western that plunges the reader into a world where refreshing Ardèche swimming is only a distant memory. A world without water, which strongly resembles the Ardèche, “it is not directly named, but in writing it is the southern Ardèche that I had in mind. An attentive reader will recognize it” ; a text, moreover, partly imagined during the long hikes of its author.
But where science fiction often deals with the collapse of our civilization, Laurent wants to see the glass half full, “D’Eau et de Sang is not a dystopia, there is always hope in my texts, a way out.” Inveterate optimist Laurent Salipante? Yes, and then … not even afraid! Neither of the future, nor of the role that man will play in it. “I just have what is called faith, faith in the human being.” And this nature lover, very attentive to the upheavals of the world, to recall an obvious fact that it is never useless to have in mind: “nobody knows what tomorrow will bring!”… especially not an author from the future.
To go further: Laurent Salipante’s novels are available online, or directly from publishers: www.marathoneditions.fr/www.editions-plumessolidaires.com
–
