Gilles Leroy is a French writer. Basically, he specializes on novels.
Background
Gilles Leroy was born on December 28, 1958 in Bagneux, Hauts-de-Seine, France, the son of Andre and Eliane (Mesny) Leroy. Leroy has drawn from his childhood growing up in a middle-class family in the suburbs of Paris to create novels and short stories.
Education
Leroy attended the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux and earned his Master of Arts degree from it in 1979.
Career
Leroy's 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.
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.
The short novel Madame X revolves around an aging prostitute who holds court in a dilapidated movie later in Paris and the narrator who becomes her client and friend, known only as of the Sentimental One. In 2011, Leroy participated in the international literary festival Metropolis Blue.
Views
Quotations:
“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- 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 this century 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 last two 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 novel L'Aviateur I evoked the life of one of my great-aunts, who worked in 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 resized, 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.”