Cathy Bonidan, teacher, talks about her new novel

Cathy Bonidan returns with a new novel, Victor Kessler did not say everything. The opportunity for the aufeminin editorial staff to discuss this work with her, but also her teaching profession. An exciting exchange.

After two highly regarded first novels, Cathy Bonidan offers a third book to her readers. This time, his pen is attached to the character of Bertille, a woman without history, it is believed, who works as an investigator for a polling institute. In a supermarket, when she was trying to interrogate an old man, he collapsed at his feet. The man is taken to the hospital and Bertille retrieves the shopping bag he left behind and brings it home. Curious, she discovers there a manuscript: the confessions of a certain Victor Kessler concerning the murder of a child, forty-four years earlier, in a village in the Vosges. This is the start of a long investigation for Bertille and the immersion in a story where truths and lies oscillate. Cathy Bonidan surprises, once again, with her sharpened pen and her sense of perfect suspense. For us, she came back to her inspirations, her way of working and the way in which her writing process is linked to her original profession as a teacher.

What were your inspirations for writing this novel – to find the subject, the places, the characters?

So, at the start, I never had the subjects of my novels in my hands. I have no idea where I will locate them. At first, I only had characters. Often, they are people I meet on the street, in waiting rooms, on public transport or when I am driving my car. People I see, watch for five minutes, and make up a story for. There are some that I forget, of course, but some of them remain in my mind. And when I embark on a new novel, I draw two or three characters from "my reserve". I look if they like me, I wonder where and how they could meet. For this latest novel, Victor Kessler did not say everything, until the very end and the epilogue, I didn’t know how I was going to untie my whole story. I didn't know the end! I may not be working as a novelist should work. I feel more in the role of the reader who discovers a story and who imagines what comes next. That’s why, when I get up in the morning, I’m in a hurry to put myself in front of the computer because I want to know for myself what will happen to my characters. I write a chapter, then another, it goes on without knowing exactly where it leads. It's been very amateurish, I recognize it. (laughs)

One of the main characters in your novel, Victor Kessler, is a teacher in a small village. It’s your first job. Yet you damn damn this character … What did you want to transmit through Victor?

I'm not sure I want to pass something on. The character is a teacher because I was coming back from school when I invented it. I ran into an old man crossing in front of me and he was taking a long time to cross with his shopping bag. He was pissing me off, the light was green and he didn't seem to want to move faster. As a little revenge, I decided to transform him into a character who would be released from prison for committing murder. (laughs) As I was coming home from school, I had to realize that it was a teacher who had killed a student. Little by little, this is something that I missed a bit, I think: making little allusions to my profession. Often, I am told that I chose the Vosges as the setting for my story with reference to the Grégory case. But, in fact, it is a complete coincidence. I had just started the novel when I learned that the commune of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges had awarded me an award for The Scent of Hellebore (the first novel by Cathy Bonidan, editor's note). I did not know where to locate my story at that time and I told myself that this was the solution: my heroine would go to the Vosges.

In your novel, you come across intrigue, you multiply the twists and turns, we are constantly surprised, with each page turned. How do you find all these false leads, invent all these family secrets? Where are you going to get it all?

I do not know. (laughs) Surely in my readings and in information that I hear on television. It is enough that I come across a story or a testimony that marks me for it to stay with me. Later, it comes out in a novel. What interests me at first is to advance in history, to create a fairly rich character. And if the character is not enough, I stop before the end. If I have not been able to find enough experience for a character, that means that he will not carry me far enough to complete the book. I already stopped a book after 150 pages because I realized that I had reached the end of the character and that I had not worked enough. So now I’m very careful; I like that my characters are "broken", that they have experienced failures or pain. Otherwise, I write mostly for fun. For me, writing is a game. It is not something very serious to me. I do not yet consider this a profession. Sometimes I have fun with form. I sometimes create a constraint to follow, for example. This was the case for my second novel. I had to post letters one by one on a site. I didn’t know where I was going but I had to move on because people were following online. It was a writing game: trying to go all the way without being able to go back, without being able to correct anything.

In your novel, children play poignant roles and some adults fail to protect them as they would have liked. This brings a dramatic aspect to your book, which is above all a thriller. What message did you want to convey?

I have worked with children for several decades. So I think that even if I refrain from writing about what I know, the pain of the child affects me through my job. I worked for a long time in the northern suburbs of Paris. Today, I am in Morbihan. And, despite everything, we always come across children who are suffering. I think the lack of child protection particularly affects and hurts me. Sometimes I face children and say to myself, "Where are the adults? "

Basically, your whole novel deals with the questions of truth, which is sometimes to be avoided, and of falsehood, which sometimes protects. These are surprising positions. Can you explain them to us?

Truth and lies are my passion. It’s something that works for me. There is also the fact that we all have a different truth. And then there is the truth about our childhood. We have lived our memories, we believe in them, we could swear on them … And we will compare them with our brothers, sisters, our parents, but no one displays the same truth. We sometimes build our lives on memories and truths that are not. This is the main theme of my latest novel, Victor Kessler did not say everything.

Your teaching profession has been greatly impacted by the health crisis. When the confinement was announced, how was the organization in your team? What were the feelings of each?

It was a shock at first. When we learned that the schools were going to close, we didn't expect it, not so brutally anyway. We weren't prepared for it. Everything was organized in an emergency. In our school, we are lucky to have children who have computers at home, at least most of them. We therefore exchanged by e-mail on the work to be done. The children asked their questions, the parents too. Compared to other sectors, I think we were lucky. It set up relatively well. There was no feeling of "losing" students during confinement. They are quite young. I work with CP and CE1, they are six or seven years old, they were with their parents, they were followed. Parents of students have, for the most part, been able to organize to babysit their children. Most of them were able to telecommute one or two hours a day to take care of their homework. We did pretty well.

How was a day of distance learning? What did the first days look like?

Students were given work at the start of the week in all subjects. There was always a compulsory part. Then we also adapted to the parents' availability. For those, we gave mainly the fundamentals to assimilate according to the educational level of their child. There were also activities that children can do on their own that require less explanation. It was a tailor-made job. However, that represented one to two hours of work per day, less than usual, of course. We followed this process during the school holidays as well. It was less intensive, but we didn't have a break until May 11.

Do you think that this confinement had consequences on the pupils and their teaching?

There are always large differences in level in the classes. There, indeed, some were able to dig. We know very well that everything will have to be updated in September. But it is a job that we are trained to do. We have to make sure to help as much as possible some students and keep those who are ahead. Our concern mainly concerns those we have not yet seen in school. The others, we were able to measure where they were, and give work accordingly to recover. The ones we haven't seen at all by the end of the year … Maybe it will be fine … Their parents are with them. You should know that in the so-called priority students for the return to class, it is not only the children of the caregivers, as we were asked. We also integrated children in great difficulty. These come every day.

The recovery for teachers remains quite painful: wearing a mask, the distance to keep with the students. Getting close to children, taking their notebooks, helping them do something … these are things that are difficult to banish from everyday life at school. But I think the kids are doing very well. They integrated the sanitary rules and everything that had been explained to them surprisingly well. I am really amazed. At the first recess, we asked ourselves a lot of questions within the team. How were the students going to do? They are not allowed to touch each other, to play with the ball. But that was not a concern for them: five minutes after the start of recess, they had invented a game called "shadow cat": they had to touch the shadow of their comrades to catch them. They find advantages in everything and they are happy to be fewer in class too. They're doing pretty well compared to the adult world, and everything you would think.

Victor Kessler did not say everything is available at Éditions de La Martinière

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