..."The Oscars of the picture book world"
When Anna Cavalda, with her fiery literary dreams, repeatedly rejected submissions, the little-known French teacher must not have imagined that she would one day become a best-selling author throughout France.
As we know in hindsight, the manuscript of her first collection of short stories, I Wish Someone Was Waiting for Me Somewhere, "roamed" through more than a dozen publishing houses, but was not favored by an editor until early 1999, when Le Dilettante, a small and unremarkable publisher, took a fancy to the novel and published it.
Since then, the sales have made publishers who have received manuscripts hate their own eyes: more than 1.5 million copies have been sold in half a year, and even Albert, the wife of former French President Jacques Chirac, has publicly claimed to be a member of Kavalda's "fan club".
This is just the beginning, and Kavalda's subsequent writing path is even more impressive. In 2002, she released her feature-length debut, Once Loved, which continued to be fanatically sought after by "fans." Later, in 2004, the novel "Just Together" (also translated as "Together, It's Good") once again set off the "Cavalda fever": staying in the top 10 of the French best-seller list for 130 consecutive weeks, selling nearly 2 million copies in France and selling more than 4 million copies in Europe, comparable to the global hit "The Da Vinci Code" in the same period. The novel was brought to the screen by Claude Bailey, a veteran director of the French New Wave era, and achieved impressive box office results.
After only four years of silence when many readers thought that Kavalda would never surpass this peak, she returned in March with her freshly baked novel "Consolation" (also translated as "Happiness Needs to Wait"), which attracted overwhelming book reviews as soon as the novel was released. In less than a month, sales directly jumped to 300,000 copies, and in the best-seller list of Le Figaro, it ranked first for several consecutive weeks, with a total sales volume of more than 5 million copies.
No one can doubt that Kavalda, with his own writing, created a miracle in contemporary French literary writing, and also achieved the "Kavalda phenomenon" that the French publishing industry could not decipher.
Every bestseller is a legend. With the hot sales of works and the growing interest in authors, who is Anna Kavalda? Readers familiar with the history of French literature will inevitably have such expectations, perhaps she is a copy of the best-selling queen Sagan: 17-year-old Sagan, in six weeks to write a novel "Hello, Sorrow", easily in Europe and the United States to burst into popularity. After indulging in car racing, smoking and drinking, and becoming addicted to drugs, every small act will cause a star-like sensation; or perhaps she is another Duras: a confusing emotional journey, a free and flowing temperament text that makes generations of "Duras fans" indulge in it, and they can't stop.
Kavalda is just Kavalda herself, she is neither Sagan (left) nor Duras
However, it is futile to have such expectations of Kavalda and to gain insight into the secrets of his work's best-selling. Her experience couldn't have been simpler. That's all we know: In 1970, Anna Kavalda was born into an ordinary family. Her life, like her novels, is homely, trivial, with few big ups and downs and peaks and turns. Like the usual French woman, she married an unknown veterinarian soon after she became an adult, then divorced, and now she is a divorced mother who wears house clothes and writes books at home with children, and has been famous for 20 years without scandal.
"Just Be Together", "I Know Where Someone Is Waiting for Me"
We can also learn a little from the reporters who interviewed her: as a veritable "beautiful writer", Kavalda does not like all public occasions, hates photographic lenses, and only uses e-mail for interviews, except for his works. Her meagre literary credentials don't seem to be worth mentioning, and after receiving her Bachelor of Arts diploma from the Sorbonne, she has been a literary youth, loving all opportunities to write on white paper, even writing cover letters for friends and party testimonials for her family. Kavalda became famous, and as early as 2008, someone had calculated for her: since 2004, she had made at least 32 million euros. But she still lived in the small town of Melun near Paris, living an almost reclusive life, only to change into a beautiful big house, buy a golf cart, and hire a nanny for her two children, which is at best the standard of the middle class in France.
Cavalda has always been outside the mainstream contemporary French literary scene. She claims that she does not want to enter the literary world and is not a so-called intellectual. Perhaps for this reason, despite the popularity of her works in France, mainstream writers still ignore her existence and lament the decline of French literature.
Poster of the French version of The 35-Kilogram Hope film in which Kavalda wrote the screenplay
As a human being, Kavalda's works are equally "unobtrusive", focusing only on the daily lives of ordinary people. Strange men and women meet and flirt on the street, and good things are accidentally stirred; pregnant women wait with joy for their children to be born, only to find a stillborn baby in their stomachs; women who dream of being writers are suddenly paralyzed when publishers say they can't publish her work ("I want someone to wait for me somewhere"), a typical French petty bourgeoisie, 24-year-old Mathilde, interrupts her studies, gives up her job, and her life is in a quagmire, losing her purpose and direction, but can't find anyone to talk to. Until one day, she left her wallet in the café and got to know someone. Young, 26, is a graduate student who graduated with honors but couldn't find a job and didn't know when the opportunity would come. Sometimes, he even wanted to jump from the Seine. Until one day, I experienced an encounter with my upstairs neighbor. Both people are trying to change their lives from meeting or meeting a person. ("A Better Life"); four young men and women, Camille, once a very talented artist, now no longer have the courage to draw; Ferribel, guarding the huge apartment left by his grandmother, has a gentle personality but has social difficulties; Frank, who is a good cook, who has a not bad personality but is a bit pretentious, is taken in by Ferribel and takes him into the apartment and visits his grandmother Pollette who is hospitalized every week; Bollet, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease, the only expectation of life is the sound of his grandson Frank's motorcycle every week But in front of her grandson, she always held back tears and never complained. They live together in a huge Ottoman apartment by the Eiffel Tower in Paris, these seemingly insulated characters have various conflicts due to some special circumstances, and eventually they learn to tolerate and understand each other, and live in harmony under the same Parisian eaves ("Together, It's Good"),47-year-old architect Charles, who has a successful career but cannot deal with the problem of increasing estrangement from his family, until one day, he suddenly learns that an unexpected death of Anouk, the mother of his former childhood friend Alex, has died unexpectedly. This opens up all kinds of painful memories of the past. He decided to leave Paris in search of his friend Alex, hoping to open the knot in his heart. Carrying a heavy past, he meets the strange woman Kate and enters her fantasy world, and they look for a harbor and comfort in each other. ("Consolation").
A Better Life
"Happiness, Need to Wait"
Cavalda's rejection and dismemberment of stories by pure literary writers since the rise of the French New Novel School, or the pleasure of popular writers in creating stories full of romance and adventure, are obviously different from Sagan and Duras, who yearn for rebellion, destruction and unusual life, intentionally or unintentionally cast the work with a trance and a magical shadow. She presents the daily lives of ordinary people in almost colloquial words: clerks, soldiers, veterinarians, petty bourgeoisie, engineers, young men and women, who are like our friends, family, or colleagues, we always encounter them on the street, in the shops, in the office building, and their stories are only within our "feet".
At the same time, as the French actress Audrey Tatoo said, "From her novels, I see the sunshine in life, not the darkness and cruelty in life." "Kavalda tries to tell us through her story that life is hard and full of tragedies, yet joy is everywhere. Reading her novels will make us feel that in such an era when the living space is becoming more and more cramped, people will still expect a little kindness and comfort from others in their hearts while their emotions are pouring out.
From her (Kavalda's) novels, I see the sunshine in life, not the darkness and cruelty of life.
French actress Audrey Tatoo
For this reason, the widely circulated "literary masters" are as real and believable as the stories she narrates in her novels: a lady who is a doctor at a party, speaking of Kavalda's novels, began to cry as she spoke, because she found her own shadow in the book, she was also like the characters in the book, once abandoned, and later got cancer, many times wanted to live, and finally, it was friendship and family affection that saved her.
Some commentators have analyzed the magic of Kavalda's novels and said that she used the form of novels to appease the uneasiness of the French. This bowl of chicken soup for the soul, simmered over a slow heat, tastes pure, and does not allow the self-conscious discerning French reader to classify it as a literary fast food, and in the name of bestsellers, her novel is still a French meal that satisfies readers of all walks of life.
Stills from the film "Sleepless in Paris" adapted from "Just Together"
For most readers, however, instead of speculating, it is better to learn from Kavalda to witness the power of the ordinary. It is conceivable that Cavalda's concern for daily life in France today, insight into the tragic and absurd living situation that life cannot be surpassed in the world, is a deep perspective on the gray soul of contemporary French people. This kind of care for the loftiness of life and the power to penetrate the soul not only give people a strong artistic shock, but also has a distinct enlightenment significance for the creation of contemporary Chinese writers.
New Media Editor Fu Xiaoping
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Postface: 3-22