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“I’ve been writing since I was fifteen. I wrote my first novel in 1983, at the age of 19. I never really thought about publishing it, even though the few people that did read it praised it to the skies. But it was just a first novel…
At the time I was living alone in a forest, in the French Alps, and I also wrote a collection of poems that impressed many of the “happy few” that read it. Lost in those mountains, I carefully mulled over the meaning of my culture, then that of my civilization, and I must admit that I started shaking with fear. I was very young at the time, barely twenty years old.
So I decided to leave Europe. My grandmother was from Chile, so I headed towards there. And after that towards Chad – another long story, that I might tell you one day… Anyway, I reached neither! For 3 years Life tossed me from one adventure to another, turning me away from the path I had decided for myself… and all in all it finally led me to India. My plane landed in Mumbay on May 15th, 1990. I was twenty-five years old at the time. and when the doors of plane opened I knew, instantly, certainly and definitively, that I was going to spend the rest of my life in this country.
In the 19 years I’ve spent here, that premonition has only been confirmed. Of course I kept writing too. After two more collections of poems, a play and several unfinished essays, I was asked to write a screenplay for C.E.G., company of an American producer called Zachary Lovas, a young and exceptionally talented filmmaker praised by Robert Redford and Sidney Pollack themselves. He was shooting a movie in Bengal, Rajasthan and Nepal, and I became the artistic director and screenwriter for his film project.
Yet I knew that I was a story teller, and that I would go back to writing novels. In 1994 and 1995, I wrote “Le Parlement des Rivières” (The Parliament of all Rivers). You know exactly when you have written a great book, not because you’ve convinced yourself that you have, but because all the readers, thousands of them, sing its praises. That’s how I realized that The Parliament of all Rivers was a great novel.
Editors became interested in it. I received congratulatory notes from major French publishers including Lattès, Paul Otchakvosky-Laurens and Françoise Verny. The latter finished her letter saying: “You’ve written a marvellous book, let’s get down to business.” Olivier Todd was also in favour of it. So basically, the novel was going to be published… Unfortunaltely, six days before the contract should have been signed the main partners in Fasquelle & Grasset Publishing parted.
I will not give a detailed report of what happened next, but for sure I witnessed Françoise Verny, THE big dame of literature , bursting into tears utterly powerless. A while later, the Lagardère Group was to take over 80 % of the French publishing industry, and Literature passed into the hands of industry, into the world of business and demagogy, into the empire of communications and stockholder committees…
I felt so bad for this loss of freedom in French literature that I decided to fully adopt India as my own beloved nation. When Fasquelle left Grasset, I had already lived here for almost a decade. Right after writing The Parliament of all Rivers, I had written a philosophical tale, Rêver d’Etoile (translated into English as The Shine), and to my great surprise, it was also a triumph. I had started by handing out simple photocopies of my manuscripts by the dozen, but then I typesetted them and handed them out fifty by fifty, and finally I had them made in hundreds of copies.
I was now in Pondicherry, with almost eight thousand French expatriates and twenty thousand French speakers or avowed Francophiles, plus many tourists coming from my sad, but lovely homeland every year. My books were acclaimed by practically everyone that read them, and had started to become what you call “a big hit”. So much so, in fact, that the following years, hundreds were no longer enough and I had to publish in editions of several thousands! So it became important to legalize it all… It seemed that the best solution to answer the demand of these readers, including those who were starting to order my books from abroad, was to have an independant publishing house. Indeed nobody in Pondicherry was publishing new French fiction, and furthermore, the idea of “independence” pleased me, literature without independence being unconceivable to me.
So, I didn’t really start a publishing company… Rather, what I started was adding my touch to literature. Since my books were becoming popular with more and more readers, I simply set up an official publishing structure so that I could keep on distributing my novels and stories legally and in total freedom, to all those who wanted to read them.
I am sure you’ve understood… Yes, I started Libre Édition in an administrative and legal sense, but what really started it were The Shine and The Parliament of all Rivers. And today the books sell in English and French in India, France, Switzerland, Canada, Serbia, Afghanistan, China, Australia, Russia, Laos, Thailand, the USA, and I forget where else… mainly on the internet, by word of mouth alone!
As I speak, a few dedicated and enthusiastic readers have decided to get my books to as many eyes as possible, because they know they help people feel good, as it did to them and many other readers… This is something that doesn’t happen often! So I want to thank them with all my heart, especially because I have now been able to resume my writing instead of managing this success...
In a word, I would like to say THANK YOU to all you readers for liking my books. A writer can earn no better wages than the enthusiasm of his readers... Thank you.
Frédéric Mari
10th December 2008
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