XXIII edition
10/15 December 2013
Jean Cristophe Grangè
Le Kaiken
Le Kaiken
"My novels sell very well in France. Each book sells around 300,000 copies. But when I tell people my name, many don’t recognize it. Then as soon as I say I wrote Blood Red Rivers [made into the film The Crimson Rivers] everyone remembers me. The pool of filmgoers is much wider. But when I write I only think of the book, never of how it will come out on screen."
In his first career, as a reporter, Jean Cristophe Grangè was sent to myriad places round the world. Including Japan, which is a character its in own right in this new book. Says Grangè: "Actually, my relationship with [Japan] developed in three different phases. The first was when I was a student, and was fascinated by their millennia-old culture. Then I got to know it firsthand, when I went to do several reportages there, and today I know it in a very different way, thanks to my wife, who’s Japanese."
The plot centers on Inspector Olivier Passan, who is also married to a Japanese woman (though they are on the verge of divorce), who is in turn the element that sparked the story itself. Grangè’s novels are always conditioned by the insistent presence of evil. "But I don’t write about violence or evil," says the writer. "I write about problems, and violence for me is a problem, because it’s inside man, from childhood, and we can’t ignore it. I believe that one of the functions of the artist is to transform a problem into a work of art. I think that man is born to be good and generous. My books are like a catharsis, for myself as a writer and for readers. They’re fables for adults, in which the ultimately the knight always wins."
Grangè does not yet know if Le Kaiken will be made into a film. The trivialization of screenplays that cinema demands bothers him greatly. Though he was pleasantly surprised by the six-hour mini-series that was adapted from his previous novel, Le passenger.
