October 2004 to March 2007

October 2004 to March 2007 marks the writing of a novel that Éric Reinhardt describes as both a personal conflagration and a temporary escape from despair. The period becomes more than a date range: it is the span in which he risked spending everything on the work, felt himself becoming more fully himself, and then faced the exhaustion left by its completion.

The writing interval

Reinhardt recalls concentrating the ideas he had accumulated and pouring his notebooks, formative sensations, and most precious thoughts into what he calls a voracious novel. The dates mark a concentrated act of literary self-expenditure: he wanted to hold nothing back, and imagined the book taking the place of the person who had written it. In recounting this to Bénédicte Ombredanne, he presents the period not as steady, ordinary labor but as an attempt to stake his whole inner life on a single work.

From despair to exhilaration

The project began, he says, in profound sadness and a desire to end both life and art. As he advanced through the novel, however, that sadness gave way to euphoria and a renewed desire to live. He figures the change as a shift from his usual, careful writing in a Renault Clio to speeding at 230 kilometers per hour in a red Porsche: the image makes artistic risk feel like velocity, while the journey becomes a route toward fulfillment. The car finally turns into a rocket carrying him through the sky toward the stars, giving the writing interval the shape of a personal metamorphosis. He tells Bénédicte that he had never been so happy, and that by the time the novel was finished he no longer wanted to die but wanted to enjoy life.

Completion and depletion

The end of the period does not bring lasting creative freedom. Reinhardt tells Bénédicte that he has returned to his starting point, worse off because the novel has left him with no reserves. He distinguishes the person who wrote it from the person speaking now: the writer of the book was not quite himself, and had given nothing thought to the exhausted self who would have to follow. The contrast makes the novel’s achievement inseparable from its cost. As he describes himself as spent, like an exhausted coal mine, he laughs; the small gesture closes an account in which creation has carried him from suicidal sadness to joy, but has not spared him the emptiness after the work is done.