We could have listened to them for hours. Preferably, even if it is not very 2023, by driving towards the West, or even beyond. But three hours is already not so bad, and sometimes you have to avoid the word too much. To repeat all the same what a pleasure it is to travel in the Chalumeau country with Richard Gaitet, decidedly a master of long-term interviews.

First (episode 1): pose the man. Laurent Chalumeau is the man of the sketches of Antoine de Caunes and José Garcia at the time of “Nowhere else” and Canal pré-Bolloré. He’s “the $1,000 punchline writer with the spur-sharp phrase.” It is also the one without which, faith of Virginie Despentes, Baise-moi (1994) would not exist.

It was therefore time to go and question the one who defies all oxymorons. That said, and above all because this festive skinned, this joyful indignant, this funny but not that, likes nothing so much as “to make people who speak well wrinkle their nostrils”. Born in Paris in 1959. After a 17/20 in the French baccalaureate without having read anything, he had to take the oars in the first year of preparation. Admire the prose of Bayon, Philippe Manoeuvre, and Philippe Garnier (one of the feathers of Rock

Didier the muddle and Pine of oyster

Episode 2. Meeting with Antoine de Caunes: it’s “love at first sight”. For him, Chalumeau creates characters that have become mythical, encrusted in our retina and screwed deep in our ears, that are Didier l’émbrouille and Pine d’huître. It will be, for the writer in the making, “a school and a curse” – especially since too much banter kills banter and you will have to learn to lighten your sauces. To write ? “It’s craftsmanship, it’s getting your hands dirty and getting your fingernails dirty. It’s a job, but not a job,” says the man who sticks to it every day – four or five hours ideally.

Laurent Chalumeau is the author of fifteen novels, including: Fuck (1991); Is Neuilly Burning? (1997) ; Kif (2014), or Vice (2021, all published by Grasset). But also a book at Rivages in 2015 on Elmore Leonard, his “writing master”. The two books he worships? Perfect Happiness (1975), by James Salter, and The Years (2008), by Annie Ernaux. Right now, he’s “working on a killer novel.” Tell yourself that you can’t wait to read it.

As we are also eager to find, at the start of the school year, Richard Gaitet (just like Charlotte Bienaimé from “A podcast of your own” and Delphine Saltel from “Living happy before the end of the world”) on Arte Radio, since its director, Silvain Gire, had the elegance to take them back before leaving to go and rework his prose and make way for Perrine Kervran.