“The duty of every writer is to talk about his society without embellishing or debasing it”

Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indridason, in Lyon, in 2017. MARCELLO MENCARINI / OPAL

Usually, he doesn’t like to get away from his island, but this time he made an exception. “I escaped the terrible snowstorms sweeping through Reykjavik, no planes have been able to take off since that night”, confides Arnaldur Indridason straight away. Luckily for us, his arrived the day before.

In the Parisian hotel where he is staying, the master of the Icelandic thriller, translated in twenty-six countries, settles down in an armchair that is somewhat narrow for his Viking stature. And joking: “I don’t understand the tourists who visit my country in winter, when the day is barely breaking. At this time, I rather want to fly to Tenerife! » An island just as volcanic as hers – that’s no coincidence.

Indridason has Iceland in his skin, and it is a new facet of its history that he evokes in The King and the Clockmaker (which appears in France at Métailié, like all his books). Because he sometimes allows himself to neglect criminal investigations for the time of a historical novel. That, “as much out of the need to give myself a break as to take up another writing challenge”he explains.

Read also: Arnaldur Indridason and Anne Holt: The Assassin Came from the Cold

In the XVIII^e century, Jon Sivertsen, a modest Icelandic clockmaker who had immigrated to Copenhagen, undertook to repair a delicate clock reminiscent of that of Strasbourg Cathedral, designed by the Swiss Isaac Habrecht (1544-1620). In the corridors of Christiansborg Palace, he meets King Christian VII, reputed to be mad. As they meet, he tells her regarding the tragic fate of his own father, in Iceland, then under Danish domination.

This story is inspired by real characters and a trial for “identity theft”, which caused a stir in the 18^e century, in the Westfjords. “I discovered it by looking through a history book, notes the writer. I knew right away that I had a good subject. » If this infidelity to the polar is not the first, never Indridason had gone back so far in the past of his island. Its readers will however not be disoriented: the novel, like all its books, uses the detour through history to paint an unvarnished portrait of Iceland, far from the egalitarian and peaceful cliché in force abroad. “The duty of every writer is to talk regarding his society without embellishing or debasing it. To do this, he can go back anywhere in time. »

“The collective memory of Icelanders”

Here once more, his characters have in common that they are haunted by disappearance, once morest a backdrop of strong social intrigue. A vein inspired by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, two Swedish authors from the 1970s (published by Rivages) whom he cites as his masters. “They created an ordinary cop character [l’inspecteur Martin Beck] and have transformed the detective novel by grafting onto it an uncompromising social critique of their country”says this historian by training, who became a journalist then a film critic before embarking on the creation of novels.

You have 72.5% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.