The writer from Nice is a regular at the book fairs blossoming in our cities and villages. “It’s a place where people I’ve lost touch with can find me if they wish. Each year, I run into an old school friend, from kindergarten or university, even teachers.” A page of reunion!
It was indeed hard to approach him during the Nice book fair: friends, admirers, or new readers “requisitioned” him… Always smiling, pleasant, and available, Didier Van Cauwelaert doesn’t let it get to his head, despite the success of his books.
If this year marks almost a quarter of a century since he started publishing, the urge to write has been with him for much longer.
“20 Years and Some Dust”, “An Object in Suffering”, “Cheyenne”, “The Forbidden Life”, “The Education of a Fairy”, “A One-Way Ticket” … are novels that Nice-Première advises you to read without moderation. A real pleasure of reading that carries us into a world we believe to be real.
In his latest work, he investigates “the greatest enigma in the world, or the most beautiful scam of all time”: “Cloning Christ?” Such a question stirs up discussion!
So, let’s take the time to discuss it with its author among the book stalls under the shade of umbrella pines.
Nice Première: “Cloning Christ?”, is this your latest work?
Didier Van Cauwelaert: It’s the first essay I’ve written. It came from a novel when I wrote “The Gospel of Jimmy”. I thought I was inventing lots of things, but geneticists told me about attempts to clone Jesus from the DNA of the Shroud of Turin,
there were lots of madmen claiming they could do it, so I investigated and produced this document afterward.
N-P: So, is it actually possible to clone Christ today?
D.V.C.: First, we’d need to be sure it’s really him. And then, for cloning, you need cells in perfect living condition, not degraded DNA that is over 2,000 years old. But the cells and DNA found on several relics attributed to Jesus including the Shroud of Turin are in a surprisingly good state of preservation and quite unexplainable. What has been cloned are molecular genes. From the DNA material, the cloning of this DNA was done, meaning the photocopy of certain genes or gene combinations. That’s not enough to clone the entire genome, of course. But some are convinced that by continuing this type of experiments, we will eventually get there. There are cults that have seized on this and dream of being able to manipulate a Jesus In Vitro.
N-P: A real danger?
D.V.C.: Yes. To control the danger, people need to realize what’s happening in the shadows, hence my need to tell all this.
N-P: In your books, you often refer to the paranormal. What are your sources?
D.V.C.: Imagination, first and then, experience. Nothing paranormal, like ghost apparitions or other, happened to me before I wrote “The Forbidden Life” where I invented everything. It’s as if life serves me what I cooked up in the imagination.
N-P: Do you believe in miracles?
D.V.C.: Yes. What is a miracle? I believe that by asking for the impossible, the impossible can happen. When you study the medical records of the miracles of Lourdes, you can only attest to it. It’s not just a question of belief. We’ve seen cancers completely disappear, dead optic nerves functioning again… all this is attested by the top doctors for over a decade. It concerns science, not the church. After interpreting the miracle, whether or not it is the will of God? Is it the collective unconscious? Or is it the individual himself who will provoke by his distress or his hope the fact of returning his stem cells to the embryonic state of constitution? I do not know. I tend to think that if God exists, he might have other things to do than intervene for Mr. So-and-so and not for Mr. Such-and-such. This teaches us a lot about what might be new scientific laws tomorrow. We observe, but we do not know where it comes from. The only thing we are sure of at Lourdes is that the water has absolutely nothing miraculous. When analyzed, it’s not even mineral, and the only miracle linked to this water is that no one has ever fallen ill after coming out of it. We immerse people who have pustules or other and there has never been contamination. In a swimming pool, you catch fungi and there, nothing: that’s already a miracle!
N-P: It is said that you wrote your first novel at eight years old. Can we then say that Didier Van Cauwelaert is the Mozart of literature?
D.V.C.: No, no. I wasn’t a child prodigy. I was a normal person. I worked like a pro already. I already had my writer’s method at eight years old. Instead of doing my homework in school, I was telling stories. I was extremely rigorous and offbeat at the same time, but I was not a prodigy. I was precocious but above all, this is what I wanted to do in life. I decided faster than others. By eight, nine years old, I was already active in life, just as I am today.
N-P: Where do you find inspiration?
D.V.C.: Everywhere. Inspiration is not a problem. It’s the meeting point between imagination and reality. The one feeds the other and vice versa, sometimes. The problem is the time it takes to form it. When I think of a topic, I ask myself: is this the subject I need to do now? Is it a priority? I have never known a lack of inspiration. However, a page too dark, and that I do not like and that I redo 20 times, I know that.
N-P: How do you construct a novel?
D.V.C.: I dream about it a lot. I turn it in my head. I need the first note, and then, it triggers the other harmonies. It composes a bit like a symphony.
N-P: Are your novels adapted into movies?
D.V.C.: There was “A One-Way Ticket”. Then “The Education of a Fairy”, a Franco-Spanish film with Irène Jacob and Ricardo Darin, was released in June in Spain and will come out in France at the return from summer. After that, “The Gospel of Jimmy”, “An Object in Suffering”, “The Apparition”, and “Cheyenne” are in the process of adaptation. But that, I will turn it next year.
N-P: Literature, cinema, and theatre?
D.V.C.: Yes, I have two plays waiting for distribution. One will probably be next year, in January, and the other for the following September.
N-P: You were born in Nice. What memory comes to mind when this city is mentioned?
D.V.C.: Memories of inspiration: Walking in the streets of Nice to fix, to note what, after, will be in the books. It’s a way of suddenly seeing differently the place where you were born, where you grow up because you are going to make something of it in a story, it becomes raw material and not just a scenery or a place of life.
N-P: And to finish, if I say “First or Premiere”, who or what do you think of?
D.V.C.: I do not think of racing, to come first. I think of what is “first time”. I like and I try that things be a first time, whether in a romantic encounter, in pleasure, at the table… I would like life to be a succession of first times.
Website: [http://www.van-cauwelaert.com/](http://www.van-cauwelaert.com/)
