Jean-Christophe Folly: Benoit Blues

 

 

Last week, I attended an author talk with writer, actor, and comedian Jean-Christophe Folly for my French class and was very interested to hear him talk about his creative process. Folly was promoting his debut novel, Benoit Blues, which we read the first few chapters of for my class. Before writing Benoit, Folly had been an actor and comedian for many years and part of what struck me most in the interview was the way he described his experiences in different art forms. Though he has only just published his debut novel, he is not new to writing. Writing fiction has been an act of relaxation and sometimes collaboration with his friends for him since his teen years. While he seems grateful and content with his career on stage and screen, acting ceased to be as much of a creative outlet once it became his full-time job and writing this novel scratched a creative itch for him as acting no longer could.

Both the interview itself and Folly’s varied creative pursuits brought to mind my focus book, Faith, Hope, and Carnage by Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan. The book is told in interview format as one of Cave’s many and wide-ranging creative projects. I was also struck by the similarity in which both Cave and Folly described their inspiration. Cave writes of his more recent music that “my music began to reflect life as I saw it” and when asked if the experiences of the main character in the book reflected his own life, Folly responded that some aspects of the main, character, Geoffrey’s world were inspired by his own, but that he was also inspired by the people around him and their own experiences. Both Cave and Folly use the creative process of collecting to inform the art that they make, incorporating seemingly unrelated knowledge and experiences into music and fiction.

I have not finished Benoit Blues yet, but after enjoying the excerpts we read in class, I would really like to. My favorite aspect of the book so far is Folly’s characterization and the way his characters and settings feel so real. In fact, what has won me over most about Benoit is a theme shared by Faith, Hope, and Carnage: I resonate with their depictions of grief and it has made me more fully connect with the books. The inciting incident of Benoit Blues is the death of Benoit, the main character’s best friend, while Cave writes that when his son died, “everything changed. That sense of disruption, of a disrupted life, infused everything.” Geoffrey, too, deals with the way grief knocks your world off its axis and, from what I’ve read so far, does it beautifully. I look forward to continuing reading Benoit.