A woman settled in the piano bar at the Beau-Rivage hotel in Geneva. She plays the first notes of the soundtrack of the Godfather. Delighted, Joseph Incardona suspends his sentence and listens. The golden eyes and the finely trimmed beard, gray turtleneck, his motorcycle helmet placed on the seat, he looks like a character escaped from his latest novel, Subtraction of possibilities. The same music could accompany certain pages of this “Bonnie and Clyde genevois”. Mafia operations are not lacking. One of them even takes place in this palace where the author now gives his meetings to journalists.
To write the scene, he came to have coffee on the spot, smell the air, assess the chandeliers and the color of the flesh. These impressions, subject to his imagination, then undergo a chemical reaction in which fiction absorbs reality. Thus rubbed against each other, these two materials end up forming only one, history. “For me, life is this: what you live, what you have in your mind, it’s the same. When I write, I’m not looking for the real, I’m looking for the likely. “
Shakespearean love story
This is not wishful thinking, the kind of phrase that a writer pushes over the desk to give himself the strength to carry on. Joseph Incardona’s thirteenth novel, his most ambitious to date, is credible from start to finish. This Shakespearean love story tied to the strings of a thriller unfolds in Geneva in 1989, a few months before the invention of the Internet.
Although he lived there as a teenager, then again since 2007 after a decade spent in France, the author had not yet dared to attack his city, this Calvinist stronghold that is praised for his art secrecy and discretion. “We have to redouble our efforts to tell stories that take place in Swiss cities, in cinema as in literature. It is often said that this country is not cinegenic, except for its nature, of course. Perhaps that’s why the French-speaking authors tell few stories, that they focus more on man and interiority … “
In Subtraction of possibilities, Joseph Incardona has chosen a subject that resonates with the territory: the world of banking and finance, its offices overlooking the Junction, the villas crouching on the shores of the lake, the bags of tickets in the locker rooms of the sports halls and the interlope bars where the jet set satisfies its carnal whims.
Always want more
This is the world that Aldo Bianchi covets. In the first pages of the novel, he lives in a border suburb and sells his coaching services to the Tennis Club des Eaux-Vives. Her students are women in their fifties who cling to the last embers of their beauty and dream of a final passion. Often they pay to afford it. Odile Langlois is one of them. Her husband is about to further increase his fortune by investing in genetically modified organisms. Aldo intends to take the opportunity to finally climb into the world of the powerful. On the way to Olympus, he will cross the road to Svetlana Novák. The young financier, an outsider also, ambitious like her future lover, intends to also take a piece of the cake.
“We have to redouble our efforts to tell stories that take place in Swiss cities, in cinema as in literature.”
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The hubris has always inspired storytellers, if not life itself. For Joseph Incardona, Subtraction of possibilities begins by reading a news story. The story of an asset manager who takes minute sums from the backs of his clients until he is spotted by his superiors. For a long time, the anecdote trots in the writer’s head. Little by little, the facts become a fable and draw the outline of a novel. “I started with this question: what makes someone want more and more? We live in a world that is constantly changing, where everything becomes possible, where everything is excessive. I wanted to make it a fresco. We had to find a good angle of attack, that the dramaturgy should follow the style. “
Human trafficking
Behind Joseph Incardona, the hotel’s Christmas tree tops peak on the second floor balconies. At the foot of the tree, the packages are stamped with logos of luxury brands, false promises of material happiness. The same ones that embody the characters of the writer, obsessed with the power of their car, the brilliance of their jewelry and the value of a woman. More than a fresco, it is a contemporary peplum that the Genevan author has succeeded. Black, sharp, poetic. Four hundred pages punctuated by the whip, held down to the long parentheses that he allows himself here and there to reveal the underside of the construction of the Gotthard tunnel or the human trafficking networks that feed the European prostitution markets .
Corsican mafia
“Behind every fortune hides a crime,” said Victor Hugo. Joseph Incardona demonstrates this without ever falling into the caricature of a comedy of manners. The only lulls in this polyphonic tale are those he devotes to Mimi Leone. A Corsican mafia, widow, loving mother of a girl with Down’s syndrome, who keeps goats on the flanks of her island when she is not waging bloody vengeance. Tracking down enemies at the wheel of a modest Fiat, Mimi Leone kills time by devouring Ramuz’s books.
Basically, it is not ultra-capitalism, GMOs or the corruption of bankers that interests Joseph Incardona. Between the lines, his book celebrates the power of fiction. Those who govern our lives – the sovereignty of money, the desire for love, the vertigo of the social ladder – and those who sublimate them. In Subtraction of possibilities, we still meet John Berger, Mary Shelley, Grisélidis Réal, Chandler or Tolstoï. These works are planted like cornerstones on the path of his characters. Because “you need allegories. They are necessary to build themselves for the sake of grandeur and self-enhancement, “he wrote to justify the motivations of the puppets he is pushing towards their destiny, as tragic as it may be.
Novel
Joseph Incardona
The subtraction of possibilities
Ed. Finitude, 400 pages
ESPRESSO
Where do you write?
Home. On a stripped small desk, my laptop and that’s it.
When?
The morning. Rather standard schedule, 9 am-1pm
What are you reading at the moment?
The Cherokee by Richard Morgiève. I discover a sacred writer. A writer is like fingerprints, his style is his own.
Who are the writers who feed you?
The good ones. All that is good stimulates my work, pushes me to bring out the best in an attempt to live up to what I read. When I finish a novel that captivated me, I’m a better man. Some authors, pell-mell: Harry Crews, Raymond Carver, Jean-Pierre Rochat, Gabrielle Roy, Carson McCullers, Roberto Bolano, Charles Bukowski, Tchekhov, Knut Hamsun, Pasolini, Fitzgerald, Baldwin, Ramuz, Céline…
Why do you write?
Paraphrasing James Bond: Because the world is not enough. More seriously: so as not to feel useless to myself. Because I cannot conceive a day without writing.
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