French writer Agnes Desarthe says that, as a woman, it is her responsibility to break males' hold over literature, Yang Yang reports.

As part of this year's Francophone Festival in China, French writer Agnes Desarthe visited Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai last week to meet with readers and share her experiences.

Two novels and four picture books by her have been translated into Chinese, including Five Photos of My Wife, A Secret of No Importance, Je Veux Etre Un Cheval (I want to become a horse), Les Freres Chats (cat brothers) and Dingo Et Le Sens De La Vie (Dingo and the meaning of life).

The subjects of Desarthe's writing vary widely. The author, now 50, wrote in her early novels about death, massacres, aging and memories. She also created interesting female characters of a rich and delicate psychological mix in novels like Five Photos of My Wife and A Secret of No Importance.

Most of her books are for children.

"When I was a little girl, I got on better with adults than with children. And now as a grown-up, I get on very well with children," she says in an interview with China Daily.

Desarthe recalls being asked why she was interested in older people.

"I said because they are like children. ... They watch. I am a watcher because a writer is more of a watcher than a listener," she says.

"When you are in deep interaction, you don't have the right distance to capture anything or to command in an original way."

Desarthe's sympathy for people on the margins permeates her works for children.

"I walk very quick, but I am a slow thinker. I need time to think. So maybe that's why I am always more sympathetic to people who are like that, people who might feel estranged. That's children, and old people," she says.

At a recent discussion with young Chinese readers at the Institut Francais de Chine in Beijing, Desarthe said that the first book she wrote was about a "girl penguin" who is ashamed of herself because she feels cold.

"She lives among other penguins, but no one feels cold except her," she says.

In the picture book Les Freres Chats, she describes a cat who is good at playing golf but forbidden to enter a golf club that is exclusively for dogs.

At that interaction, a small girl asked Desarthe why the cat was forbidden to enter the club.

"It is a story about racism. There are many countries where at one point in their history, the majority excluded the minority. For instance, in the United States, for some time, golf clubs forbade black people (from entering)," she answered.

"It's a problem that I am interested in. It's a crucial issue. It's one of the themes that I put in my books for children because children are very sensitive to exclusion and they are interested in this kind of problem, too," Desarthe tells China Daily.

She says she tries to make fun of such problems, using animals to make the problem look less serious.

"But this is a very serious theme. Why should anyone be excluded from anything?" she says.

Desarthe's maternal grandfather was killed in Auschwitz during World War II. As a writer of Jewish origin, Desarthe takes the responsibility to draw people's attention to that part of history.

"I speak about what I know. For many people in France, it's either mysterious or even worse - false. Lots of people would like to think it never happened." she says.

"It's important to bring history to life. One of the ways is to fictionalize it, to make novels out of it and write stories about it, to draw people to something that they might either ignore or don't want to hear about, because they think it's too sad, too horrible."

Telling children about violence in history through stories is probably a good idea because they are within the comfort of storytelling, according to Desarthe.

Like many woman writers, Desarthe does not like to be labeled a "woman writer".

Being a woman is a fact that you cannot and should not overlook, Desarthe says.

"For centuries and centuries, men were the writers, mainly writing about men or women but from a male point of view," she says.

"I told myself, well, that's your job. Now that you are a writer. You should write about women from a feminine point of view or about men from a feminine point of view."

But writing about men comes easily to Desarthe because like most other women in this world, she grew up reading mostly about male characters in books. And now, creating a female character for her novels is "like doing it from scratch" because in literary history most were created by men.

"I feel politically drawn to (the responsibility). I should write about women, as a woman and for women", she says.

In her last novel, Ce Coeur Changeant (a changing heart), she wrote about the different stages in a woman's life.

"I realize babies were absent from literature because it was written by men who didn't interact much with them, especially in the old times. Literature lacked this character," she says.

Contact the writer at yangyangs@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily USA 03/17/2016 page9)