We weren’t expecting it in the bookstore. And yet, since he made his debut with his first novel The Next Time You Bite the Dust (Stock), comedian Panayotis Pascot has been the most sought-after author of the literary season. He has already sold 76,000 copies of his book, according to GfK. Not to mention that the 500 seats that were offered to the public, via his Instagram account, to attend his reading at the Antoine theater on October 2, were gone in 3 minutes!
“The enthusiasm around his book is not a surprise,” comments its editor Paloma Grossi. Very early on, we felt a real interest in the novel within Stock. The book starts from the intimate and moves towards the universal.” In this novel, an autofiction, it is about the author, his loves, his family and his anxieties. He has a nervous, angry style, sometimes crude words to talk about homosexuality and depression. “But the scale of the phenomenon is a surprise,” adds the editor. I’ve never seen that for a first novel in the literary season!”
A success confirmed by the prestigious Mollat bookstore in Bordeaux. “The next time you bite the dust is our best seller, by far, in French literature. Its start is comparable to that of Cher Connard by Virginie Despentes last year. We have been selling them every day for a month, or around twenty per day.” Same story at the Book Hall in Nancy, which is experiencing “impressive sales”.
How to explain this success? First of all, there is a celebrity effect which is undeniable. “He is an artist who has an attentive audience,” says Paloma Grossi. As we have said, Panayotis Pascot is an actor before being an author. A child of television, he was noted for his talents as a comedian with his one particularly funny and touching stage performance entitled Almost. Its broadcast on Netflix, which boasts more than 10 million subscribers in France, has surely contributed to its notoriety in bookstores. Likewise, his participation in the second season of the comedy series Lol, qui rit, sorte!, on Amazon Prime, which has 7 million subscribers, is significant. All of this put together, supported by the actor’s community on social networks (456,000 subscribers on Instagram and 193,100 on Twitter) are part of the reasons for the success of the book.
In addition, the novel is a way of entering into the private life of the star. This, beyond Instagram or Twitter. And in an era of everything virtual, the book is a way to own something of the comedian we admire. However, if notoriety is a component of the literary phenomenon, it is not its result. Many other comedians, actors and YouTubers have switched to novels without experiencing the same phenomenon. “We go beyond the success of a well-known person, whose book sells well for a week or ten days before running out of steam,” agrees Mollat.
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The book is not just a product, it stands on its own. “There is real strength in autofiction when it looks at its insides with sincerity. It is a modern book. He has real power in his words,” argues Paloma Grossi. And perhaps therein lies the real reason for its success. First written “for him”, a bit like a diary, “to sleep at night”, the inner book finds an echo in the outside world. When talking about himself, Panayotis Pascot also talks about the other. He is raw and on edge. “He was able to touch readers by revealing his intimacy,” we analyze at Nancy’s Book Hall. It created word of mouth.”
“It’s the story of someone who learns to love himself, who learns to love his father and to let people into himself,” Panayotis Pascot explained to us during the “Le moment des livres” podcast. The author wonders about becoming a man, an adult. We are in his heart, in his head, in his sheets. He tells us, without concession, about his mental health, the psychologists he consults and the medications he takes, his fears and his shame. Subjects and emotions that our society questions. And then, this novel has something of a yell, of a vomit, the words spring out, like tears and desire, abruptly, violently, quickly. What gives the text this unstructured, disordered form, some might say.
Thus, the book ultimately has something testamentary about it. Panayotis Pascot has given himself up and exposed himself so much that we now wonder: what to say after that? Will it be a first and last novel? The author explains that he has spoken little about his mother and that the latter “deserves a book of her own”. The announcement of his second title? In any case, Panayotis Pascot has successfully transformed himself by moving from the stage to the pen.
