Question 6

I’m wondering if you can explain a little more what you mean by “being at the border” between the fantastic and the real. There are all sorts of names for the genres that play with varying levels of the fantastic, so where do you see yourself fitting in, and to what purpose?

I think the most accurate word to describe what I try to do in my literary work is the word uncanny. Yeah, uncanny would be my shield. It’s realism but with something in it that goes crazy or wrong, something that lets us think that the real is not exactly what we thought it was, that the reality in which we live is full of strangeness and magic. And we forget that this magic is strong.

I totally agree with G.K. Chesterton when he wrote :

“My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery… The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things that are fantastic… Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense.  All the terms used in the science books, ‘law,’ ‘necessity,’ ‘order,’ ‘tendency,’ and so on, are really unintellectual… The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, ‘charm,’ ‘spell,’ ‘enchantment.’ They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a MAGIC tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched. I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic.”

It’s provocative of course. But not only that–he means something. Chesterton is serious about it. And he’s right. Let’s look at our life, at our world to see how we are in a magical reality. (These days just look at the financial crisis: these men who told us for years to believe in the sanctity of the market as if it’s a religion.)

Question 5

Ok, to change the subject briefly, I was wondering if, in light of Valentine’s Day, you could talk about the way you approach writing about relationships in your novels. Virgil seems to view the relationship he doesn’t remember having as something akin to a dream, a movie he doesn’t recall seeing. It is, essentially, something that exists abstractly to him but that to everyone around him exists as something undeniable. An assumed truth. The difference is something straight out of a Philip K. Dick novel—is the relationship symbolic, in any way, of something larger?

Virgil has great capacity for guilt. Therefore he thinks that the problem comes from him. In fact, Clara certainly plays a trick on him to attract his attention at one point. But we don’t know for sure and there’s no answer, because ultimately this is not the point. The important thing is Virgil’s inner journey, that he wakes up, that he comes to himself.

It is not to be unrealistic to describe a reality that is not the same for all, a strange reality. To me, Philip K. Dick is a realistic writer. I am more interested in using the fantastic but making it plausible. Being at the border.

I think we’re good at not seeing those (friends, family) around us. And very good at forgetting those we have known. Humans have eyes to not see and ears to not hear. We are ghosts to each other. Most of the time. For most people. It is not uncommon for married people to get divorced and realize they have lived for decades with a stranger. To see, hear, or learn about someone is not easy, it’s not obvious. This takes work, time and practice.

Question 4

Oddly enough, I just started reading The Long Good Bye, having only seen Altman’s adaptation. The quest is there, but it also seems—to me at least—to be this wonderful snapshot of a specific time period and culture within it. In The Discreet Pleasures of Rejection, Contemporary Paris seems to be almost like another character , Virgil’s only reliable, predictable friend. And cultural references abound. What are your thoughts on all of this?

Paris, for me, is a very important city, because I spent all my youth (until I was twenty-five years old) in the suburbs of Paris. Unlike in the US, French suburbs are poor areas with nothing, nothing to do, and are of course very ugly. I’ve lived in Paris for ten years now. I love Paris like someone who has suffered from hunger loves food, like someone who has suffered from the thirst loves water.

Paris has three roles in this novel: First, Paris is Virgil’s only stable relationship. You can count on the inanimate things. Second, it was important for me to write about Paris. It’s actually the Paris I know, but it’s an invisible Paris in a way, because it’s never described in books. It’s the real city where my friends and I live. Far from clichés, far from the “museum” or “bourgeois” Paris. A real people city, where we live, with cheap (but good) restaurants where we go, nice cafés. A very mixed city, with African and Asian people, a city where it’s a pleasure to live even if it’s not always comfortable. But the gentrification is about to destroy it. So I wrote about that, a kind of destruction of Paris, a silent destruction—by credits cards, young bourgeois couples, and franchise stores. Lastly, a landscape always tells a reader something about the main character’s state of mind. Paris here is also a way to show Virgil’s personality and thoughts.