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.)

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.

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.

I hope sometimes we can create an original idea (but yes, it’s rare), or a new suit (outfit) for old ideas. It’s a challenge. So of course the world of my novel is not original, but I tried to make something of my own with it, and I hope I create tiny, tiny new things (otherwise there’s no point to writing).

An inspiration that I thought about after the novel, after the writing (actually it was during a book festival) was Hitchcok. Clara is like a McGuffin. She has a meaning by her absence and invisibility, but also she’s a McGuffin, the means by which I move the story and my main character.

So no, there was no direct (conscious) inspiration. But of course I am full of the Lubitsch movies (and Hawks comedies) as well as Woody Allen movies. And I built this story like a noir story. It’s a quest, and the hero will find that’s an existential quest. So for that the first book which comes in my mind is The Long Good Bye, which is that kind of novel, a quest, an investigation. At the end the result is a that the hero is not exactly the same, he learns about himself. That’s the most important thing, because now life may begin. In a way, all my books so far are stories of birth; characters born as themselves.

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is a big thing for me, a huge influence for me (but I didn’t think about it when I was writing, I don’t think). It’s also a story of masks, desperation, quest, and love. And of course the French moralists: Chamfort, La Rouche-Foucauld. As you maybe noticed, I quite often write what are kinds of aphorisms. I like that, it’s very natural for me. It’s a sentence—I hope a witty and beautiful and well shaped one—that tells a lot of things with a striking effect. For example, from this novel: “For a long time, Virgil had thought that men and women had to deal with three misunderstandings: meetings, relationships, and separations.”

None. Let’s say there’s no difference, I think, between Woody Allen’s generation and mine. Of course it’s not totally true, but in terms of relationships, fear of death, loneliness, it’s the same. The thing is, Woody Allen talked about and directed movies about a certain kind of character that the cinema never showed before, but I am pretty sure (it’s a safe bet) that these kind of characters existed in the Middle Ages.

I don’t believe in the importance of technology nowadays (computers, though very useful, are only pens, and cell phones are homing pigeons), and what you call a greater awareness of the working of the mind. Let’s read Plato, Montaigne, Robert Burton, Nietzsche… This knowledge is not new at all.

When I wrote that “nowadays fights take place in the battlefield of thoughts,” I didn’t mean that it’s new, I just want to say that artists seems to allow themselves (and Woody Allen for sure) to create characters, main characters, who fight on this field. That’s new (not the reality of the thing, but the use in art). It’s like there’s a mix (a happy meeting) between the heritage of film noir and philosophy (and introspective thought), between Dashiel Hammett and Sigmund Freud (or between Walter Scott and Montaigne, or even Nietzsche). That’s new. But of course I’m reminded of the Greeks, especially Sophocles. That’s why I think the Greek tragedies are important for Allen, and of course for me. There is a proximity, a similar way to take things from philosophy, but also to trivialize things.

Woody Allen is my hero, one of the artists I admire the most. Because of the diversity of his works (Another Woman, Match Point, Manhattan, Zelig, Annie Hall…), and of course because I feel close to the characters he plays in his movies. (But let’s be honest, he’s not the only creator of such characters; see Bellow’s Herzog, and before that the work of Scholem Aleichem).  And yes because of what you said, because Alvy Singer, his anxiety and imagination. A sensitive man trying to live and love in a world that manufactured fears and neuroses. It’s a very moving character; he wants to find a way, which his why he fights. He’s not inactive, passive; he does things, clumsily maybe, but he does something with his life, by action, by thinking. Alvy Singer (and Isaac) is the true modern knight who wants to understand something about relationships, himself, women. Nowadays fights takes place in the battlefield of thoughts.