INTERVIEW As an approach to this interview, I decided I would read all of Javier Marías’ published novels and short stories (just as much for an excuse to read them as fitting preparation for the interview). Moving from one book to the next, each felt like different neighborhoods of the same majestic city, one to which we long to return after we’ve left, where we recognize similarities in the streets and signs and the attentions of its inhabitants, even if the different topography (or subject matter) from book to book is evident. The first sentence frequently thrusts us right into the middle of a crisis, one that, for all its immediacy and urgency, can wait. We experience time differently. Or, rather, our time is replaced by his. Every book encloses within it a notion of time (or perhaps multiple notions of time). In Marías’ books, while intrigue carries the reader forward with urgency and speed (as we wonder how things will fit together, how a stain of blood on a banister will be explained, or why the man who accompanied a woman in her death and whose identity is not known has sought out... {CONTINUE READING}
POETRY Chrrr chrrrrreee Goes the steady printing machine Chrrring bloody scenes into bold black ink Chrrring headlines that make you glug glug your drink Chrrring crimes against women Steep rise in ink Gang-raped Japanese tourist International stink stink Strip-searched for menstruating Blink blink Irom force-fed from starving Think think... {CONTINUE READING}
PROSE J. was lining up his coffee spoons. How many would he need to measure out his days and ways? He was getting older, his head grown slightly bald, and the women weren’t lining up at his doorstop as they had been (or so he remembered it) some ten years before. He finally dared to eat a peach, and lay down in the middle of the floor on his kitchen as the evening spread out against the sky, reminding him of a patient under operative sedation. He left his flat and walked aimlessly through the streets of London, thinking of London as it had been not so very long ago, something which inspired in him much doleful nostalgia. In those days, there were braceleted and evening-gowned women of scandalous attraction with whom J. had fallen in love (sometimes reciprocally). There was Anne, whose arms were white and bare, but in the lamplight downed with light brown hair. After a fortnight with Anne, J. had fallen in love with... {CONTINUE READING}
	EXCERPT On my street—I write this in Paris, eight hundred kilometers higher up on the map—there’s a burly chômeur with bleached blond hair and a large motorcycle (Wow! look at that beast, Clément says as we pass by), whose wife, an immense fake-blond chewing gum and smoking a cigarette (I’ve seen her, I could swear, chewing and smoking at the same time, which is rather impressive) is not, as one might imagine, without a certain elegance, as demonstrated through such tender gestures as when she crouches down over a stroller in order to wipe the face of her snotty-nosed child. On my street there is an old couple, in the window of the facing apartment; like the character in Reiser’s Gros Dégueulasse, the man walks around in his briefs and a tank top a few sizes too large, obliging me to take a few steps back on my terrace; the mistral has blown away pieces of the reed barrier we use to block the view, and so nothing can deprive me of this... {CONTINUE READING}
EXCERPT FROM THE MEMOIR The man I called my father died in 2005, ten years after Maman Pauline. I am not sure I ever really knew him. We were both intimate and distant. Intimate, because I had always felt his eyes watching me, accompanying me every step of the way, anxious I might stumble or fall, concerned I should choose the path he had opened up for me. He seemed distant, too, not because he wasn’t my biological father, but because I knew nothing about him, never having met a single member of what I might have considered my ‘paternal family’, even if, to do him justice, his relationship with my mother had never been sealed at the mairie. Their union was an unspoken agreement, made material by the fact that a man  and a woman lived under the same roof with a child, in a society  where the collective opinion was more important than any signature on a piece of paper, or vows before a public authority. Sometimes, even when a civil marriage had taken place, a few wise old men would mutter among themselves: So what... {CONTINUE READING}
	EXCERPT FROM THE MEMOIR The photo’s in black and white, with a bit torn off at the bottom, on the right-hand side. It was taken at the end of the 1970s, one afternoon in the Joli-Soir district. I had come to meet my parents in this bar, where we are all sitting at a table. The two of them have glasses raised to their lips, and mine is on the table. It’s filled with beer, my mother insisted on this, she didn’t want anyone to think I was only there for the photo. We had to make it look like I had been sitting drinking with them for some time. I can still hear my mother acting like some finicky film director, to the photographer’s slight surprise: ‘Hold on, monsieur, we’re not ready! First get rid of those flies buzzing round the table! A fine way to mess up people’s photos! I’ll tell you when to press the button!’... {CONTINUE READING}
NONFICTION She said, it’s like you’re taking too big a mouthful of something you can’t get enough of. You’re chewing not to masticate it but to get as much into your mouth as you can. And pieces are falling out, shining and wet. These are the stories. It was the fox, I recall, who told the Little Prince that words are the source of all misunderstandings. I didn’t agree with this statement at all, especially since it was itself made of words, and because it seemed to mean that we should all just shut up and let our flesh have its way. That’s terrible advice, I thought. The fox was talking about a kind of taxidermy, a form of life whose appearance is outwardly preserved but inwardly replaced in every living respect by dead matter, by stuffing. He helped the Little Prince—himself a form of childhood preserved in the face of an adult world that seemed too complicated to process, that had to be broken down, reduced to... {CONTINUE READING}
	EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL Howling and half-naked in his torn and bloody clothing Fargo is a desperate man and dangerous to himself and others. He ricochets around his kitchen, heaving furniture into the street. The street is twelve stories down and Fargo fills the New York air with chairs and tables, lamps and dishes, cutting boards and cabinets, electric fans and plastic caddies, frying pans and double boilers, brooms and mops and metal buckets, canned goods and Pyrex platters, a garbage can, a cookie jar, a toaster oven, even the refrigerator door, which he rips off and throws out the window. The door sails through the air like a giant Frisbee filled with condiments and lands in the middle of 102nd street and shatters, hurling mustard, ketchup, mayo, cheese and relish everywhere. A man standing in the crowd that has gathered across the street to celebrate this mad defenestration snatches up a package of Velveeta cheese and holds it... {CONTINUE READING}
FICTION I got on the plane (this after two hours or so in the airport: going through the security checkpoint, drinking a coffee because I was tired and needed to do some work while in transit, and buying some aspirin at a shop, for which I have a receipt with the name of the shop and the time I was there). The plane took off. It was a small one, the kind that makes you immediately think of plane crashes. At one point, I got up to use the bathroom, as I’d had a lot of water. Every time I’m on a plane I make a point of getting up at least once to use the bathroom to stretch my legs. I prefer window seats because I can watch as the world seems suddenly small, and then the cities are replaced by clouds. There by the window, you are generally sat next to two people, and some might say you are at their mercy should you need to use the bathroom, but I like asking them to move because, in a way, this is a small redistribution of power—I request that they get up; they must comply. (If you sit in the aisle, the circumstances under which you can ask two strangers to move are limited.) Mostly, I slept. I couldn’t work, and didn’t even pull the... {CONTINUE READING}
	AN IMPROMPTU 1. Beginners Please LIGHTS UP on an empty space with a recumbent form delineated in light. The recumbent form is a very large CAT, lying on its side with its head in one hand, propped up on an elbow, pensive. Inside the catsuit is ARTHUR MIDGET, baronet, actor, and professional philosopher. He speaks as if explaining a matter to the audience. MIDGET: As long as the human Mind perceives things from the common order of Nature... He thinks for a moment. MIDGET: ... it does not have an adequate, but only a confused and mutilated Knowledge of itself, of its own Body, and of external Bodies... {CONTINUE READING}
	SHORT FILM “Barbara,” written and directed by Yannick Privat, is a smart, beautifully shot, dialogue-rich short film of twenty minutes set in a single location, an apartment in Paris. Seven actresses are gathered in a living room discussing their prospects in the highly competitive film industry, each looking for her big break, in this case concretized by the imminent casting decision for the role of Barbara, the lead in a new Paul Thomas Anderson film. The film begins somewhere in the middle of the evening, the actresses passing a joint, one of whom, Pauline, is complaining about an actress who’s not in the room: the type all of them know, she says, who positions herself right in front of the camera, blocking everyone else from view. This is a situation to which all of the actresses in the room can relate. Pauline says she’s come to terms with the idea that she won’t be cast as the young lead. Another of the actresses says, consolingly, even if that were true... {CONTINUE READING}
SHORT FILM It was November, 1990. It’s afternoon,” the voice begins. This follows a shot of snow falling against a gray sky, the flakes appearing as black or negative flecks against the gray. The subject speaks into the snow. And in that speaking, we find something of the nature of memory, storytelling, and film: we don’t travel, in remembering, from present to past, but rather the reverse. The past becomes present. In doing so we move toward a self, a presence, through depths that are camouflaged by the sensory world. This voice cannot be said, here, to constitute a “voiceover” that, like the caption of a photograph, is meant to complete the image, to reveal the narrative phantom or ghostly subject that, even as it lies outside or beyond the image, haunts it with meaning. In Richard Dinter’s short film Snö (Snow), it’s hard to know where these layers begin or end, and in this they resemble psychological drives, those mysterious expressions of an even more mysterious unconscious, the kernel of our external worlds. There is where the subject lies, unresolved. Here the subject’s drive is literal: “I’ve been out at my parents’ house... {CONTINUE READING}