Billiard Players

Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, my editor, brought this miniature scene back from Mexico for me.  I like the dog patiently waiting under the table for a ball-skull to fall. I also like the mirror.  I go past it every day; it’s a comical memento mori.  I am a part of the scene, and one day the phantasmagoric undertakers will play a game of billiards with my head too.   In Mexico on All Saints day, the Day of the Dead is a very colorful celebration, with wacky disguises, and a pile of objects cobbled together that make Halloween masks look very commercial.  Disguises, drinking, dancing, the carnival and irony are escapes from death.  Clearly, art and literature are too.

Paul is my editor and good friend.  We met in 1969; I had sent him the manuscript for Pig Tales.  It’s a picture that appeared on the back page of Libération, a sort of consecration, in 1998 I believe.  You can also spot flowers and cigarettes next to it: it’s a once in while thing; they’re always around my place.

I write by hand, then I type using the computer, as many as seven rewrites.  At the time it was done on diskettes. I’ve saved the diskettes of all my books until Le Bébé. They are on the shelves of my library. The use of diskettes quickly became obsolete.  You needed two diskettes to hold one photo, and the novels sometimes would not fit either.  Next there were the zip disks, sort of super diskettes, but they disappeared as rapidly as they arrived.  To explain a USB drive to me, my husband said “you could write your entire lifetime and you wouldn’t fill it”.

I like the  rash contrast between these old diskettes and the very chic, timeless spines of the Pléiades.  Natalie Sarraute gave me hers.  She was a grande dame, at once very anguished and very malicious.  She was writing her last book, Ouvrez, when the Pléiade edition of her complete works appeared.  It was funny, to still be writing after…

I have numerous embroidered alphabets in my office.  The first dates from 1899, from my great grandmother.  The second dates from 1921:  my grandmother.  The third is from my mother.  They embroidered them when they were girls, at the public school, where they were forbidden to speak the Basque language, and where a needle and thread were used to get French into their heads…  There’s also an alphabet painted by my father, a Ouija board to “speak to the spirits”…

My drug.  My fuel for writing.  I used to carry a thermos everywhere in my trips (not this one, too big) but since the new airport security measures, I’m not longer allowed!

Gift from my father when I turned 18.  On of the few luxury items I have.  You see it there on a page of the manuscript of Tom est mort.

A simple statuette for the tourist market.  It was given to me by a friend there.  I find it funny, enigmatic and pretty.  I represents a meditative and slightly ridiculous colonizer.  There’s something Faulknerian too.

To the side, with no relation, in the mess on my desk, there’s a poster from one of the most beautiful films in the world, Blow Up by Antonioni.

look in the carnets