{"id":168321,"date":"2024-08-15T10:00:46","date_gmt":"2024-08-15T14:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=168321"},"modified":"2025-07-28T11:23:20","modified_gmt":"2025-07-28T15:23:20","slug":"siding-with-joy-a-conversation-with-anne-serre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/08\/15\/siding-with-joy-a-conversation-with-anne-serre\/","title":{"rendered":"Siding with Joy: A Conversation with Anne Serre"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photograph by Francesca Mantovani.<\/p><\/div>\n

Anne Serre\u2019s \u201cThat Summer<\/a>,\u201d which appears in the new Summer issue<\/a> of\u00a0 <\/em>The Paris Review, opens with an anticlimactic claim: \u201cThat summer we had decided we were past caring.\u201d But the story that follows is packed with drama. Over the course of three pages, it chronicles interactions among four characters in a family\u2014two of whom are institutionalized. There are two deaths. Serre\u2019s narrator\u2019s reflections on her family dynamics, charged and nuanced, are the main attraction. They bring to light entire dimensions of experience; when life has such a finely wrought interior, death is literally the afterthought.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThat Summer\u201d previously appeared in French, in <\/em>Au c\u0153ur d\u2019un \u00e9t\u00e9 tout en or, a collection of stories of similar brevity. That was not Serre\u2019s first book of short-shorts, though her books available in English are made up of longer texts. They include three short novels<\/em>\u2014The Governesses, <\/em>The Beginners, and<\/em> A Leopard-Skin Hat\u2014<\/em>and<\/em> The Fool and Other Moral Tales, a collection of novellas. All are translated by Mark Hutchinson, who is a longtime friend. Her untranslated works include <\/em>Voyage avec Vila-Matas, which riffs on an experience of reading Serre\u2019s Spanish contemporary, going so far as to feature a fictionalized version of Enrique Vila-Matas, and <\/em>Grande tiquet\u00e9, written in a combination of French and a language Serre invented for the purpose<\/em>. In her latest novel,<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>Notre si ch\u00e8re vieille dame auteur, an elderly authoress whose death is imminent directs the process of assembling the manuscript that she has, already, left behind.<\/em><\/p>\n

This interview was conducted primarily over email. A WhatsApp call was thwarted by \u201cenormous storms\u201d in the Auvergne region where, for two months out of the year, Serre lives, in a house that was also her grandparents\u2019. As in Paris, she lives alone, something she has wanted since her adolescence. Asked if she would field a personal question, the author was encouraging. \u201cLiterature is personal,\u201d she said.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Are you in Auvergne right now?<\/p>\n

ANNE SERRE<\/p>\n

Yes, I am. As I\u2019ve been doing every summer for a long time now, I\u2019m spending two months of vacation here, in this region of mountains and small lakes, in the house I have inherited. Now that my whole family has passed away, the house belongs to me.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t write here. I spend my vacation the same way I did when I was a child. I walk in the lanes and meadows, look at the scenery, swim in the lakes, and at night I read in bed. There are a huge number of books in the house\u2014three generations\u2019 worth. Basically, I do pretty much the same things I did when I was twelve or fourteen.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you feel you need to be back in Paris in order to write?<\/p>\n

SERRE<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it\u2019s connected to the city of Paris. I just happen to live there for the rest of the year, and I live alone. I\u2019ve always lived alone. My apartment in Paris is a bit like a big office, if you will. I work at my own pace, when I want, how I want, and however I please. For the time being, I\u2019m alone in my house in Auvergne too. Not until August will some friends come for a visit. But the house is so filled with presences for me\u2014my family, my father, my sisters, my grandparents, even my great-aunt and uncle who also lived here at one time\u2014that there are too many people around for me to be able to write. Even if they\u2019re only ghosts.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Has it always been important to you to live alone?<\/p>\n

SERRE<\/p>\n

Yes, I always wanted to live alone. Even as a child or a teenager, when I thought about the future, I never saw myself getting married or living with someone as a couple. Which didn\u2019t stop me from falling in love, of course. I like men and have been passionately in love, but I\u2019ve always organized things so as not to live under the same roof as them. Since I never wanted children either, it wasn\u2019t difficult.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Does living alone lend itself to writing?<\/p>\n

SERRE<\/p>\n

Yes, I think that in my case living alone has been essential for writing. I\u2019ve always been astonished that women writers I greatly admire could have a family life. Think of Nathalie Sarraute, for example, whose work is extremely demanding and required all her time\u2014she had three daughters and was married. I always wondered how she managed it \u2026<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In \u201cThat Summer,\u201d many details of the family\u2019s life are out of view. When the sisters don\u2019t leave the island, Capri is described as being \u201cpetrified.\u201d You have that title, in English, The Fool and Other Moral Tales<\/em>, and I thought I might ask about morality. Even the first-person plural at the start of the story seems marked by a complicity, or the evasion of responsibility \u2026 Is it corrupting to be part of a family?<\/p>\n

SERRE<\/p>\n

Your question about \u201ccorruption\u201d reminds me of Henry James, an author I\u2019ve always loved, whose work is shot through with a strange feeling, never really explained, of something unspeakable you can\u2019t quite put your finger on. There\u2019s something on the moral plane that horrifies James (and perhaps horrified him during his childhood), but he doesn\u2019t know quite what it is. In everything he writes, he\u2019s trying to find it. This thing that horrified him, I think, is a form of inversion, the wrong side (but of what I don\u2019t know) presented right side up or the other way around. It\u2019s particularly noticeable in The Turn of the Screw<\/em>. That\u2019s where he comes closest to finding it. It\u2019s what makes the book so fascinating, in fact.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

\u201cI think, unfortunately, that I preferred him mad.\u201d I wanted to ask you about this line, too, from \u201cThat Summer.\u201d The narrator is referring to her father. What is the role of the perverse in your texts\u2014if \u201cperverse\u201d is the right word?<\/p>\n

SERRE<\/p>\n

Most of my narrators use irony and self-deprecation, I think. It\u2019s just the way my mind works. But I\u2019ve certainly inherited this in large part from the English satirists and all those marvelous Irish writers from Sterne to Beckett, and also from Cervantes, Voltaire\u2019s tales, and so on. I\u2019ve always loved seditious fantasy and farce, enormities uttered with a smile, the narrator playing around with his role as storyteller and the tale being told. I like the detachment they allow in the face of tragedy\u2014not to deny tragedy, but to bring out its grotesque side, since death will obliterate everything. That said, the narrator in \u201cThat Summer\u201d is distinguished more by<\/u> her candor. She likes the complex, conflicting emotions aroused by her father\u2019s folly\u2014and says so\u2014no doubt because they allow her to perceive all kinds of interesting things she wouldn\u2019t perceive in more straightforward, peaceful circumstances.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a \u201cslightly erotic\u201d tinge to the father\u2019s \u201cjoy\u201d that can involve thinking he\u2019s Alfred de Musset, George Sand\u2019s lover. Erotic and family love occur together elsewhere in your oeuvre. Did you need both to form this story?<\/p>\n

SERRE<\/p>\n

I think that in everything I\u2019ve written\u2014starting with my first novel, The Governesses<\/em>\u2014I\u2019ve associated Eros with joy. And also, despite its gray areas, with family love. My sense, but I may be deluding myself, is that I made a decision one day, when I was very young\u2014I would choose joy. In the same way you might choose to live in this or that country. I imagine that the foundations must have been laid in my early childhood (otherwise I probably wouldn\u2019t have been able to make such a decision), but later, in spite of the bereavements and difficulties I experienced, I adopted it, not as a form of \u201cpositive thinking\u201d or as a shield against grief but because I\u2019d noticed that siding with joy enabled me to think more clearly\u2014to focus my thoughts. I see a bit of myself in a sentence by the Italian poet Dolores Prato, in her book Scottature.<\/em>\u00a0\u201cI was in thrall to that powerful, indomitable joy that mysteriously took hold of me now and then, sometimes for no reason at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How did you first conceive of “That Summer?”<\/p>\n

SERRE<\/p>\n

\u201cThat Summer\u201d began with an opening sentence that popped into my head and made me want to tell a story. When I\u2019m writing, it\u2019s as if I\u2019m making a piece of furniture, a table or a beautiful wooden chair. I\u2019m like a cabinetmaker. I love the work, so I\u2019m always very cheerful when I\u2019m doing it.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Did you do many drafts of this story?<\/p>\n

SERRE<\/p>\n

No. In general, I write straight through, without a break. Especially stories. Then I read them over and sometimes make little changes. But the rhythm and images, I seldom change. I trust my initial impulse.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Your stories are allusive, often featuring famous names. George Sand\u2019s and Musset\u2019s appear in the first lines of \u201cThat Summer,\u201d when you\u2019re describing the father\u2019s illness. Can you tell me about Sand and Musset?<\/p>\n

SERRE<\/p>\n

I heard a lot about Musset and Sand when I was a child because my father was very fond of Musset\u2019s work and was fascinated by his affair with George Sand. We often visited Sand\u2019s house in Nohant. From a child\u2019s point of view, she was a strange figure because she had a man\u2019s name (the same name as my father) and dressed like a man. I was still at an age when you confuse reality and fiction slightly. I think that, for me, \u201cMusset\u201d and \u201cGeorge Sand\u201d were names of characters in a fiction told by my father \u2026 and this may have left its mark \u2026 Whenever I feel love for an author\u2014when I love someone\u2019s work, as well as admiring its author I also feel deeply grateful to him\u2014I have an unfortunate tendency to start thinking of him as a character in a book \u2026<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How does reading contribute to your writing generally?<\/p>\n

SERRE<\/p>\n

Like any compulsive reader, my mind is full of images from the novels I\u2019ve read. When I\u2019m writing a story, some of these images pop into my head, get mixed up with other images from different sources (scenes I\u2019ve experienced or imagined), and are transformed. Most of the time, I can\u2019t really say from which specific novel such and such an image came. I might be a bit obsessed, for example, with the image of a sloping field at nightfall, with a little house at the top where the windows are all lit up, and I say to myself, Well, what do you know? I\u2019ve seen that in a Peter Handke novel. Then later, when I\u2019m reading over the story again, I\u2019ll realize the image doesn\u2019t come from Handke at all, but from an Irish novel.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Recurring characters and settings are a feature of your work. I\u2019m curious about Combleux\u2014the place where, in \u201cThat Summer,\u201d one sister is hospitalized.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>SERRE<\/p>\n

Combleux is a name I thought I\u2019d invented, though I later discovered that a town called Combleux does actually exist in France. It\u2019s a name I immediately associate with Proust\u2019s imaginary town of Combray. So in a way the hospitalized sister is in In Search of Lost Time<\/em>, while the father, who\u2019s in a famous sanatorium in Switzerland, is in The Magic Mountain<\/em>, or maybe in the position of Robert Walser in his Swiss asylum at Herisau.<\/p>\n

But then the plot thickens, because not only did I discover after my book was published that a town called Combleux actually exists, but, more recently, I was invited to go and talk about my work\u2014in Combleux! And while strolling around the town before the reading, I was suddenly brought up short by a charming riverside restaurant that I recognized at once. I had had lunch there decades before with my father and sister \u2026 Things like this happen to me now and then, and every time I\u2019m filled with a curious feeling\u2014a mixture of amazement, amusement, and sadness at having forgotten so much.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Elsewhere in Au c\u0153ur d\u2019un \u00e9t\u00e9 tout en or<\/em>, one of your characters refers to literary journalists who ask unsuitable questions. Specifically, your narrator says that they ask, \u201cif it\u2019s autobiographical, which of course means nothing.\u201d Do you, too, think that a text\u2019s being autobiographical means nothing?<\/p>\n

SERRE<\/p>\n

I was referring to certain French journalists who take an exaggerated interest in the biographies of living writers. I have nothing against autobiography and love reading memoirs and letters and writers\u2019 diaries. I\u2019m fascinated by Elias Canetti\u2019s powers of recollection, recounting his life down to the last comma in three enormous volumes, or Stefan Zweig\u2019s overflowing memoirs. When Gertrude Stein writes about her day-to-day life with Alice Toklas in Paris or Billignin, I\u2019m in heaven. But I\u2019d be hard pressed to write an autobiographical text myself because my memory is full of gaps and whole sections have fallen to pieces\u2014as it has been, no doubt, since my mother died when I was twelve. My memory is made up of a multitude of images that are very precise but curiously naive or elementary, like playing cards, but with no connection between them and not necessarily in the right order. When I\u2019m writing a story and one of these images pops up, I feel as if I\u2019m turning over a card in a game of solitaire and finding a place for it among the other cards already on the table, and this allows me to construct a narrative.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Is writing useful for remembering?<\/p>\n

SERRE<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t try to remember things when I\u2019m writing. In a way, my own life doesn\u2019t interest me all that much, except as material. As I said before, I try to make an object, preferably a beautiful object, with a strong presence. I don\u2019t worry at all about how inaccurate or distorted my memories might be. I embrace it, in fact.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Since \u201cThat Summer\u201d is a translation, I wanted to ask about that process, too. Can you tell me about your friendship with Mark Hutchinson?<\/p>\n

SERRE<\/p>\n

Our friendship has lasted for more than forty years now. When we first met, I was on the editorial board of a small literary magazine in Paris where I published some of my early stories. One day we decided to get together with the members of an Anglo-French poetry review that was also based in Paris. Mark was a contributor to that review. He\u2019d come over from England, a young poet with an impressive baggage of reading and learning. As well as talking to me about authors I knew next to nothing about because they\u2019re not much read in France, unfortunately\u2014Blake, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Brodsky, Marianne Moore\u2014he talked about life in a way I\u2019d never heard anyone talk about it before. Over the years, as a result of our more or less continuous dialogue, not only the English-speaking world and its culture but a particular form of knowledge Mark possesses have become part of me, opening up my inner world. It never occurred to me when we met (or even twenty years later) that one day, Mark, who mainly translates poetry, including Ren\u00e9 Char and Emmanuel Hocquard, would translate my books into English. But a few years ago, when the editor in chief of New Directions, Barbara Epler, decided to publish The Governesses<\/em> in English, our friendship set off naturally down that path.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What can prose do that poetry can\u2019t? What draws you to writing narratives?<\/p>\n

SERRE<\/p>\n

To tell the truth, I\u2019m more familiar with prose than with poetry, much of which is inaccessible to me, I\u2019m sorry to say. Whereas Mark\u2019s enormous library contains not only poetry, fiction, and essays but philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and so forth, my own library consists almost entirely of novels, short stories, writers\u2019 diaries and memoirs, a handful of plays (which I prefer reading to seeing performed onstage), and plenty of monographs about painters, which I look at when I\u2019m feeling poorly or am laid up in bed with flu. There\u2019s only one shelf of poetry. I like having those books and seeing their covers\u2014Emily Dickinson, Anna Akhmatova, Coleridge\u2019s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner<\/em>. Every once in a while, I open one up, read a few pages, and tell myself, like Rabelais, that this is the \u201csubstantific marrow,\u201d but I\u2019m not spellbound the way I am by fiction. I\u2019ve noticed in fact that I tend to read everything as if it were fiction. If I\u2019m reading The<\/em> Memorial <\/em>of Saint Helena<\/em>, for example, I think of Napoleon as a character. If I pick up Winnicott\u2019s The Piggle, <\/em>I think of the little girl as Alice. With Saint-Simon\u2019s Memoirs,<\/em> I think of characters from the commedia dell\u2019arte \u2026<\/p>\n

Mark once said to me (and I remember this because I wrote it down in a notebook, and I always remember what I write down in my notebooks) that poetry is a way of grasping seemingly disparate facts that are grouped together because they\u2019re part of the same species. That for Marianne Moore it was \u201cimaginary gardens with real toads in them,\u201d and for Basil Bunting, \u201cwords that name facts dancing together.\u201d So I get the general picture. For my part, however, I need to be told a story, and I need there to be, at the heart of that story, a dangerous, mesmerizing well or passageway, as there are in most great works of fiction. It\u2019s this passageway that attracts me. As I approach it (in reading), I feel something very powerful, a bit like Ulysses with the Sirens, if you like! And I\u2019m sorry I can\u2019t be more precise in describing that passageway\u2014its nature, its function. Perhaps I try to understand it by writing \u2026<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jacqueline\u00a0Feldman\u2019s <\/em>On Your Feet, a bilingual experiment, was published in March by dispersed holdings.<\/em>\u00a0Precarious Lease, her account of a Parisian squat, is forthcoming from Rescue Press this fall.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anne Serre\u2019s \u201cThat Summer,\u201d which appears in the new Summer issue of\u00a0 The Paris Review, opens with an anticlimactic claim: \u201cThat summer we had decided we were past caring.\u201d But the story that follows is packed with drama. 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