Jonathan Safran Foer : The Brod’s way’s lights...

-JSF : not, really, I sent a lot of mails, some of it was to writers and a lot of it was to people not writers : I just liked sending things to people. I didn’t think that I wanted to be a writer when I was young, I think it wasn’t until very recently, I’m not even sure, now that’s what I want to do and I took it very more seriously as a profession.

-Who were your favorite writers, living or dead ?

-JSF : I like a lot of past writers like Kafka, Rilke, Ovide, the real classical writers have been typically my favorites. As for contemporary writers, I like Philip Roth very much : he serves in a different league than the others, he’s very powerful.

-Did you grow up in a literary environment ?

JSF : Not particularly ; it was an environment that encouraged conversation, it was talks all the time, but not necessarily writing and reading, but talking all the time, in trying to express yourself all of the time.

-What has been the reaction of your family after reading your book ?

-JSF : It’s interesting because it was a couple of stages in writing and when they first read it, it was just a draft of a book, and they found it interesting and weird ; and then they write it after I sold it and then get published and then they took it more seriously after it has been published, after getting reviews and attention, they read it differently again. It’s very hard because they’re a family, so they can never read anything I would say in a way honestly because their love always strangle anything else. I’m not really sure, I don’t know what they say, not to me but to each other, but they seem very happy.

-And your grand mother : you said that if she had known you were doing this trip, she would never allowed you to do it : why ?

-JSF : I think there’s a couple of reasons, one is she would have thought it was dangerous, her memories in that area are so terrible, that I think she would have felt that it wasn’t a safe place to be. And also, she has spent the last fifty years trying to forget everything that happen so why would you want to actively try to remember ?

-And how did she react after reading the book ?

-JSF : She reacted not as I expected : in fact it made her very happy. But she would never wanted to go back there herself. She was happy for me to go there at here place, but after : not at all if I had told her before ! I think she felt like, in a way, it justified her life.

-You’ve been translated in 18 languages throughout the world : have you been surprised and how do you live this success ?

-JSF : I didn’t think it was going to be published in English, forget about any other languages ! The whole thing has been a huge surprise for me and I think it’s a surprise to a lot of people I know, even a surprise to the publisher in a way, because it’s not the kind of book that usually does well, it’s more difficult than other books and the subject matter is a little bit strange, people are used to assuming only the very very simple books who do well. So I was extremely surprised and really happy. In terms of my lifestyle, nothing have really changed, I used to have a lot of jobs, many different jobs just to make money and now I just write, and in a way the only good thing money can never buy is time, and I’ve time, that’s the big difference.

-Talking about the novel : what personal quest did you pursue when you took this trip to Ukraine and wrote this book, after that in Prague ? Two different quests ?

-JSF : In think that on the surface, I was looking for this village, but in fact, I realized that afterwards the quests found it’s content inside of me : I was nineteen years old when I’ve been there and I was becoming a man, figuring out what kind of life I wanted to live, figuring out where I came from and the influence of that on where I was going, and I think I realized in the process of writing this book that what I was looking for was myself.

-What is the proportion of real facts in inventions in the novel ?

-JSF : It’s difficult to say ; the facts don’t play a particularly large role, names and many things. The place was real. I think I was very true to my emotions and to my experiences, the way I experienced the world, and I felt a little bit risky about that in giving so much of myself, but the facts of my life are rather different : there’s nobody like Alex , for example, and the facts about the village and the past are completely imagined.

-Was it important to go back to the country of your ancestors ?

-JSF : It’s funny because I didn’t think it was before I did it, that it was something I was so interested in : I made this trip and wasn’t sure why, and I think I didn’t know the value of it until I’ve done it. Afterward, I could say that it’s something that I had to do.

-What was your impression when you were there ?

-JSF : It’s a difficult place, a very difficult area, economically depressed, they have no money, and it’s just getting on it’s feet, I think that there’s a really hopeful country. There wasn’t so much to be happy about.

-The memory is very important too : at the end, the nazis burns the books of the village. Is it one of the roles of a book to perpetuate memory and in that case a book is essential ?

-JSF : Different books have different functions. I think it was important for me, not to preserve a memory so much as to retell a story. I wanted to take something that was old and make it contemporary. My book is not historical so in a sense I wasn’t preserving anything so much as making on my own, and maybe that’s the best way to keep something alive, in continually making it. In a way, it’s not even my story.

-You said that humor is the only way to tell a sad story...

-JSF : The truth is humor is the only way for me to tell a sad story : there’s plenty of people who tells sad stories without humor and very successfully, but I know that the way I experienced the world requires humor. By humor, I don’t mean the kind of things that makes you laugh, I just mean a distance, a kind of appreciation for symmetry and unusual things that happen, an appreciation for absurdity. Without humor, it’s not sad enough, the humor makes it more sad because it’s a way of preventing sentimentality or easy tragedy, easy softness. There’s a great passage in Moby Dick, where Melville says that the only way that you can be warm in a bed, to know that you’re warm, is if your nose is sticking out into the room, so it feels cold : you have to know cold in order to know warm, and I think that it’s a sense you have to know, humor have to know tragedy in order to know humor.

-What is the most important thing you’d like to communicate to your readers ?

-JSF : I don’t think that it’s anything I want to communicate exactly. For sure, I want to make people feel, but the most important kind of feeling a book can inspire is recognition for the reader when he says that he recognize that, I’m somehow like that, that says something that’s true for me, something that I would have said if I knew how to say it. Books are an opportunity for people to realize how similar we are, that’s one of the ways in which books can be wonderful for the world. So many of the problems over the world, problems with Iraq, with North Korea, between Palestinians and Israelis, comes form a lack of recognition. We forget how similar we are, and books have a way to put out very specific details about human life and to revealing emotions of showing that we’re actually quite similar, and so the ideal reaction for my book would be somebody to say : ‘I feel like I wrote your book, that’s my story’.

-Do you think that the writer have a social role and which one at your sense ?

-JSF : I think there’s a social role, but it’s one you don’t want to think about : after you’ve written a book, you can have a social role, but when you write, I think you just want to create a piece of art and express yourself : every successful piece of art have the function of somehow showing what people are like, and the more you know how people are like, the less you want to kill people and the more you want to be good. I don’t care about books that try to teach, the problem is then there’s a relationship in which the author is a teacher and the reader a student, and you can’t recognize each other that way, you have to be on the same level. I think that the greatest compliment that somebody paid on my book, in a New York Times books review is that this book has an enormous amount of trust on the reader : that’s what I like, that kind of trust which happen when the readers trust you and you communicate.

-The truth is a very central idea in this novel : is it why you can never get the total truth that the novel is better than chronicle, for honesty ?

-JSF : There are different kinds of truth : if you talking about lifting this thing up ( an ashtray on the table), holding it, there’s a truth in saying there’s a kilogram exercising his forces of attraction etc, you can describe it like that, there’s kind of truth in the science textbooks, but there’s an historical truth like there’s today the January 27th and Jonathan Safran Foer is holding an ashtray in this hotel in Paris. What it feels to me that it was cold, and maybe heavier than I expected, and It’s remains me of holding some other things when I was a child, and the interesting thing about that kind of truth is that it’s different for everybody, not two people describing something in the same way. And that’s the kind of truths that are approaches, no scientific or historical truth. You always have to sacrifice one kind of the truth for another. In my book, I sacrificed a lot of historical truth for emotional truth.

-What has been the most important fact you discovered about yourself, during this trip and then, in the writing process of this book ?

-JSF : I don’t know during the trip, but in the process of the book and publishing it, I discovered that there’s a lot of people very similar to me and I didn’t know that before, that I’m not alone in the world.

-You said you were unobservant and skeptical then : did you change your mind now ?

-JSF : No ! I’m still the same !

-Did you meet the American dream during your trip, as Sacha dreamed it and Lista has never heard of USA ?

-JSF : Yes, I did, but I think he dreamed of having food on the table and having a nice house and a lot of basic things we take for granted all of the time, and they wrapped this whole dream up like symbolic order into something that they called America. It’s the immigrant’s dream of the last century.

-But in Europe, did you meet people who don’t need this but dream about the fake side of it, like Hollywood, fast food and buildings ?

-JSF : I met them before, not on this trip, and it’s interesting because now it’s a real love and hate relationship, where people hates America but loves Hollywood, they loves the movies, they love the books but they hate the country. But the people who makes the movies and write the books hates America in a way and their president too ! There’s an increasing distance between the governments and the people, and it’s a mistake to think that most of the Americans want to go invade Iraq, it’s not true.

-Peoples rarely want wars, it’s often the fact of the presidents and generals and politics...

-JSF : And interestingly naïve in very many people upstairs want it. Just a couple.

-The end of the book : we understand that the grand father is gonna kill himself, after writing a letter to Jonathan and Sacha : closing doors is essential at your sense in life, as he died in peace with himself ?

-JSF : He closed a door but also opened a door, and the book end without a period, just in a middle of a sentence, which suggest that it’s open, it’s not something that is concluded, it’s almost a kind of beginning, in Hell, but it’s also a kind of closure, in part because to begin requires to end first. It’s a book very much about will, which is the final words of the book : ‘I will’. You understand that the grandfather says ‘I will kill myself’, but almost in the beginning of the book and often after that it’s a theme of it. In the end, all the characters arrives in a moment of will : I will act.

-From the chaos emerge the light...You talk about the useful sadness : it’s an advice for a better life for anyone instead that cultivating bad souvenirs and doing nothing ?

-JSF : I’d never give advice to anybody, I just might say that in my life I understood that a certain amount of sadness is necessarily bad, grief is bad, you don’t want to have grief, like a family member dies. But to be sad a just a part of the human life and it’s a very normal emotion, it’s a feeling that is extremely human and extremely healthy.

-The Internet : are you a surfer yourself ?

-JSF : Yes, and, right after this, I’m gonna go in an Internet café and check my E-mails ! I do write on my computer always and I do a fair amount of searching around. Internet is extremely useful : you can get more information in ten minutes than Shakespeare was capable of giving in his entire life ! The research is amazing. You wanna make sure you don’t confuse information for knowledge, because they’re very different. Simply knowing facts doesn’t give you any great incidence on the world, but it can be very helpful.

-Do you think that one day, Internet will overcome in a way books and magazine and newspapers ?

-JSF : I’m not sure : a part of me hope so and a part of me hopes not. I hope so because it will be many more people able to read books, and that’s a good thing. I hope not because I love books, and nothing can replace that experience.

-Do you know this book, ‘House of leaves’ ? It was published first on the Internet, chapter by chapter. Do you think it’s a good idea and would you do something like that ?

-JSF : It’s interesting but I wouldn’t because I think it were a very good place for it, just not for me !

-In the novel, the grandfather’s dog have an incredible name : Sammy Davis Junior, Junior ! Where does it comes from ?

-JSF : I have absolutely no idea ! It just like that, it’s funny, and who knows where everything comes from ?

-One moment, the grandfather learnt that ‘The hero’ is Jewish, and so he called his dog ‘Dean Martin junior, junior ! But what are your musical tastes ?

JSF : I like independant rock, this band called Bright Eyes in America is getting very popular, I love them. I listen to jazz and classical too.

-Do you work on another book ?

JSF : In fact, I’m going to be living in Paris in february and march to finish the book if I can. It will be a novel, I like big things ! I started with short stories, but there’s only a few at the moment.

Interview made on January 27th 2003 in Paris by Jean Paul Coillard.

Photos : Idem.