La Muselivre

"Some critics have said The Magus did not achieve what it set out to do." [...]"No argument from me," Fowles replied disarmingly. At my prodding, he expanded: "You must remember it was a first novel and I tried to say too much. It was written by a young man who really didn't have very much experience of life, but who had a tremendous love of narrative. It says so many things and nothing really is concluded. One thing that worries me about it now is that it's not terribly well written. One day I hope to rewrite it." Three years later, he did so. [...]

We talked about Alain Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman, then still in vogue, and Fowles made the point that "the English nouveau roman - as practised by Christine Brooke-Rose and others - doesn't work. A brave failure." As with the novels of Camus and Sartre, "it's something that's grown out of the texture of the French language. I don't think you can do it in English. The English tradition is inherently pragmatic and realistic." Nevertheless, he described his characters in The Magus in existentialist terms. Nicholas was "a typical inauthentic man of the 1945-50 period", whereas Alison was "supposed to be someone who is choosing herself". When I asked if the authorial interventions in The French Lieutenant's Woman were in obedience to Sartre's dictum that the novelist cannot act like God, Fowles replied that Sartre was being "silly".

- Le dernier Shan Sa, sorti cette fois sans trouble ni fracas. Pour ce que cela avait rapporté à son précédent roman, le fracas...

- Pensez Mozart pour Noël, il est très trendy : pour le 250naire de sa mort, vous avez droit à un dossier complet au Nouvel Obs, son hagiographie à l'Express et des extraits de ses lettres que l'un d'entre vous trouvera forcément sous son sapin cette année. Pari tenu. C'est soit ça, soit la correspondance de Marie-Antoinette.