Anne Serre has been published steadily in her native France since the release of her debut novel, Les Gouvernantes, in 1992, but it wasn’t until October 2018, when New Directions published it as The Governesses, translated by Mark Hutchinson, that her writing was made available to an English-speaking audience. The Governesses was followed by The Fool in October 2019, a collection of three unlinked but thematically cohesive novellas. Serre’s two books tell enchanting and surprising stories, both delightful in style and shocking in their disregard for moral norms. At their heart is the subject of the fulfillment of desire—desires which range from living absolutely for the story to the taboo of incest; this jarring mix of charm and discomfort makes for a unique and surprising reading experience. Here, in a rare English-language interview, Serre speaks about her work in translation, her “infinite conversation” with longtime friend and translator, Mark Hutchison, and unravels some of the mystery surrounding her untranslated work.
—Tristan Foster
Tristan Foster (TF): In your essay published in Granta, entitled “How I Write My Books,” you state that you begin with a sentence, that this is the gate through which the rest of the story enters—this sentence and those which follow are the product of your reading and your thinking and living life. You write: “It requires on my part months of silence and solitude, a form of inner tranquillity, and close attention to what is taking shape inside me.” You frame this as something less serendipitous than it is magical, using the language of the occult—mystery, trickery, secret ceremonies—to describe it. How important is the magical for you, both in your writing and how you think of it?
Anne Serre (AS): I don’t believe in magic, neither in life nor in writing! When I try to describe how I write, I’m describing a mental process in which memory and imagination meet like two rivers that suddenly flow together. It’s a bit of a mystery because, for me, this only ever happens in writing. You might compare it to a child at play. When a child pretends to be a character and invents a situation, he is both himself and the invented character.
TF: It was also a delight for me to read, in that same piece, your view that the writing is a patchwork—of memories, your previous work, and the imagination, but one which “appears to be cut from the same cloth, and a cloth that is new and without a snag.” I say that because the story told in The Governesses seems to me to contain a perfect world of its own, one that is recognisable from fairy tales encountered as a child as well as, perhaps, Emma and Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair, an ecosystem in total balance, so much so it might pop if poked with a stick. The Governesses was your first book, originally published in 1992; why has building this kind of world been so important to you from the outset?
AS: I used to say that I came to literature through “the door of enchantment” because it was the only door open to me. I tried to find other doors but I couldn’t. Sometimes I think that 99% of my early material was made up of my reading and my daydreams about my reading. I was full of fiction. Maybe a little too much to make do with just living.
TF: Your book, The Fool and Other Moral Tales, translated by Mark Hutchison, has recently been published by New Directions. The three stories in the collection were published separately in the original French across a period of seven or eight years. How do you feel about these three stories being laced together in one book?
AS: I consider each of my books as a piece in a jigsaw puzzle; I don’t know what the image will look like in the end. I’m very curious to find out. Those three stories are probably three pieces that belong together, even though they were written at different times. I don’t think you necessarily write your books in the right order. You can begin with your fifth novel and end with your first. And sometimes I’ll keep back a manuscript without publishing it for quite a long time. I consider it finished, but it’s not the right moment to publish it. Not because of the subject or the literary fashion at the time, but because I don’t quite know where it belongs in the puzzle.
TF: You’ve been publishing steadily for close to thirty years now, yet it was in 2018 that your work appeared in English. What is it like working with Mark and how do you feel about the process of translation?
AS: Working with Mark isn’t so new, not only because he’s been my best friend for thirty years, but because his role in my life is rather unusual. Ever since we first met, he has been my main literary companion, my one real interlocutor, and I can say that our conversation for thirty years has had a big influence on me—not exactly on the way I work, but on my consciousness as a writer. It’s difficult to explain. Mark is closer to poetry than to fiction (he has translated René Char and Emmanuel Hocquard, for example), and his knowledge and understanding of poetry has nourished and continues to nourish me a lot. His translations of my stories are a new chapter in our infinite conversation. Otherwise, I’ve been translated into Spanish, but I’ve never met my Spanish translators.
TF: In my review of The Fool and Other Moral Tales, I struggled—and ultimately failed—to shut off the impulse to pin the fool down and tear his mask off. And in doing so I worried I was one of those writers who can’t recognise the fool when they see him. What do you think about readers searching for analogies in your writing?
AS: I think we all read to learn how to live. It was Mark who said this to me one day, and I wrote it down in my notebook! Coming across analogies when you’re reading is interesting, but finding new ways of thinking is even more interesting, especially when they allow you to dig deeper into your own way of thinking.
TF: I’d like to take that idea a little further and ask specifically about the critical reception of your work. Critics seem to have difficulty categorising your writing, tending to describe as fabulist or dream-like, with one English speaking reviewer thinking of it as a mix of Charles Perrault, Shirley Jackson, and Angela Carter. Some of these reviews have been overt feminist readings, with one critic labelling your texts as “feminist fairy tales.” How do you feel about these interpretations?
AS: In the beginning, I was a bit alarmed when critics said: her books are interesting, but it’s hard to say why. I thought my books must be missing something and tried to find out what. But another voice in me would say: keep following your own path, and maybe one day the image you’re trying to draw will appear more clearly. Fortunately, there were people at the time who liked my books—my publishers in particular. That was a great help. I’m always interested in how people understand my stories. Some of their interpretations surprise me. I’ve no idea if I’m a cross between Perrault and Angela Carter, but I’m certainly a mix of very different voices. I can’t really claim to be a feminist because I’m more of a child than an adult. And a child can’t really be a feminist.
TF: I want to talk about dangerous writing. There are passages in The Governesses that are scandalous, ranging from the risqué to the shocking, but then there are those in “The Wishing Table” which go even further, describing perverse criminal acts. Indeed, this is where the narrative’s tension rises from; the protagonist is a willing participant in her sexual abuse. How do you approach this kind of writing? Is there danger there for you?
AS: The only danger in my life is not writing. When I stop writing for a few months because I have nothing to write about, the image I was talking about earlier may start to fade. That’s the danger. As for the scandalous passages in my books, they’re not scandalous to me because they’re like dream narratives. And in a dream you can be a merry murderer. But I understand that this might be a little hard to swallow for the reader.
TF: The four stories available to English readers each offer a detour from reality. Each is indeed packed tightly, like an egg, as you’d describe it—a discrete cosmos of its own. This is in contrast to other modes of fiction, like the realist or politically inclined, say, which very deliberately intersects with reality. Does literature bear a responsibility one way or the other?
AS: Fiction, realist or not, doesn’t try to convince but to seduce. No matter what the literary genre, the goal is the same. It’s very difficult to seduce a reader. You can’t cheat because the reader senses it at once. A writer’s only responsibility is to seduce without cheating. You have to build a trap, a wonderful trap, that the reader is only too happy to fall into. It’s what the reader wants, what you yourself want when you’re reading. You can build a realist trap, like Philip Roth, a perverse trap like Nabokov, a weird trap, like Robert Walser, an austere trap like Peter Handke, and all kinds of other traps. To build a trap isn’t so easy. I think you have to be a bit mad to want to do this and to succeed in it.
Special thanks to Mark Hutchinson for assistance with the translation of this Interview.
Anne Serre was born in 1960 and studied French literature at La Sorbonne, where she completed a master’s thesis on seventeenth-century fairy-tales. Her first novel, Les Gouvernantes, was published in 1992 and was singled out by Michel Crépu in La Croix for its “remarkable economy of style.” It was followed by a collection of stories and twelve further novels and short fictions. She has received various literary prizes, including a Cino del Duca Foundation award in 2008 for her work to date, and several of her books have been shortlisted for the Prix Femina. Two of her books, Petite table, sois mise! and Voyage avec Vila-Matas, have been translated into Spanish. Grande tiqueté, a tale written in a “private language,” and a collection of short fictions, Au coeur d’un été tout en or, are due out in 2020.
Tristan Foster is a writer from Sydney, Australia. His short story collection Letter to the Author of the Letter to the Father was published by Transmission Press. 926 Years, co-written with Kyle Coma-Thompson, is forthcoming from Sublunary Editions.
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