- Where did you get the idea for this unusual book which, as it says on the back cover, "retraces the last ten years of the life of the French composer Maurice Ravel"?

It is a body of work which I think I know quite well, and for quite some time. Put it this way, it is part of my personal musical landscape. But that isn't really where the novel comes from. I started out by wanting to write a novel set in the 1930s, with fictional characters but also real people playing their own roles. But I soon abandoned this approach. And then, the character of Ravel had always interested me, independently from his music. He seemed to me to be a sort of irregular. I have no idea why, but I felt absolutely convinced that he had met the poet Valery Larbaud. This seemed highly probable; they had mutual acquaintances, friends and interests. So I started reading around the subject - in vain. As this also turned out to be a dead end, Ravel took up all the available space. I read all I could find about him - and I think I've read just about everything, with the exception of Arbie Orenstein's biography, because my English isn't up to it. The first time I visited his hou

- Why did you focus on the last ten years of his life? Was it to break the rules of biography?

Initially, I wanted to deal only with his American tour, that great leap forward, that moment when, at the pinnacle of glory, he put himself in the limelight. But that happened ten years before his death, so I wanted to follow him to the end, but with a strange relationship with time: the American tour lasted four months and it takes up two thirds of the book, while the last third covers ten years. So what I needed were different movements, balances, accelerations, ellipses and pauses - rather like in a musical composition.

- When your project settled on a real person, were you worried about taking a literary approach to biography?

I did think about covering his entire life. But there is an excellent biography by Marcel Marnat, and I had no desire to make a novelistic reflection of it. Nor did I want to fall into the trap of writing a historical novel - a genre which is often mocked, but which is also interesting and deserves closer attention. So what I needed was a balance, to follow his life, but also to go farther than that. I felt like someone was leaning over my shoulder as I wrote. I constantly had to reject certain situations and scenes that would have been easy to exploit in the novel, but which the text itself rejected because they were too demonstrative.

- When choosing a real person, should a novelist have a different ethical approach than he might have when it comes to fictional characters?

I think so. For example, I couldn't put fictional words in his mouth. The scenes in the novel are based on events described by his biographers or reported by other people who appear in the book. I experienced a rather perverse dual constraint. I couldn't write: "That morning, Ravel woke up in a bad mood." That would be absurd. At the same time, I knew he had sleep problems which made him often unbearable. I was constantly going backwards and forwards between certainty and fiction.

- When he appears in his cabin in Le France, confronted by all those pyjamas and hesitating over which colour to choose, "for him alone favouring an emerald green rather than a véronèse" this is exactly the sort of thing a biographer must avoid! But which a novelist can't resist...

The voyage is pure fiction. I decided that he went to Le Havre on his own, but I have no idea if he did. It is more probable that he was accompanied, but I decided otherwise, and that's that, it is one of the things that makes this book a novel and not a strictly true story. That said, the fictional scenes are always based on what I know really happened.

- What remains of the original idea of a novel set in the 1930s is its technological and aesthetic environment. It is a period which saw the invention of a sort of modernity that has always had a major place in your work. Hence the presence of Conrad, and Faulkner...

Of course, but there are also the Surrealists, who I feel less close to, I must say. What was amazing was to see people as varied as Faulkner, Conrad and Breton working at the same time, and at a various degrees. Faulkner was publishing his first two books, Conrad was about to die, while his novels were coming out in France. The Ravel-Conrad meeting is controversial, but I think it really happened, and even occurred twice, and that on the second occasion Ravel was with Paul Valéry - which is also interesting. We are confronted by a constellation of people with extremely different inspirations, in their attitudes towards novels and literature. But what was important for me was that Conrad and Faulkner were present - after all, they matter a lot.

- There is also a nod towards jazz, when the birth of Gerry Mulligan is mentioned...

I like that. It's incongruous, and also a way of showing that something was coming into being with that generation, which included Charlie Parker. What's more, Ravel was interested in this music. In his Concerto for the Left Hand, some discreet references to certain dimensions of jazz can be heard. In one of the sonatas, too, there is a movement entitled blues, which isn't blues at all but instead a sort of nod towards that young musical tradition.

- Though music is often present in your novels, this is the first time that it is so central. What did this mean in terms of the musicality of the writing and the composition of the novel?

Music is at the heart of the book, but I didn't want to talk about music. There are only a few exceptions, for example the lecture in Houston which I allude to, and the short passage at the beginning about inspiration. This is simply because I found that these observations echoed the work of literary construction and rang absolutely true.

- Can the book be read not quite as a self-portrait, but rather as a mirror image of the composer and the writer who is retracing his life?

It is not a self-portrait. But this mirror image, which people who have read the book now ask me about, was something I only grasped at the end. While the project was maturing, and I was spending my days in the library, it wasn't in my mind at all, but a sort of seduction occurred between him and me, which was rather mysterious, and this mystery was later to deepen. If I could risk a rather presumptuous comparison, it perhaps comes down to the question of work, the fact of having a task to complete without always knowing how it will turn out, and the obligation to maintain a sort of line. For him, this line was rather curious, because it was based on the idea of unique objects: apart from the concertos, his pieces are always unique objects, a singular exploration of each genre, of each form. This is an approach I feel close to.

- Apart from the documentation about Ravel, we can sense that you have also researched the period extremely closely.

From an imaginary point of view, it is a period that really attracts me. Its extremely dated technology has a real charm, which is verbal and almost cinematic. As for the liner, Le France 2, I reconstructed it , but it is fairly faithful. I voyaged - so to speak - at home, or in the library, I visited all the ocean liners of the time. I spent a lot of time in American trains as well! It was an obvious way to enter into the fiction. The research was indeed a delight, I enjoyed it just as much as I enjoy constructing my novels. And as that pleasure had faded slightly, I now had the impression of rediscovering it in a new light. For me, fashion is like a scientific discourse, I understand nothing at all, but there is a kind of poetry in the language - the fabrics, the cuts, the styles, the outfits? I am sure that I would not have experienced the same pleasure in a different period, but I don't know why. What charmed me was a sort of black-and-white atmosphere.

Jean Echenoz was interviewed by Sylvain Bourmeau, Les Inrockuptibles.