- In your latest novel, La petite fille de Monsieur Linh (‘Mister Linh’s grand daughter’), the Asian setting is very prominent. Even beyond the character of the old man, the presence of Asia pervades the whole book. Is it a part of the world that you know well?

I travel a lot – for pleasure and also more recently out of necessity – and I like Asia very much in general, and South-East Asia in particular. It’s an area of the world that I know well and for which I have a great affection. My little girl was born in Saigon, where I adopted her when she was two months old, and I have very powerful ties to Vietnam and to Cambodia.

- So it follows, then: we guess that Mister Linh left his native country to escape a war there, but in fact the land is never named…

You have to understand that the book is just a story. This is why the old man’s exact origins are not revealed. Nor the name of the country he travels to, for that matter. I’ve already had responses from readers around the world, and for Australian readers the harbour town where Mister Linh settles has to be Sydney, for Germans, it is Hamburg, for the French, Marseille… But there is nothing to indicate the exact location of the country, only to show that it’s a Western one. I wanted to preserve this vagueness in order to give a certain universality to the book.

- And is it the Asian influence which lends the feeling of measure and serenity that one has as one reads the book?

As I was writing the book I felt that serenity, the serenity of the characters, particularly that of the old man. In Asia, they have a very different relationship with time to ours. Their understanding of memory and of suffering there is also very different - especially their attitude towards hateful memories. I am always amazed by the way in which the Cambodians have assimilated the period of the Khmers Rouges, how they speak about it. By the way the Vietnamese talk about the United States, so forgivingly. Whereas we, in Europe, we really struggle to lay our conflicts to rest. There is a serenity in Asia, a passivity even, in the face of misfortune and death. And this is where the naivety and simplicity of the character comes from. You have to picture the fate of these refugees, many of them peasants uprooted from their farms, suddenly plunged into alien landscapes, alien smells and alien tastes. Hence the wide-eyed, round-faced element of the character. Besides I wanted a very simple, poetic, pared-down style for this book. I wrote it somewhat as a contrast to the rather convoluted style of my last novel, Les ames grises (‘Grey Souls’).

- Another dominant characteristic of the book is the dialogue which is established between the two men, which is in fact made up of silences, of looks but few words, as if true understanding and communication cannot occur through the medium of words…

This is something that I didn’t consciously think about as I was writing the book; however, since being asked in interviews, I’ve been obliged to give the idea some thought. And I think there are several reasons for this effect. First, my primary tool is the word, and I like to work out what one can and cannot do with words. To find out what is beyond them, forced to the margins. I love cinema and painting, and what always interests me about a scene is what falls outside the frame, beyond the field of vision. More than words, it is the silences between the words which interest me, the gaps. And then there is the fact that the book tells the story of a friendship, and in friendship one has no need for words. And perhaps also the fact that, in my professional experience, I have worked in an institute for severely handicapped children, some tetraplegic, others completely deaf-mute, and there we were obliged to invent a way of communicating without language. And it worked, we got there. These two characters who don’t talk to each other, they’re like a metaphor in this time when we have a real problem with language, a difficulty in really talking to each other. I’m continually surprised to hear of these people who spend whole nights on the Internet, ‘chatting’ with people to whom they wouldn’t even give the time of day were they to meet them in the street. Ours is a society in which virtual communication wins out over a non-existent real communication.

- Was it important for you to demonstrate this in your book?

I am not a theoretical writer, someone who gives lessons. There are two things that I avoid like the plague: first of all, books written as platforms to prove some theory, and secondly, scandal, dirt-digging. My business is to tell stories, stories that work like keys to open doors or to bring attention to contemporary problems. I have confidence in literature, in the power of a story to touch people, simply through the tale it tells, to awaken people to new ideas.

- And what kind of relationship do you have with your readers, with those whom you do indeed touch?

I am always amazed by the letters that I receive. When I write a book, I am alone, completely alone; and when the book appears, all of a sudden there is a strong link forged between you and thousands of people, people whom you haven’t met and almost certainly never will. It is strange to see how your book has reached out to others, it’s astonishing.

London, August 2005