‘Five Days’ (‘Cinqu Jours’) is published today in France! My eleventh novel, my fourteenth book. From where I sit now - on a sofa in my Paris apartment - I can look across the room at bookshelves that cover the entire opposing wall. In the far right-hand corner there is the shelf containing my fourteen books in French (all published by my amazing publisher here for the past sixteen years, Editions Belfond). There is a space next to my ‘oeuvre’ to-date - a space capacious enough for another fifteen or twenty books. Glancing at that space waiting to be filled, I think: that is the rest of my life. A little story: back in January 2011 I had just finished the final copy edits on my novel, ‘The Moment’ (‘Cet Instant-La’), and had made it down to Boston from Maine in a snow storm and was at the airport, queuing for security and a flight to London. Standing to the left of the queue was a woman in her forties with the sort of severely attractive New England-ish face that John Snger Sargent might have painted a century or so ago. Only I doubt he would have portrayed her in the down jacket she was wearing, or crying silently - as she was when I spotted her. And she was compulsively twisting the wedding ring on her left hand, as if it was a manacle she couldn’t remove. Ten days later, on a holiday in Laos, I was hill walking in high country near Luang Prabang and came into a café where a young, crusty, backpacking German couple were drinking tea at a table and having an argument; the woman asking her cowed fellow: “Was wilst du?!!!” The translation of which is: What do you want? Some weeks later, that perpetually dautning question, “What do you want?”, and the image of that fortysomething woman in silent tears at the airport - looking alone and lost and wondering what would come next in her life - conjoined together in my imagination. And ‘Five Days’ was born. Happy Publication Day to you, mes fidèles lecteurs et lectrices. Et, bien sûr, bonne lecture!
Posted on: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 07:44:25 +0000
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