The Gourmet is about a man recognised as the world’s greatest food critic – how hard was it to write this character and convey how he feels about food?

I never saw it as a challenge; it came very naturally and gave me only pleasure and excitement. I never decide to recount something so that I have afterwards to work hard on it. I just abandon myself to the pleasure of following my pen, of running after a music that is playing within my head. Writing this novel was like a delightful hunt, an attempt to describe my emotions and sensations while eating. I wrote the text in five weeks, starting at the end, the last scene, and then going back through the critic’s life. Indeed, I think food is quite an easy topic: it only requires the writer to be attentive to one’s own inner moves and to put them into words and sentences. It’s a matter of concentration and enjoyment.

The eponymous gourmet, Pierre Arthens, is quite iconoclastic in his tastes. Why?

I don’t really know. I don’t write with intent, only with intuition. But ten years later, when I read over the text, I see it as a fable and satire about power and its arrogance. It’s the story of the quest of a powerful man imbued of his own glory; it couldn’t be a refined and harmonious stroll in the land of good taste. And besides, I think that taste is often a strange mix of sophistication and ancient attachments that are as strong as they are rough and surprising. Perhaps that is a consequence of my own eclecticism. For food and literature, unlike philosophy, my only guide is pleasure, without any consideration of what may be considered as worthy or not. The sacred delight of eating and reading can stand neither constraint nor inauthenticity.

Pierre Arthens also takes a potshot at what is probably the most famous bite in all of literature: Proust’s tea-dipped madeleine, which he calls ‘abominable’.

It was just a wink to the reader. I was raised in the shadow of Proust and the story of the madeleine, and as a child I could only imagine it as a marvellous and exhilarating moment of tasting. When as a teenager I read the text myself, I was completely amazed to discover that it involved a spongy piece of cake in a tisane – not even good tea – in the dusty and oppressive room of a sick woman. Afterwards, I thought that I had been extremely presumptuous with this short allusion.

Proust’s language, for any French reader, is a cathedral that can only be admired and honoured. I remember very clearly my amazment when reading pages of La Recherche for the first time, maybe at 15. I was thinking: so this is what one can do with French language; this is the most fabulous language in the world and I want to devote myself to it till my death. I haven’t changed my mind thereupon. I hope this little wink can be considered as a humble homage.

The Gourmet is a new book for your English-speaking fans although you wrote it ten years ago. What led you to write it?

The same thing that led me to write every single text, published or unpublished: writing is my country. On the specifics of the topic, I don’t know why this character came suddenly to mind – and if I have suspicions, they’re too personal to be told. All I can say is that there is for me a very close conjunction between words and flesh, writing and desire, language and body. While writing the culinary scenes, I simply enjoyed the intoxication of deploying, as best as I could, the carnal generosity of both language and food.

In The Gourmet more than a dozen narrators give us their view of the dying critic, including his wife, a cat and a statue. How hard was it to create so many different narrative voices?

Again, I am a very lazy author, not only due to my low output but also because writing is never a challenge for me. I just follow my desire and I not only find writing easy, it also gives tremendous joy. I always give up when writing becomes laborious; it’s the sign that something’s wrong. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t take a lot of energy and, especially, concentration. And the very difficult part is upstream, the terrible moments when I am trying to find a genuine voice that will be able to support the narrative, even if I never know in advance which narrative it will be. It took 30 years for the first novel and maybe five for the second.

About the voices in this one, it was a great pleasure to write them because when I did, at my husband’s suggestion, I had already written all the food chapters, with a total unity of tone. Then, it was very refreshing and playful to make changes in style, even if I was at that time a complete amateur in this area.

From this narrative device, we learn a great deal about Pierre Arthens, not the least of which is that he is quite deluded with regards to how he is seen by those around him. Is self-deception a tragedy?

The main problem of Pierre Arthens is that he doesn’t care about the people around him. If only he could understand that he himself is the main problem of his life and that it’s himself he’s disappointed in, he would be a different person. Self-deception is the worst emotional experience I know. And I think it’s linked to a very significant and deep cause. Throughout the novel, Arthens thinks he’s trying to recover a lost taste but that of course is not the real goal of his quest. He belongs to that category of person who has lost the most precious gift ever given to humanity: the ability to be enchanted.

If I read over my novels, I am more and more convinced that they deal with enchantment. Not as a childish belief but as the faith in the power of human spirit. Self-deception, for me, is always connected with the incapacity to maintain this faith. Incapacity that leads to cynicism, hate, cruelty and poverty of feelings.

Arthens is an enormous success in his career, but in the end it has not made him happy. As it happens, you’ve also had enormous success, with The Elegance of the Hedgehog selling millions of copies across the world. Has success been different to how you thought it would be?

Success, I’m sorry to say so directly, is a word for magazines. I never imagined that any of my books could interest many readers, I never thought about success and today less than ever. Praise is a gift – the extraordinary gift that some readers gave me by sharing my universe and being moved by my words. That’s all. I feel very humble and grateful for such luck. I am a discrete person, I stand personally away as much as possible from media so that the debate can focus on my texts and not on me. Besides, I know that there is no link at all between what is called success and happiness, which is for me the exact opposite of the intoxication of power and glory. And that is in fact the message of this first novel.

What was your most memorable meal and why?

I started to write fiction, with The Gourmet, after years of writing personal texts. I wrote just for myself because I felt that would be the best way to learn about myself, and because for me, privacy is as vital as breath itself. Since my privacy is very important to me, at a certain point, I promised myself to follow this hunch once and for all, even about harmless and charming subjects. Hence, I’ll keep my personal memorable meal for myself.

Interview by Jennifer Whitehead.

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