Joker to the core, perhaps to challenge the archetype of the solemn and grumpy French writer, David Foenkinos (Paris, 1974) talks about his latest novel, Everyone Loves Clara (Alfaguara), as if it were not about him. But he admits there is a lot of himself in its pages.
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Light and deep at the same time, the work deals in its first part with love and couples; in the second, with the tragedy that breaks the daily life of the family in a serious car accident, and in the third, with writing and the difficulty of writing.
“What interests me is finding fascinating, or at least surprising, situations in life”
“It is a novel imbued with a somewhat mystical energy,” Foenkinos analyzes about that girl who “becomes clairvoyant” upon waking from a coma. “It is in the last part that we realize everything makes sense and is connected,” he explains without revealing the intrigue. “It was very exciting from a narrative point of view to have someone capable of changing other people’s lives. And then there is that somewhat mythical writer who no longer writes and whom we adore precisely because he no longer writes. He is quite mysterious, and we know they will both meet,” he points out.
The psychology of the characters, the description of their feelings and emotions, is essential for Foenkinos: “What interests me is finding fascinating, or at least surprising, situations in life. For example, the relationship between the parents who reunite in the hospital is very captivating to me. When you see someone with whom you have lived a long time, you know them intimately, immediately, and that seems suggestive to me from a novelistic point of view: reuniting with someone you haven’t seen in years, in a very painful context, and that intimacy is rekindled. For me, that is very symbolic in the work. In one passage I say that in every love there is pain, but in every pain there is also a kind of beauty and the possibility of rebirth.”
And indeed, Everyone Loves Clara also has a reading as a romantic novel: “That’s true. It is a book that talks a lot about love. For example, the story of the sculptor who made The Angel of Pain after the death of his wife fascinates me. That enduring love is very beautiful, a declaration through time. And the idea that we can somehow converse with the dead is a recurring theme in the book.”
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That’s right, Foenkinos is convinced that it is really possible to see beyond the phenomenological: “There are people who have this extrasensory perception. We have somewhat strange sensations, like déjà vu. Some say it is because our mind is ahead of our body. We have already experienced it because our mind is already there. So, if we are ahead, it means we can know the future, like in premonitory dreams. I was seriously ill at 16. I had a near-death experience and was revived by the love of reading and writing,” he reflects on the analogies between his own experience and Clara’s, who has “flashes of intuition.”
“What do we do when we have the ability to feel the lives of others?” he wondered, and a possible answer is the one his novel gives: “At first it is difficult; everyone wants to meet Clara, who will gradually understand what she is going to do with her gift. Clairvoyance is a topic that fascinated me. In fact, I met many clairvoyants while writing the book, but not to predict my future, but to explain the origin of my stuffed animal,” he jokes.
And there slide fate, chance, free will… “Ultimately, we have the feeling that everything is predetermined. And that is why we can feel guilty, but not too much, because there is something like predestination, and we realize… We ask ourselves: what if it had been a second later? Everything could have been different. But I believe everything is written and everything has meaning. Regardless of what I would have done, Clara’s fate was to have that accident.”
As for the frustrated writer, the other protagonist of the novel, and his passionate love for a woman older than him, is there also a personal background? “No, but it is an autobiographical dream. In fact, for me the age difference is completely irrelevant,” he answers when talking about the similarities between that fictional story of his and the real one of Emmanuel Macron and his wife. “I know Brigitte very well. I see her often. She loves writers. She is wonderful, very interesting and intelligent. She reads a lot. She is interested in others, unlike many politicians who only talk about themselves,” Foenkinos flirts, half-jokingly, with the partner of the President of the French Republic. Watch out!
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