Q: Despite the almost total absence of description in your books, I can see places and objects very clearly as I read...I wonder if there might be painters who have particularly influenced your visual imagination? Or filmmakers?

A: You raise a very important issue. The style that I have just referred to might have that very power, a poetic power to make visible that which has been neither described nor expressed by metaphor, but rather only evoked. As if the language that I had to invent carried inside it, within its structure, this hallucinatory power of sight. The reader creates the film of the story as he or she reads, a private cinema. This requires a release of the imagination if the book is not to remain forever closed to the reader.

I could not say that certain painters or filmmakers have influenced my visual imagination, which comes from poetry. What my writing tries to do is to appropriate the power of the photographic image and especially the cinematic image. This allows the writing to capture the real, to make it visible. But the fact that the image is born of the power of language alone means that it is not only an image, but also a thought that creates meaning.

I would like that to be my revenge as a writer, at a time when we are entering into a culture of the all-powerful image, which threatens to kill literature: to invent a language that would be capable, by liberating the vital forces of imagination and thought, of resisting the images -- seductive, manipulative, stultifying and alienating -- that invade us from all sides.