10 Questions for Laure Katsaros
- By Abby MacGregor
“Ry-sur-Andelle, in Normandy, has one claim to fame: it has been described as a possible model for the fictional village of Yonville-l’Abbaye in Gustave Flaubert’s celebrated 1857 novel of adultery and provincial life, Madame Bovary.”
—from “The Pharmacist’s Dream”, Fall 2018 (Vol. 59, Issue 3)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In 2000, I completed a dissertation on the seashore in modern American poetry from for the Université Paris-VII. At roughly 550 pages, this was the longest piece I had ever written. I could never write anything like this again. Now I prefer shorter forms and less academic prose—my ideal is the essay.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I am particularly receptive to works by writers from Normandy, from Gustave Flaubert to Guy de Maupassant, Maurice Leblanc (the creator of the Arsène Lupin detective stories), and, closer to us, Annie Ernaux. I recognize in their words some stories I heard growing up, some of the regional language, and many familiar landscapes, from the hills of Rouen to the cliffs at Étretat, the Romanesque abbey in Jumièges, and the woodland and pastures of the bocage.
What other professions have you worked in?
I have worked in bookstores. I have also worked as a translator and editor. The strangest job I ever had was teaching English to dental school students in Paris. My background is in literature; I was completely unfamiliar with the kind of English used in dental school. I had to get up to speed on bruxism and composite resin.
What did you want to be when you were young?
I wrote a lot of poetry when I was young, so that was something I always enjoyed. In elementary school, I memorized entire poems by François Villon and Victor Hugo. I still remember some of them many years later. I also loved acting, directing, and creating costumes. I spent hours “recycling” my mother’s old clothes, learning lines, and directing my friends in plays. We loved “Wonder Woman” which played on French TV at the time and we invented new episodes while twirling around wrapped in kitchen towels (aka capes).
What inspired you to write this piece?
I visited the village of Ry in the summer of 2016. It was tiny and picture-perfect, with traditional Norman-style thatched roofs, and many reminders of its self-proclaimed status as “the village of Madame Bovary.” If you think of the way the village is described in the novel, it is funny that the local inhabitants should try to capitalize on Flaubert’s fame. Emma Bovary (the adulterous wife in the novel) hates Yonville and desperately wishes to escape from it. You sense the misery of a woman with higher dreams and aspirations stuck in a muddy one-street village with no one to talk to.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
Two cities connected to family history—Le Havre in Normandy on my mother’s side of the family (a city I visited often when I was a child) and Alexandria in Egypt on my father’s side of the family (a city I have never visited and to which my family has never returned since they left in the 1960s, so it is more a fantasy, or a memory, than a reality).
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
Keith Jarrett’s 1975 Köln concert and Miles Davis’s 1959 “Kind of Blue.” When I write, I prefer a wordless, repetitive kind of music.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
I just have to be in a place (usually my office) where I will not be reminded that I am also a mother. I need to be surrounded by books and away from Legos, toy trucks and unwashed socks.
What are you working on currently?
I am working on a book project about the utopian philosopher Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and his architectural ideals. Fourier invented a radically new form of collective living, the “Phalanstery” (a compound of phalanx and monastery). He believed that if people of all ages and conditions lived together, worked together, and partied together in his phalansteries, then poverty and unhappiness would vanish. It would be like a huge beehive with many happy little bees. Fourier was not exactly a forerunner of communism, but he diagnosed very early on the social and psychological miseries created by capitalism.
What are you reading right now?
I just finished reading (or rather re-reading) Romain Gary’s 1960 autobiographical narrative Promise of Dawn (in French “La promesse de l’aube.”). A film version came out last year in France with Pierre Niney and Charlotte Gainsbourg. I found the book tremendously moving. Romain Gary (the pseudonym of Romain Kacew) talks about his bond with his Jewish Russian mother and his experiences as a pilot fighting for the Free French Forces during World War II. In a way it is a pretty classic Bildungsroman—how a young man overcomes the obstacles in his path and rises to success. Gary was the ultimate mama’s boy: his mother’s insane pride in him and her certainty that he would one day become a “monsieur” with custom-made English suits kept him alive. There is also something of Stendhal’s heroes in him—a kind of outsized pride, sense of honor, and touch of madness. The book is also a useful reminder of the sacrifices made by fighter pilots in WWII, as many of Gary’s wartime companions died in horrific circumstances. This reminded me of another book I read a while back, HHhH by Laurent Binet, a historical and autobiographical novel which tells the story of the plot to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich in Prague and of the two heroic Czech agents who carried out the assassination.
LAURE KATSAROS is professor of French at Amherst College. She specializes in nineteenth-century French literature, culture, and material culture. She is the author of two books, Un nouveau monde amoureux: prostituées et célibataires au dix-neuvième siècle and New York-Paris: Whitman, Baudelaire, and the Hybrid City. In 2014-2015, she studied the history and philosophy of design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design with the support of a “New Directions” grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She has recently completed a manuscript entitled Glass Architecture: Charles Fournier and the Utopia of Self-Surveillance.
