Jean Echenoz: "A spy office wanted to put microphones on insects to get secret information"

BarcelonaThe passage of time has not diminished the shyness of Jean Echenoz, but it has not managed to turn him into a cynical or disenchanted author. Born in Orange in 1947, the French writer has been one of the headliners of this year's Mot festival, but before that he passed through Barcelona with a new book in hand. Bristol (Raig Verd, 2026; translation by Anna Casassas) narrates decisive months in the life of Robert Bristol, a film director who is finishing the shoot of his latest film. It features effervescent, established, and semi-retired actresses, a solicitous but inconstant lover, an inspired policeman, a blackmailing general from South Africa, a bestselling author living in a palace, and a long list of supporting characters, human and animal, who further expand Echenoz's universe. The usual taste for details, the author's undeniable skill, and a sense of humor more subtle than our times make Bristol a pleasant and recommendable reading experience.

The protagonist of Bristol is a film director in a downturn who, nevertheless, remains enthusiastic about his next project.

— It would be a bit like me, if instead of making books I had dedicated myself to cinema.

I have seen him in better shape than the director.

— Thank you very much!

The relationship of his literature with cinema goes back a long way. The Greenwich Meridian (1979), his first novel, referred to it from the beginning, with that scene in which it seems that a camera is filming what we are reading. Does Bristol return to that first creative gesture, giving prominence to a filmmaker?

— I had not thought about it until now. In many of my novels, I have tried to apply cinematic language to literary language, as a way of playing and expanding the possibilities of what I was explaining. Sometimes I have wondered if one of my books could be turned into a film, and some people have answered me that no, because the film already exists within the book. In a way, they are right. Cinema is a sweet obsession for me. I can't help but return to it. But I don't plan it, I'm not aware of it.

Is there any movie that particularly dazzled you when you were little?

— If I think about childhood, I remember Eisenstein. My father sent me to see, when I was still very young, Ivan the Terrible and Alexander Nevsky. Both of them marked me. I also remember the films of Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock.

While studying, he lived through the outbreak of the New Wave.

— I don't remember much about the Nouvelle Vague. Of all the directors who came out of it, the ones I appreciate the most are Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rozier. The latter is little known outside of France.

She majored in Sociology. Why?

— I studied sociology to avoid liberal arts majors. I loved literature too much. I guess it was too private a territory to share.

Do you think there is any element of the race that is reflected in your narrative work?

— Perhaps the fieldwork I did for some subjects allowed me to acquire a taste for observing places and spaces that is reflected in my books. There are also readings I did during those years that have been important. Erving Goffman's studies, for example, helped me to stage everyday life through fiction.

In Bristol explains a train journey of the protagonist towards Nevers. On the way, he notices how the transition between the city of Paris and the countryside is not simple: "The periphery complicates the project, it is never a clean break, there are developments that contradict the silos, company parking lots that refute the crops, a discount supermarket discredits a fertilizer spinner".

— I love places that don't fit the canons of beauty.

His parents passed on the passion for the arts to him, didn't they?

— Yes. My parents were good readers, they listened to a lot of music and were interested in the arts. It was lucky to grow up in such an open family.

Where does his sense of humor come from?

— On the need to take distance from situations and characters. Humor puts a smile on my face while I write, I hope to be able to transmit it to the readers.

I would say it appears more in books set in the present than in the trilogy formed by the novels dedicated to the composer Maurice Ravel (Ravel, 2006), the athlete Emil Zátopek (Correr, 2008) and the inventor Nikola Tesla (Relámpagos, 2010).

— In those three books I started from real lives and they allowed me to follow a different rhythm than novels require. Sometimes you have to go out for air. That's what I did with Ravel, Correr and Relámpagos. Although I continue to be interested in creating portraits of real characters, and I would like to add a woman to the trio –I am still looking for her–, I abandoned it when it stopped being an effort to write them. In literature, when things come too easily to you, it means you are not on the right track.

In Bristol explores once again an anti-heroic character.

— I am more interested in people who suffer from work, love, or existential problems than in those who get ahead. Happy people are incredibly boring.

In this novel, I've thought I've detected some nods to previous novels. There is a chapter narrated from the point of view of a fly. The spy-flies were crucial to solving the intrigue of Lac (1989).

— A spy agency wanted to put microphones on insects to get secret information. When I read this news almost forty years ago, I felt I had to transfer it to a novel, even if it meant taking it a bit to the extreme, as happens in Lac.

The love for flies seems like a statement of intent about his literature, which focuses on often minuscule details and dignifies secondary characters, animals, or objects.

— It's simpler than that: in Bristol I simply wanted a fly to appear and for it to serve me to narrate reality from many points of view, as if we were seeing it through its fragmented eyes.

Asia makes its presence felt again. If in Enviada especial (2016), North Korea was very important, here South Korea appears through a journalist whose interview recording with a writer is erased.

— The presence of South Korea is, here, testimonial. As an Special Envoy, on the other hand, I focused on North Korea because it seems to me a kind of hellish and autistic country, where its inhabitants are isolated from the world, a terrible place where there are still labor camps.

In Bristol there are several chapters set in Limpopo, the South African province where the director is shooting the film. It is one more place on the long list of countries that appear in his novels. Where does his love for sending characters to remote places come from?

— As a child, I had a world puzzle and loved to look at it intently. Meditating on the names of the countries would spark my imagination.

Where would you like to travel through fiction, coming soon?

— I don't know for sure yet, but perhaps in some Latin American country.

In 2017, during his penultimate visit to Barcelona, he said that every 30 or 40 years we announce the death of the novel. What does he think, now, of these words?

— I keep them. Fiction has existed since time immemorial. This has to do with the status of the novel, which has always been weak. In the seventies, when I started writing, with the rise of experimentalism and literary theory, there was already talk of the death of the novel. I am confident that imagination will not become extinct.

Is there a place, in today's world, for filmmakers like Robert Bristol?

— There is always a little hope for the failures. I hope so.