Ève Guerra or the Art of flashback 💫

 

Your images are often in motion. Did you look to cinema to write the novel?

"From Darren Aronofsky's films, I borrowed the process of recurring flashback. It's about distorting temporality by reproducing the same scene to create an effect of insistence and repetition, almost like overpressure. The same thing happens in Christopher Nolan's work: we see the same scene again, but with different elements.

It's a technique I used in the novel, just as I borrowed some things from poetry: free verse, line breaks... I'm a Latinist, and punctuation is a modern invention, from the 16th century: before that, there wasn't real punctuation, there were segments and breathing units. 

When I write, I really think in terms of breathing units: I interrupt the sentence when I feel I can't carry it forward anymore, when the words no longer hold together. Line breaks aren't casual; they're more melodic." I have a melodic relationship with the phrase. I'm very interested in the sound, as well as the meaning."