Gonzalo Barr

Flaubert dedicated Madame Bovary to his lawyer in what has to be one of the most effusive expressions of gratitude by any client ever (as is my custom, my translation into English follows the original French) –

                                                                      À
Marie-Antoine-Jules Senard
membre du barreau de Paris
ex-président de l’assemblée nationale
et ancien ministre de l’intérieur

Cher et ilustre ami,

Permettez-moi d’inscrire votre nom en tête de ce livre et au-dessus même de sa dédicace; car c’est à vous, surtout, que j’en dois la publication.  En passant par votre magnifique plaidoirie, mon œuvre a acquis pour moi-même comme un autorité imprévue.  Acceptez donc ici l’hommage de ma gratitude, qui, si grande qu’elle puisse être, ne sera jamais à la hauteur de votre éloquence et de votre dévouement.

Gustave Flaubert
Paris, 12 avril 1857

***

To
Marie-Antoine-Jules Senard
Member of the Paris Bar
Ex-President of the National Assembly
and Former Minister of the Interior

Dear and learned friend,
Permit me to inscribe your name at the head of this book and underneath it a dedication, as it is to you especially that I owe its publication.  Thanks to your magnificent pleadings my work has acquired for me an unexpected authority.  Thus accept here the tribute of my gratitude, that, as great as it can be, will never reach the height of your eloquence and your devotion.

Gustave Flaubert
Paris, 12 April 1857

The dedication still appears in French editions of the novel but it has been curiously omitted from English translations.  Considering that Flaubert was publicly thanking his lawyer for successfully defending him against charges of obscenity and the corruption of morals (no doubt it was the carriage scene that did it), the dedication is intimately related to the novel itself.  So why not include it?

Le magazine littéraire, in their July-August 2007 issue, features an interview with Orhan Pamuk that is predictably entitled, “Orhan Pamuk, la mélancholie d’Istanbul.”  One could dedicate years of study to “melancholy” in literature but that is not the point of this post.  The interview covers a lot of ground.  Following are brief excerpts about writing (my translation into English follows the original French) –

J’étais ce qu’on nomme un “enfant d’appartement”, enfermé dans l’ombre de cet espace familial, avec ces lourds rideaux et ces tapis épais, et je m’ennuyais beaucoup.  Mais en revanche j’étais heureux de rêver, de cauchemarder, de divaguer, que ce soit dans ma chambre d’adolescent à dessiner et peindre inlassablement, en imitant quelques maîtres, ou marcher sans but dans les ruelles biscornues d’Istanbul.  Si j’écris une page par jour, je suis heureux, et je dis volontiers qu’après on me fait faire ce qu’on veut!

[…]

Continuer dans ma vieille manière désengagée, artisanale, à la Thomas Mann, c’est tout ce que je veux.  J’écris lentement, une page par jour, je relis, je supprime beaucoup.

[…]

Je ne servirai aucune cause, si c’est cela ce que vous me demandez.  Je ne suis pas un écrivain réaliste, je ne copie pas, mais me plais a être un imaginatif, plein de la joie d’exister dans le monde sensible.  Il y a une tradition d’Homère à Chateaubriand, de Nabokov à Proust, d’écrivains qui voient le monde à travers leurs mots, come s’ils le déchiffraient.

***

I was what’s called an “indoor child,” shut away in the shadow of that familial space, with its heavy curtains and thick carpets.  And I was bored a lot.  In turn, I was happy to dream, have nightmares, to wander, whatever, in my adolescent bedroom.  I drew and painted endlessly, imitating some of the masters.  Or I walked aimlessly the quirky backalleys of Istanbul.  If I write one page a day, I am happy.  After that, I’ll admit, you can do with me what you want!

[…]

To continue in my disengaged old ways, like an artisan, like Thomas Mann, that’s all I want.  I write slowly, one page per day.  I reread.  I cut out a lot.

[…]

I will not serve any cause, if that’s what you’re asking me.  I am not a realist author.  I do not copy.  Instead, it pleases me to be imaginative, joyful to exist in the tangible world.  There’s a tradition from Homer to Chateaubriand, Nabokov to Proust, of writers who see the world through their words, as if they were deciphering it.

Source:  Manuel Carcassonne, “Orhan Pamuk, la mélancolie d’Istanbul,” Magazine Littéraire (July 1, 2007)

Unlike the Spanish language with its Real Academia, the English language has no official body that governs its use.  This is a good thing, as it allows English to be more plastic, to grow and evolve faster.

If a century ago, people commonly wrote “coöperate,” using the dieresis to break the dipthong into two syllables, now we write “cooperate.”  Everyone knows that the two vowels are not pronounced like a long “u,” which is how they would sound if you wrote, “coop.”  (But even that isn’t necessarily true.  If you saw a sign at a university that read, “Student Coop,” wouldn’t you know that there is no dipthong?  Of course you would.  That’s common usage.)  Anyway, the pronunciation of the word “cooperate” – to go back to our example — has not changed, only the way we spell it.  Nobody ordered the change.  People started to spell it that way until it became the common practice.

The premier dictionary of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED, for short), monitors usage, records neologisms, and keeps the record straight on etymology and meanings.

Recently, the BBC reported that the editors of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in its sixth edition removed the hyphen from 16,000 words to reflect how these words are written today.  In some cases, words that had been written with a hyphen became two separate words.  “Fig leaf,” “Hobby horse,” “Ice cream,” “Pin money,” “Pot belly,” and “Test tube” are some examples.  In other cases, they became one word: “Bumblebee,” “Chickpea,” “Crybaby,” “Leapfrog,” and “Logjam.”

Perhaps anticipating angry protests at the offices of the OED, editor Angus Stevenson clarified their role in the demise of the hyphen.  They were and continue to be mere observers.  He told the BBC, ”We only reflect what people in general are reading.  We have been tracking this for some time and we’ve been finding the hyphen is used less and less.”  He even offered an explanation.  The reason fewer people use the hyphen these days, he told The Telegraph, is that they no longer have the time to reach over to the hyphen key.

Above is a picture of the standard QWERTY keyboard.  In the upper right, next to the zero key, is the hyphen.  To produce a hyphen, you do not have to depress the shift key at the same time, the way you have to do with the macron, which shares the same key.  All you do is extend a finger, most conveniently the right fifth finger, nicknamed the “pinky,” and tap it.  How much time can that take?

In any case, Mr. Stevenson need not worry — after an exhaustive search of the Internet your correspondent was unable to find any call, angry or otherwise, to protest the demise of the hyphen.  To everyone at the OED:  sleep safe and sound.

It is very hard for me, as a reader, to place myself in a book until I know where I am.  I want to know where a story happens before it unfolds.

Some writers are associated with the fictitious places they created.  Two notable examples are Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha and García Márquez’s Macondo.  It doesn’t matter that neither exists on any map, they are as real as the places they were modeled after in Mississippi and Colombia.  (García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, a small town on the Caribbean that was the model for Macondo.  Last year, citizens defeated a referendum to rename the town Aracataca-Macondo.)

Still other writers ground their work in real cities.  Joyce did it with Dublin.  Orhan Pamuk has done it with his native Istanbul.  When the Swedish Academy awarded him the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, they described him as a writer “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”

Yet other writers use a real city, but so transform it and our preconceived ideas about it, as to make it their own.  Amis’s London comes to mind, as does James Ellroy’s Los Angeles, and Alberto Fuguet’s Santiago.  In fact, it was Fuguet himself, who when describing a character’s relationship with his native city, wrote [translation to English mine] –

Cada uno arma su propia ciudad.

* * *

Each one builds his own city.

Sources:  “Marquez [sic] town rebuffs Macondo Name,” BBC News (June 26, 2006), web page on Orhan Pamuk, nobelprize.org, Alberto Fuguet, “Santiago: I Was Made For Loving You,” Cortos (2005), at 68

This is from J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, section 2, “Second Diary,” chapter 13 “On the writing life,” the topmost, essay part –

Growing detachment from the world is of course the experience of many writers as they grow older, grow cooler or colder.  The texture of their prose becomes thinner, their treatment of character and action more schematic.  The syndrome is usually ascribed to a waning of creative power; it is no doubt connected with the attenuation of physical powers, above all the power of desire.  Yet from the inside the same development may bear a quite different interpretation:  as a liberation, a clearing of the mind to take on more important tasks.

The classic case is that of Tolstoy.  No one is more alive to the real than the young Leo Tolstoy, the Tolstoy of War and Peace.  After War and Peace, if we follow the standard account, Tolstoy entered upon a long decline into didacticism that culminated in the aridity of the late short fiction.  Yet to the older Tolstoy the evolution must have seemed quite different.  Far from declining, he must have felt, he was ridding himself of the shackles that had enslaved him to appearances, enabling him to face directly the one question that truly engages his soul:  how to live.

Source: J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (2007), at 193

We are so accustomed to hype that we come to expect it as the natural precursor to launching an author into the mainstream.  Hype is usually seasoned with words like “discovery,” “young,” and “the-next-big-thing.”  The 20-something author arrives and leaves with all the suddenness of a tropical thunderstorm.

Buzz on the other hand builds over time, often a few years.  It spreads by word of mouth or the Internet.  The novel being buzzed about is treated like samizdat, one more gem the mainstream press missed.  It is usually the third or fourth book by an unknown who is in his thirties, has a day job, a mortgage, and a family.  Nothing to hype about.

Hype is everywhere.  It comes in predictable waves before each publishing season.  Buzz occurs sporadically, though I suspect we will see more of it as newspapers continue to shrivel and other media take their place.

The truth is that most writers don’t even start to write seriously until they are in their thirties.  I’m not implying that the only material worth writing about is experience.  I am implying that you need maturity and experience to create a fictional world that will last, even a Borgesian one, for what do most writers do if not create worlds and the people who live in them?

Alan Pauls is an Argentine writer who was born in 1959.  He published his first novel, El pudor del pornógrafo in 1987, El coloquio in 1990, Wasabi in 1994, and his fourth, the one that gained him international fame beyond Argentina, El pasado, in 2003.  That novel won the Premio Herralde, which is no small thing.  With it, he broke into the mainstream and his earlier novels will be reedited and published by Anagrama, a large Spanish publisher in Barcelona that reaches the entire hispanophone world.

In between novels, he writes for a newspaper in Buenos Aires, teaches at a university there, and writes books about literature.  He is married and has a daughter.

One of the books he wrote about literature is called Cómo se escribe: El diario íntimo (How To Write: The Intimate Diary).  It is a selection of writings by Kafka, Musil, Pavese, Barthes and others about writing.  Recently, Pauls gave this interview to Álvaro Matus.  The interview appeared in the book pages of El mercurio, a Chilean paper.  Below is an excerpt from the interview (my translation into English follows the original Spanish) –

– Antes remarcabas que tus libros no tenían nada que ver con tu vida.  ¿Cuándo se empieza a filtrar la experiencia en la literatura?

– Creo que el cambio se produce con Wasabi, esa novela que publiqué por primera vez en 1994.  Hasta ese momento siempre había sido partidiario de la idea, un poco tajante, de que para que hubiera ficción había que cortar con la vida.  Era simplemente una idea, porque si leo El coloquio u otros textos de esa época, veo que hay una dimensión autobiográfica escandalosa.  Pero yo los escribía pensando que estaba en el reino puro de la literatura.  Wasabi, en cambio, se publicó un año después de que naciera mi hija.  Y ahí algo cambia:  la literatura empieza a volverse porosa, deja de ser esa especie de fortaleza blindada.  Me di cuenta de que si dejaba de tener miedo podía trabajar con mi propia vida de una manera completamente entusiasta; pero siempre con un requisito:  pensar mi experiencia como si fuera otro.  Porque nunca he visto la literatura como vehículo para expresarse, como algo confesional.

– ¿Entendiste que no se necesitaba una vida “novelesca”?

– Cuando uno ve que no ha estado en ninguna batalla, que no ha sido consejero de reyes y que no had toreado en España, se pregunta ¿qué puedo contar?  Pero el siglo XX cortó con eso. El día de junio de Leopold Bloom, el personaje del Ulíses, es el más mediocre, banal y estúpido que se pueda imaginar. Sin embargo, es el día más novelesco del siglo XX. Lo que enseña Joyce es que cualquier cosa puede ser literature, sobre todo la inmovilidad, la desaparición, la falta de identidad, la pérdidad, el extravío. El siglo pasado inventó un héroe en cuyo linaje me gustaría ubicar a mis personajes, seres que en vez de protagonizar una aventura se preguntan ¿qué pasó?  […]

…[S]iempre me ha interesado lo que el viejo Freud llamaba lo siniestro: el momento en que lo familiar se vuelve desconocido, lo íntimo se vuelve enemigo, lo más cercano se vuelve hostil. Ese giro que toman las cosas es el punto de partida no sólo del amor, sino de la ficción en general. O sea, para que haya ficción tiene que haber algún tipo de acontecimiento siniestro.

***

– Before, you were saying that your books have nothing to do with your life. When does experience begin to filter through literature?

– I think the change happened with Wasabi, a novel that I published for the first time in 1994. Until that moment, I had always subscribed to the idea, a bit emphatically, that for fiction to happen one had to cut off life. It was simply an idea, because when I read El coloquio or other works from that time, I can see that there is a scandalously autobiographical dimension. But I wrote them thinking that I was in the province of pure literature. Wasabi, on the other hand, was published a year after my daughter was born. And that’s when something changes: literature becomes porous, stops being a kind of armored fortress. I realized that if I stopped being afraid I could work with my own life in a completely enthusiastic manner, but always with one requirement – thinking about my experience as if I were someone else, because I have never seen literature as a vehicle for self-expression, as something confessional.

– Did you realize that one does not need to lead a “novelistic” life?

– When one realizes that he has not fought in any battle, that he has not been a counselor to any king and that he has not faught bulls in Spain, one asks himself, What can I tell? But the twentieth century ended that. That day in June, which is Bloomsday and is named after Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s character, is the most mediocre, banal and stupid that one can imagine. Nonetheless, it is also the most novelistic day of the twentieth century. What Joyce teaches us is that anything can be literature, especially inmobility, disappearance, the lack of identity, loss, misplacement. The last century invented a hero in whose lineage I would like to place my characters – beings who instead of being protagonists in an adventure, ask themselves, What happened?  […]

…I have always been interested in what old Freud called the sinister:  the moment in which the familiar become unfamiliar, what is intimate becomes an enemy, what is nearest to one turns hostile.  That place, where things turn, is the point of departure not just for love but also for fiction generally.  That is, in order for fiction to occur, there has to be some kind of sinister occurrence.

Source:  Álvaro Matus, “Un viaje por la literatura, el cine, la vida,” El mercurio (Sept. 2, 2007) 

Two illustrative tales –

It was 1979 or 1980.  I crossed Broadway to hear Julio Cortázar (above left) read in an auditorium at Barnard College.  The reading was awful, a real letdown.  The questions from the audience were thankfully more instructive and certainly very friendly.

Afterward, a group of students surrounded Cortázar to ask him about his work.  One student seemed more interested in voicing his own opinions about Rayuela than listening to what the author had to say.  (There’s one in every group.)   Another fellow seemed especially nervous.  His forehead was sweaty even though it was a cool and cloudy day in New York.  Finally, he got up the courage to ask the author — “How does one become a writer?”

“By writing,” Cortázar answered.  His tone of voice was rude, dismissive, and condescending.  The fellow turned and left.  I didn’t stay much longer.

Regardless of the author’s lack of good manners, he was right.  How else does one become a writer except by writing?  Any number of people have confessed to me that they want to write a book or that they could write a book or that they have a book in them.  Most of these people don’t write at all.  Yet they nourish the hope that they can write and someday they will publish.

Why do people accept that a pianist must practice his scales, a painter must sketch, an actor has to rehearse, but a writer… A writer simply opens a bottle of liquor, sits down, and writes?

Writers are partly to blame for this.  Surely we can name one and probably more than one contemporary writer who seems to be more interested in posing than in writing.  After all, which is more likely to get you written about – making your word quota for the day, paying your bills on time, having a quiet dinner followed by some reading or arriving sloshed to a TV studio and groping the female interviewer’s breasts on camera?  It’s shenanigans like this that contribute to the view that writing requires more inspiration than it does perspiration, that writers are by nature undisciplined.

Which leads me to my second illustrative tale –

A good friend of mine who edits a magazine was invited to interview Mario Vargas Llosa (above right), one of the most prolific and respected literary writers in the world.  The one-hour interview was scheduled for two in the afternoon in his apartment in Spain.  She arrived early.

An assistant showed her to a couch in the living room.  While waiting, she heard the clatter of fingers typing on a keyboard.  It was Vargas Llosa working in a room upstairs.

At two o’clock, the clattering stopped.  Vargas Llosa came down, greeted her, asked if she would like anything to drink.  Then the interview began.  The time passed quickly.

Fifty-five minutes later, he directed the interview to a close, saw my friend to the door and said goodbye.

Standing outside the closed apartment door, she looked at her watch — three o’clock.  The clattering, though fainter, restarted in earnest.

Photo:   Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa, casamerica.es

James Campbell in The Times Literary Supplement (Sept. 7, 2007) reviewed the original unexpurgated edition of On The Road, published by Penguin Books.  (My post on the Penguin edition is here.)  Campbell quotes a passage from a letter Kerouac wrote to his editor, Malcolm Cowley, in September 1955.  The passage neatly summarizes Kerouac’s ideas on writing –

Never did tell you my theory of writing. If it isn’t spontaneous, right into the very sound of the mind, it can only be crafty and revised…. The requirements for prose & verse are the same, ie blow …. Let the writer open his mouth & Yap it like Shakespeare and get said what is only irrecoverably said once in time the way it comes, for time is of the essence…

Anthony Burgess, in his novel A Clockwork Orange, created a dystopian future in which gangs of hooligans run wild terrorizing the citizens of London.  The hooligans are teenagers who speak an argot of English and Russian.  Two examples:  instead of “cool,” they say “horrorshow,” from the Russian ”Хорошо.”  “Friend” or “dude” is “droog” or “droogie,” from “дружеский.”

A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962.  A year earlier, Yuri Gagarin had become the first man to go into space.  And Krushchev had noisily disrupted the speeches of no fewer than three delegates at the United Nations, once by banging his shoe on the desk and yelling, “We will bury you!”

History turned out a little differently, of course.  The Soviet Union collapsed and held a giant fire sale, while Japan repackaged itself as a major economic power.  Haruki Murakami is known worldwide to literary readers.  Hello Kitty is everywhere.  Artist Takashi Murakami and Louis Vitton have a line of purses.  Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a mainstream hit.  Manga commands a section of any large chain bookstore.  And the number of US high school students studying Japanese is rising.  Japanese quietly, but most definitely, has become cool.

So does that mean that we will soon be reading Japanese slang sprinkled into American fiction?  I found myself doing it in my novel.  There is a passage where I wrote –

I’ve been on enough cell phone dates — you know, every few minutes the same stupid little music goes off, a few bars of which is kawaii cute for like one nano-second if you happen to be twelve years old.

It seemed a natural thing for my character to say.  She is a young woman who read manga in her late teens.  It wasn’t until I edited the passage that I noticed the Japanese word.

The experience would have been forgotten too.  Then I started reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Dominican Junot Díaz.  The entire novel is seasoned with Dominicanisms that, frankly, I wonder if anyone except a Dominican (or someone of Dominican parentage) will understand.  (It doesn’t help to know Spanish.  You have to have grown up eating mangú not Pop Tarts for breakfast.)   But what really caught my eye was his use of the Japanese word “otaku” as a substitute for “geek” or “nerd.”  In this case, the word he wrote was “otaku-ness.”

Is this a trend?  I don’t know.  Maybe.  Meanwhile, dewa konban.

It should be obvious that if you base a character in a book on a living person you should not do it in a way that the person will recognize himself.  A living person can respond in many ways, including filing a lawsuit against you.  Lawsuits are not fun, regardless of which side you are on, but especially if you are on the receiving end.  Plus a lawsuit can take years to resolve, time during which you will likely not be writing much.

Worse still, someone unwilling to wait for the slow wheels of justice may skip the courthouse and take matters into his own hands.

That is what happened to French writer Pierre Jourde after he published Pays perdu (”Lost Country”) in 2003.  The characters were based on the 20 villagers who lived in Lussaud in central France, a place and people he had known since childhood.  Jourde portrayed the villagers as “one-toothed peasants, raucous shepherdesses and village idiots,” alcoholics and adulterers, some of whom were so stupid that they accidentally injured and even killed themselves with their own farm equipment.  He did at least change the names of the characters.  The author’s father came from Lussaud.  And Jourde still owns a vacation home there.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

After the book was published, Jourde heard nothing from the villagers.  Why should he?  There are 10 houses, 5 families, and one communal oven in Lussaud.  There is no bookstore.  The silence was not indifference.  It was ignorance.  The villagers didn’t know about Pays perdu.  And even though sales were going well, no one in the media thought of visiting Lussaud to “get the story.”  You know — assemble the villagers in front of the communal oven, read the worst passages out loud while the cameraman focused tight on their faces, conclude with a shot of the villagers tossing copies of the book into the fire.

Concerned about the silence, Jourde wrote to each of the five families to explain his book and to assure them that he was proud of his rural roots.  Still, no one responded, so he waited another year before returning to vacation there, just in case.

Meanwhile, word about the book finally spread among the villagers.  Some were offended at having been described as ignorant alcoholic adulterers.  A married couple discovered they were also siblings, the result of their parents having an extramarital affair in the 1960s.  A man crippled in a farm accident portrayed in the book grumbled that Jourde’s portrayal was insensitive.  It was that man who organized the author’s reception, the event coordinator, so to speak.

At the end of July 2005, assuming all was clear, Jourde drove to the village for the summer.  With him were his wife, two children, and 15-month-old child.  He was still unloading the luggage in front of his farmhouse when two cars drove up carrying six men.  The men yelled insults, got out of the cars and hurled stones at Jourde.  They cracked the windshield of his car and injured the baby.   Then they surrounded and hit him.  Jourde struck back at the leader of the group.

When it was over, Jourde filed charges for attempted murder against the men.  The leader of the group filed charges against Jourde for battery.  The case went to trial this past June.

At the trial, the judge questioned the villagers, none of whom had read the whole book –

- Ce livre, il était pas bien pour Lussaud, quoi, a dit Christine.

- Vous l’avez lu? a demandé le président, Alain Venzot.

- Oh ben, pas tout, des extraits.

Le président s’est tourné vers Dominique.

- Et vous, vous l’avez lu?

- Un peu.  Ma mère, il l’a traitée de sulfureuse.  Il s’est moqué de notre tas de fumier, aussi.

- Et vous, Madame? a demandé le président en s’adressant à Jacqueline.

- Moi, il m’a choquée.  J’ai ma soeur, elle était handicapée mentale.  Il a dit des moqueries dessus.  Et puis, j’ai un gendre, il a dit qu’il avait une tête de sanglier et que ma petite fille, elle avait été élevée au cassis dans le biberon.  Je peux vous dire, moi, ma petite fille, elle va au collège, en sixième et elle est la première de la classe.

Tout près d’eux, Pierre Jourde a les mains qui tremblent et la voix sourde.

-Tout cela est un immense malentendu.  Tout ce qui est dit dans ce livre est dans l’empathie, explique-t-il.

Jacqueline ne veut rien savoir.  Ce sont eux les victimes et pas lui, affirme-t-elle.

-Mais nous, on peut pas s’esspliquer comme lui, passeque lui, il est poète, alors…

Elle admet tout de même qu’elle l’a insulté.

-Bâtard, connard.  Mais c’est rien du tout avec toutes les saloperies qu’il a écrites dans le livre, avec tout ce que j’ai pleuré.  Alors, le livre, moi je dis qu’il devrait pas être en vente.

Elle se tourne vers Pierre Jourde:  T’avais qu’à pas revenir de sitôt!

– Excerpt from Chroniques judiciares: Le blog de Pascale Robert-Diard.

The prosecutor asked the judge to impose a six-month suspended sentence and a fine of 300 euros on each of the six attackers.  The judge took it under advisement.  On July 5, 2007, the judge sentenced one of the men to a fine of 500 euros.  He gave the other five a two-month suspended sentence and fines of 600 euros each.  The five were ordered to pay another 600 euros each in damages.  They were also ordered to pay 1000 euros in damages to each of the three children.

Jourde has not returned to Lussaud since he was attacked in July 2005.  But he has every intention of some day going back to spend his summers there, the way he did before publishing Pays perdu.

Après tout, c’est chez moi, he said.

I am going to guess that his next book will be entitled, Le malentendu.

Sources:  Kevin Rawlinson, “Novelist beaten up by the neighbours he wrote about,” The Independent (July 6, 2007), Henri Samuel, “Author tastes brutal reality of village life in France,” The Telegraph (Sept. 24, 2005), “Un écrivain lynché par ses personnages,” Le figaro (June 21, 2007), and Chroniques judiciares: Le blog de Pascale Robert-Diard