Ego Faber & The Future
As Maurice is slowly retreating from social life to work on his new novel, Booktunes publishes an interview with this young writer we call our friend. After reading his debut novel Ego Faber we sat down with him and talked about music, emotion, Ego Faber and the near future.
BT: Let’s start with your favorite The Strokes song ‘Someday’.
M: It’s not that I have a particular favorite, but I have listened to ‘Someday’ so often that it entered into my personal development. A lot of people who know me will associate this song with me.
BT: Did you ever make music yourself or do you have any musical ambitions?
M: I’ve never made any music myself, not really. I did set up a tribute band for Barack Obama. That was a practical joke, a student joke gone wild. I can’t sing, the band couldn’t really play. After seeing Obama twice in real life, we were so excited about him that we had to do something. That resulted in The Barock Obamas, a band with three songs about Obama. Haha, if you’d talk about mini hype: that was one.
M: I always had a dream about doing something musical, but at a certain moment you’re too old or you run out of time, too late to excel and than you have to let it go. For me, music is the highest form of art, above literature and film.
BT: That’s what a lot of writers say.
M: Music is emotional, literature is very intellectual. Music, you don’t have to understand the language.
BT: The emotion doesn’t have to be translated into words first and translated back.
M: At the Film Academy I was taught that sound is closer to emotion, image is more rational, has to be interpreted. Because it is so emotional, it’s closer to recollection, to the memory. Just like with scent, the musical experience is subliminal. Literature is, I think, a thing that you need to grasp more consciously. If you read a sentence, I doubt that you will think: Oh right, that was twenty years ago, I was there at that time.
M: What I did try is to consciously weave in as much music as possible into my book.
BT: That turned out well!
M: I did that by mentioning songs, lyrics, but also through the rhythm of the text. I practiced by reading aloud. Does it sing? If you can’t read it out loud, it failed.
BT: Reading your novel lowered my mind’s pace to the pace of a sideline narrator telling the story of Ego Faber. At the presentation of Ego Faber the text speeded up much more.
M: That’s the point of view, as a result of the fact that it is written out of the here and now. On the one hand you have a protagonist who experiences and tells everything through the senses, which forces the reader to stay in the here and now. On the other hand he is someone who, every now and again, goes more deeply into matters, taking the time to think. That changes the pace.
BT: Did you listen yourself to the music that you used in Ego Faber when you left Breda?
M: A major part of the book has been written listening to The National: euphoria on one side, melancholia on the other. The Smiths were important, too. They know exactly what the emotion was that I wanted to convey. Listening to ‘There is a light that never goes out’ makes you want to get in a car, drive out of town and start a new life somewhere, but at the same time it wants you to stay in your room and die: adventure versus the earthly.
That summer before we left for Amsterdam, we also listened to Lauren Hill a lot, partly because it’s such slow and lustful music. In Ego Faber, Zara listens to it out of nostalgia.
BT: It’s beautiful how it slows down narrative of the years.
M: A kind of endless decade, everything went well.
BT: But after that the pace picked up, starting with the attacks that also started the book.
M: Faster and more hard-boiled. We enter the second decade now and there isn’t much to look forward to. In 2000 we were all excited about the new millennium. They say that WWI ended the 19th century. The proper end of the nineties was on September 11, 2001.
BT: Can you tell us about your next book?
M: My next novel has to be about the future. It won’t be a science fiction, but science fictional elements are allowed. Think Children Of Men, a brilliant film. Passionately realistic.
BT: A dark future that could well be tomorrow.
M: Yes, I would like to write such a book. This book was about the here and now, the new generation, great expectations. The next book might be more interesting, because it has to be about things we don’t know yet, but already feel coming. Within that concept, it should be a personal account, and with the current political and social landscape it will, no doubt, be quite dark.
BT: People party in Ego Faber, but it’s definitely not a happy book.
M: They say it’s cynical, but we shouldn’t forget that people have the ability to bounce back. The protagonist may overcome Ego Faber.
BT: If it’s going to be a futuristic novel, it must be hard to unveil which music will play a part.
M: Not per se, think about Clockwork Orange!
interview by Erik de Loor / transl. by Mina Witteman / photo by Merlijn Doomernik
Find The Soundtrack to Seleky' first novel here at Booktunes. Inspirational sounds of The National are available at iTunes through our The National link.