the Paris Review / Claude Simon

INTERVIEWER

What do you want your readers to learn from your books?

SIMON

They’ll learn nothing. I have no messages to deliver. I hope only that they will find pleasure. The nature of this pleasure is difficult to define. One part is what Roland Barthes has called recognition—the recognition of sentiments or feelings one has experienced oneself. The other is the discovery of what one had not known about oneself. Johann Sebastian Bach defined this sort of pleasure as “the expected unexpected.”