You came from a musical family. Did you never think of a career in music?
Yes, I even had a certain musical education, which I abandoned completely at the age of eighteen. But it left me with a rather large knowledge of music, and the love of music too.
You’ve often spoken of the importance of counterpoint in your writing. Has music brought other contributions to your work?
Certainly. Especially the sense of form, the sense of rhythm, tempo. Repetition, variation.
You also played jazz when you were young.
Jazz perhaps isn’t the right word. At a certain point without work, when I was very young, twenty-two or twenty-three, I earned my living playing piano with a few friends in the bistros.
Did you like listening to jazz much?
Yes, quite a bit. You know, it was at the time when the Iron Curtain had really fallen, after ’48. That is, we didn’t know contemporary jazz; what we did was our own memory of jazz, our own imitation of what we considered to be jazz. I played something like jazz, but with terrific musicians, because they were chased out of the conservatories for political reasons and so on. Perhaps we even played well. It was unclassifiable, because we played before a public that was absolutely naive, in popular bars for people to dance. So, it wasn’t a demanding public. But there was behind all that the love of jazz. Whereas popular music interested me more from the point of view of theory rather than practice, in the harmonies, the rhythm.
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