“Every word has to be essential. If you can get rid of something, then don’t use it.”

An Interview with Writer Julia Deck

I met Paris-based novelist Julia Deck at the legendary Café de Flore after work. The Flore and the Deux Magots had long been rival St. Germain expat literary Parisian hangout cafes and are now mostly populated in the front terraces by tourists and avoided at all costs by Parisians for that very reason. The upstairs space of the Flore, however, is free of tourists and has a dedicated place for working and debating; I hung out there with my activist-philosopher friends for Susan Sontag and Bernard-Henri Lévy meetings during the Bosnian war in the early ’90s. This is where Julia and I met, though we had to give up our places after a few hours when a huge group of academics arrived for an evening session on nineteenth-century travel literature.

Both of us are bilingual—Julia speaks Franco-British and I speak Franco-American—and we decided upon meeting that we would conduct this interview in English (though it was punctuated by French). We focused on her runaway hit first novel Viviane Élisabeth Fauville, the year 2012, Paris, unreliable narrators, knives, and Columbo.

—Natasha Boas

I. UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

THE BELIEVER: I’m having a whiskey, would you like one?

JULIA DECK: No, I think I will have a pot of tea.

BLVR: OK. I’m going to jump right in here. Do you know what the choice was for changing the title of your novel from Viviane Élisabeth Fauville [in France] to Viviane [in America]?

JD: The American publisher suggested making it shorter, and I was fine with it.

BLVR: In fact, the copy says “A Novel,” then Viviane. Where did that come from? Were the American publishers worried people would think it was a memoir? An autobiography?

JD: I didn’t really notice that, as French covers always specify roman [“novel”] below the title, sometimes even when it’s not a novel. Publishers here have the idea that it sells better like that. Anyway, I can understand that people would want to change the title in another language, as it’s already difficult to remember in French, but the book’s also been translated in Swedish, German, and Italian, and they all kept the full, three-part name. That was actually quite flattering.

BLVR: To me the full three names are so important, because the novel is so much about the question of “who am I?” and the identity of the unreliable narrator. You never know if the narrator is Viviane or Élisabeth or Fauville (faux-ville, or “false city”). Did you have any reservations about the change of title?

JD: Not really,...