Like when you pick up a book and you don't realize what type of text it is - it could be an essay, a novel, a biography - and at one point you realize you don't know where, as a reader, you want to be. Where are you going with this text? What is the goal? How are you supposed to interpret what you're reading? And people's responses vary - some dislike it, and are put off by the confusion, the lack of comprehension.

I don't read novels that are looking to convince me of anything. I believe that literature needs to be a machine of illusions.

I don't even know - for me, it's difficult to decide which is more important - the things or the thoughts. It seems to me that certain things came up more or less naturally.

One must distance oneself from the idea of strict realism. It seems to me that real nature doesn't exist anymore, this idea of "the wild." This is why I love parks, and why I chose to use them in my work - they are beyond nature. I see nature as a resource.

Nostalgia for people, cultures, everything. There's an ability to use these marks to note things that are erased, deleted. Traces are a species of history, of evidence. It's a way for the way the narrator to construct a semblance of self, even though all of this creates a deception, a way to think of one's traces as a real way to define oneself. The trace is fallible, impermanent. It's one of the motives I had in mind throughout the text.

I find that, for me, it is this concept of borrowed or built life, life on loan, that gets me writing. It's similar to speaking about literature. I like it, and then I don't like it. It has such an inherent vein of pretention, because you're not speaking about real things. There's a literary pretentiousness made of speaking and spending so much time on unreal persons. And it seems, now, impossible to create an unpretentious, totally organic character.

A word, and all the infinite fluctuations it may possess. Like that moment when you know you have something to say, and you know you're speaking, even, but you still have no idea how you will say it. Or the moment when, as a reader, you're reading, and you are understanding what you are reading, but still have utterly no idea what will come next for you, what precisely the author wants to say. For me, that is the ultimate level of literary depth, of literary density.