Interview with 'Monsieur Ambivalence', Part 1

Thomas Fuller divides his time between Clemensat, France and Berkeley, California. His new book, "a novel for lack of anything else to call it," is Monsieur Ambivalence (Illustrated, 257 pp. $15 order from spdbooks.org or info@ifsfpublishing.com).

Q: Your story takes place in a French Village in the Massif Central, a region the French themselves consider France profounde.

A: A pretty unlikely place for an American to find himself living, as I speak no French and the vast majority of the French in the countryside speak no English. Not only was the silence good for me, the inability to say much of anything, but so were the attempts to communicate with those who I couldn't understand and who couldn't understand me.

Q: Is this a book Francophile's will like?

A: Perhaps, though it's the antithesis of a book like Peter Mayles' A Year in Provence, it's that book's complete opposite in fact.

Q: There's certainly a lot of good wine and cheese...and an appreciation for stone houses and churches built in the 13th century.

A: The first working title for the book that became Monsieur Ambivalence was Confessions of a Travel Writer. The tendency when one first reaches a strange destination--and the village where I lived was certainly strange, at least to me, a small hilltop village in the Auvergne of 100 or so stone houses and a church--is to want to locate yourself, to read a guidebook for instance to know where to go, what to see, what to eat. I fell into that trap at first and found that the more I resisted it, the more interesting my experience became...

Q: What's the plot?

A: Well it's not a straight line, it's not a beginning-middle-end type of book. In fact one of the things our hero, Monsieur Ambivalence, is extremely ambivalent about is the whole notion of time. His life in this village and the elemental changes that occur in his character are largely an attempt to sort out his very complicated feelings about time.

Q: I find the character of Monsieur Ambivalence almost lovable, and his female companion one of the most intelligent fictional beings I've ever met.

A: Merci...one reader called Monsieur Ambivalence a "courageous weakling" which is amusing but also has the ring of truth. Helena his companion is certainly his opposite, the female archtype par excellance and a marvelous cook.

Q: It's a him and hers book, and it's quite complex between them. It's almost as if she's able to detach herself from what's otherwise a very intimate relationship, and see him as this strange, funny, exasperating, perpetually disturbed man who's all over the place in terms of what he wants out of his life, while always maintaining the certainty of her own identity.

A: They genuinely love one another, I hope that comes through in the book. Certainly any tension between them is the tension between one of them being unsure of most things while the other's sure of almost everything. Helena's amused by her man in the manner that Marcel Duchamp was amused...have you ever read the interviews Duchamp gave Pierre Cabanne? You'll be struck by how many times Duchamp uses the word, amused.

Q: It's extraodinary how many people they meet, and who become their friends, in this tiny little village.

A: Well, you can imagine what a curiousity they were! Americans, come to live in a stone house in the middle of France. Just imagine a handsome French couple from Lyon or Paris moving into an old prairie home in Sterling, Kansas...

Part 2 tomorrow: Fuller on Blaise Pascal, obsession, philosophy and sex...