What I find so fascinating about celebrities, is how difficult it is for a celebrity to preserve their actual self. Celebrity necessitates emptying yourself out. Six years ago, Tank Magazine asked me to write about Kim Kardashian’s book of selfies, Selfish, which I thought was surprising. I found the rhetoric of the self and the selfie and self-presentation just so disturbing: in the early photos there’s a person present, but by the end of the images it’s clear there’s no private self left, just a public image. Why are these celebrities in our heads, why do we need them, and what does our need for them do to the actual celebrity as a person? We’re so used to thinking that we created the idea of the celebrity recently, but even in the 1700s, there were celebrities in a similar sense. The same sentences that were being said about the characters who feature in my book are being said about Kim Kardashian or any other celebrity today.

Definitely. Celine is in a slightly hazy area of celebrity because while she’s famous, she’s not on Napoleon’s level of fame. Is there a point at which you lose yourself — a point of no return with celebrity? I think so.

Yes, there was an essay by Olivia Kan-Sperling in The Paris Review Daily that drew a parallel between fanfiction and historical fiction, which I think is a really interesting avenue to pursue because in one sense historical fiction is fanfiction, just with more cultural acceptance. There’s something fun and also quite tacky about taking a celebrity like Napoleon or Voltaire and ascribing thoughts or feelings to him, or imagining him walking into a party and everybody stopping to stare. And ultimately that goes back to this question of celebrity, of whether we are owned by other people or if we can own ourselves. At what point does one lose agency over oneself? The celebrity is created by other people’s language and by a system of media. But it needs real people to inhabit the role. Maybe any theory of history is inextricable from a theory of celebrity.

We are constantly being thought by images or by other media. And language is the basic, massive development that is still colonizing our minds today. You can’t not be thought about, and being thought about will change your own conception of self. There’s this constant symbiotic relationship between yourself and the selves of others. And, on some deep level, that makes me uncomfortable — the idea that you also exist in the words of other people. In that sense, I think “code” is a really useful abstract term to talk about this kind of interplay between the self and the Other.

I actually broke off writing this novel to do a project in 2019 with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rem Koolhaas, where we invented this performance piece of live translation. A text would be read in its original language and simultaneously translated into English. I certainly think translation can model a way of imagining the Other. And translation is a field where a lot of these debates have already been played out — especially around the ethics of how you render someone else’s speech when you come from a different position, whether that’s a different timeframe, a different political position, and so on. There’s always an imbalance, and so how do you think about that?

There was a little joke in that scene, because I always find it so funny when characters in historical novels and films don’t speak their own language. It was amusing to have a moment to point out that even though the novel has been entirely in English, Celine doesn’t speak English very well at all. But, yeah, I’m interested in this idea of the third language very much. To believe in translation at all being possible, if you can go from A to B, you have to believe there’s a C in the middle. There must be this third shared element, which is deeply utopian because it means there can be common ground and that we’re not all trapped in single subjectivity. It’s an attack on the binary as it were.

The co-opting of the word “conversation” in social media is interesting and I’m sure it was probably something that was in the back of my mind. I think what’s fascinating about the use of language on, say, X, is how non-conversational it is, while still remaining in the disguise of having a conversation. Real conversation is nothing like this — it takes time and it’s certainly not a thread of your opinions on whatever political event has just happened, because even if that is “in response” to someone else’s thread it still doesn’t constitute a conversation. Beyond that, I think it’s sad that no work of art is as conversational as it maybe wants to be. Or certainly that I would like it to be. I want my work to be porous to the world. And I think that a novel is, at its best, very porous to the world, but it still can’t fully —

It’s not that conversation is impossible, we’re having a conversation right now, for example, but I think there are a lot of conversations that are staged or theatrical, where everyone knows that nothing new is ever going to be said. There’s almost a contemporary idea of politeness. In fact, one thing that I was fascinated by when thinking about this novel was how the eighteenth-century French salons had rules about how you would talk. They weren’t conversations in our sense of free-flowing talk that anyone can interrupt, and to us they would probably feel stagey. But the rules were there to try and keep the ideal, which was almost — they wouldn’t have said democratic at the time, but it’s certainly an attempt to create an equality of perspective or production. And I think that’s interesting as well: does there need to be a code of politesse to enable you to let someone else talk?

Exactly. The novel ends on the act of listening, and I think that the idea of listening until you become a participant is more and more something that interests me. I guess the best possible version of such listening is that you would be capable of changing your mind or how you live. But I think that’s always been hard.

Like finding some balance between the accurate and the highly free in a translation.

Yes, those kinds of books are basically exhibits, just cataloging historical moments. One thing that I’m getting so bored with at the moment is how that plays out in TV and film. It feels like actors are constantly doing these performances now that are essentially just mimicry of real people, but which are then described as “tour de force” acting. There was this recent moment where two films recreated the interview between Emily Maitlis and Prince Andrew, for example. Which seems insane for such a minor and recent event.

Right! But everyone is so excited to see how Rufus Sewell will enact Prince Andrew, and it’s very weird. It definitely seems like a fascinating moment. There must be some meaning to it — why are we so interested in admiring an actor for essentially doing an impersonation?

And if an actor in Shakespeare’s time was being handed Henry V, for example, that was different because no one had literally met or seen Henry V, so they didn’t have a total image. Whereas now, we have all of these images of whatever celebrity in our hands, and so the performance just becomes about measuring how close to that image an actor actually gets.

Exactly! Whereas, hopefully, in The Future Future, the fake real is really fake.

Well, I was reading The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, a book by the historian Robert Darnton. It’s about these eighteenth-century French writers who wrote pamphlets that were a weird mix of political intrigue, genuine social satire, and simple pornography. The pamphlets often pretended to be secret documents found in someone’s apartment or memoirs by some famous person — and they focused exclusively on aristocratic French women, to supposedly expose a lesbian cabal around Marie Antoinette, for example. These were being printed just before the Revolution by French writers who lived in London to avoid arrest or censure — and they became a genuine problem for the French government because they were incredibly popular. On the one hand, the pamphlets were basically acts of violence against women who couldn’t defend themselves, and on the other hand they were also part of a radical project that would become the French Revolution. I was fascinated by this whole world of low literature, because so often we’re taught that the revolution was created by great writers and thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau, but in fact these grubby bestsellers were arguably far more influential. So at first I had this vague thought of writing something centered on the male writers in London, but after a few drafts, I realized that I actually needed to focus on a woman who was being attacked by pamphlets like these. That was where it all began and then it grew out of proportion.

We’re living in an era where inhabiting another subjectivity is fraught — we have to ask ourselves who owns a story, and, even if you can try to inhabit another perspective, should you be allowed to? Those were large questions for me. I had to be deliberate about the fact that this book is not just me trying to imagine the life of Celine, but also trying to imagine an entire world, as if everything was personified. The act of trying to imagine the Other became the motor of the novel — creating a weird, fractal network of stories from France to Haiti to Indigenous Americans, showing how everyone is reading and misreading other perspectives. There’s no one fixed point.

That’s very funny because I’d read Transit about a year earlier and just loved it. That book and its World War II setting was literally on my mind while I was writing. In fact, beyond setting up a comparison between our present moment and the eighteenth century, I was keen to find other little overlaps throughout time. So I was also reading a lot of Russian Revolutionary stuff, and I was quite fascinated because some of the speeches that people were giving in that period were nearly identical to the speeches I was reading from the time of the French Revolution. In one scene of mine, the French playwright Beaumarchais – who wrote The Marriage of Figaro – is being told off by a radical revolutionary for his lack of radical commitment, and I had models for that conversation from both 1795 France and 1920s Russia. I think that sense of historical repetition is really interesting.

I didn’t know about that Morton line actually! I more had in mind the historical novels of the Latin American tradition, like Ricardo Piglia’s Artificial Respiration or those of my friend Álvaro Enrigue. For me, the idea of the “future future” has to do with the purely unknowable. Even the very close future is unknowable, of course, but people often feel they can predict near-future events. The “future future” on the other hand is utterly out of our conception. At the same time, I feel like we’re living in this moment that is terrified of the future future, and I was very keen that my version of The Future Future would end happily, at least.

One film that was important to this was Lucretia Martel’s Zama, which I love in part because it plays with the boundary between the historical and the contemporary. I read an interview with Martel where she was asked if she worried about being historically accurate — and she said that she sees historical fiction as a branch of sci-fi. Because it’s no more possible to imagine the past truly than it is to imagine the future. I nearly used that as a kind of epigraph, because this novel is definitely saying that imagining the past is equivalent to imagining the future. I also watched Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, which I think is a beautiful film.

Yes! As with all the small “modern” details Coppola puts in there, like the Ladurée macaroons and the Converse shoes. I think it’s underrated — it so brilliantly collapses the present into the past and speaks to female agency within a structure of wealth. Coppola figures something that seems to be desirable — to live at Versailles and be given everything you want — but shows how that is a prison.

I love that line — and I’m not even sure it’s mine originally. I think it’s from a Spanish poem, actually. And that duality is interesting. You could easily dismiss an eighteenth-century aristocratic woman as a party planner, but the creation of a good party is something that requires expert attention and talent. It wasn’t just a frivolous pastime, it was a way of living — and creating a good party requires a collaboration of unpredictable elements to create a genuinely anarchic and beautiful experience. But at the same time, I read this amazing letter where one of these aristocratic women who ran a salon describes standing at the edge of one of her parties and watching everyone, and then suddenly having this terrifying feeling of nothingness.

I think on a political level, one can be too easily apocalyptic. Today there’s so much rhetoric of either apocalypse or the unprecedented, but if you look back at 1785, they thought there was an apocalypse about to happen and that they were living through unprecedented times too. I was intrigued by how much Celine’s love for her daughter — and the idea that something beyond herself will continue after her death — became emotionally crucial for the ending. You don’t have control over continuity in some sense, it’s a process of life, and it creates a kind of trust. Certainly Celine ends up trusting these ongoing natural processes of living and dying, which give her hope.

I don’t know. Maybe not in a literal sense, but more in some intrinsic way. I do think that it’s important not to lose hope, however. One of the reasons that this theme has so preoccupied me is because I was getting very un-hopeful about language and writing, especially in this era where it feels language has gone into corrupting overdrive. It made me question my role as a writer — I kept asking myself, “what’s the point of adding more language?” The conclusion I’ve arrived at, at least personally in terms of my own writing, is that there are different ways of using language, and the way that you can use it within this weird organism that is a novel is one of the joyful ones. It’s not trying to assert and it’s not trying to dominate. And I think in that sense, yes, there can be a hopefulness in the act of writing.

I’ve always adored a line by Franz Kafka, from a conversation he had with Max Brod, where he says, “There is hope, infinite hope. Just not for us.” I think that’s just such a great joke and it’s basically how I feel. Hope definitely exists, just not for us.