Une vieille histoire

One of forty copies on vellum, the only large paper printed.

"Under the title, these words: "new version". What do they mean? "New" refers, obviously, to another version, "original". But what gap do we want to mark in this way? Does the "new" book erase the "first", which would then be only a part of it, or a failed, incomplete attempt?
If writing a book is an experience, publishing it puts a definitive end to it. Now, for once – the publication, in 2011, of a story in two chapters under the title Une vieille histoire –, this was not the case. Why, I do not know; in any case, one day I noticed that the text, like a ghost, mysteriously continued to produce. So I had to start writing again, as if there had been no book. A curious experience.
Rather than a continuity, a change of plan. The device remains: in each chapter, seven now, a narrator gets out of a swimming pool, changes, and starts running in a gray corridor. He discovers doors, which open onto territories (the house, the hotel room, the studio, a larger space, a city or a wilderness), places where the most essential human relationships are played out and replayed, endlessly (the family, the couple, solitude, the group, war). These territories covered, these relationships exhausted, the race ends: in the swimming pool, of course. Then, everything starts again. The same, but not quite.
Or seven is not just two plus five. The plot, which weaves together the chain of territories and human relationships, becomes denser, branches out. The most fundamental data (gender, even the age of the narrator(s)) become unstable, they proliferate, mutate, then repeat themselves in a form that is each time renewed, altered. The race, sterile at the start, becomes a search, but for what? For a breakthrough, perhaps, doubtless impossible, or else the most fleeting one possible, but all the more necessary.

Jonathan Littell .