Philippe Sollers

Portrait by Olivier Zahm

interview and photography by OLIVIER ZAHM

I interviewed PHILIPPE SOLLERS for a literary journal 25 years ago — the very first interview I ever conducted. Since then I’ve enjoyed reading nearly all of his novels, essays and articles. Sollers defies classification; perhaps for this reason he’s considered THE BAD BOY OF FRENCH LITERARTURE AND CRITICISM — even as he remains one of the most influential literary editors in France.

Sollers was born in Bordeaux in 1936. His writing, often Joycean in style, is as musical as it is conceptual. His novels treat life as comic opera, weaving the diverse worlds of politics, sex, religion, art, commerce, and mass media into narrative orchestrations.

His first novel, A Strange Solitude (1958), was praised by intellectuals like Louis Aragon from the Left and by ones like François Mauriac from the Right, something nearly an anathema…