The Chantal Chawaf Newsletter, Volume I, Number 2-3 (Summer-Fall 1997)

Interview "Chawaf Discusses Her Influences," by Kristin Switala, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, USA

Question: Which literary texts have influenced your writing the most?

Answer: These are multiple and often unconscious influences and above all for me, what has the most influence on my language overflows the limits of books and literature, even if the reading has nourished me like mother's milk. Among the books which have counted so much for me are:

Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth

Goethe's Faust

Balzac's Lost Illusions

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights

Nerval's Sylvie

Kierkegaard's Diary of a Seducer

Dostoyevsky's Brother's Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Possessed

Chretien de Troyes' Perceval

Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and August Light

Laclos' Dangerous Liasons

Proust's Remembrances of Times Past

Kafka's The Castle and The Metamorphosis

The Song of Roland

The Tales of Perrault

But in order for this list to be natural, not artificial, I could not neglect all the names which constitute my basic literature: the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, the Sumerian tablets, Claudel, Rimbaud, Charles Peguy, Colette, Poe, Malraux, Aeschylus, Charlotte Brontë, Madame d'Aulnoy, Madame d'Epinay, Racine, the tales of Grimm, and the stories of Andersen.

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