Jean-Baptiste Andrea on the writing of A Hundred Million Years and a Day

I think we awake every morning as geniuses, for a few seconds. Then life takes over. We don clothes of normality. We snuff out that flame. A Hundred Million Years and a Day is the story of a man who decides, one day, to fan the flame. For the first time ever, he decides to follow his dreams. A Hundred Million Years and a Day is a book about the dreamers of this world. I do not think anything great is accomplished without a certain amount of suffering, or sacrifice (which either makes me S&M or a Stoic, I suppose).

I'm also questioning the concept of success in the western world. To me, success is not comfort. It's not a number. It's not even reaching one's goal. It's going after that goal with unfailing determination, never giving up, even when all seems lost, even when all IS lost. Despite dealing with bones and skeletons and creatures which have been dead a hundred million years, I see this novel as very relevant to the present day. We live in a very paradoxical age: it's a high-tech world, yet we carry blinders. We think everything's happening to us for the very first time. Yet everything has happened before, on a magnificent scale, and I think it is vital for each and everyone of us to reconnect with our common history, the history of mankind. There is something incredibly humbling, and also immensely comforting, in the feeling of belonging to something so much bigger than us. Suddenly our lives make sense. This is Stan's journey.

The novel is apparently based on two different storylines: now and then (Stan's youth). Apparently, because I see this as one storyline. The chapters about his youth are not flashbacks, they are flowers of Stan's past blooming through the cracks of the present and are very much part of who he is, here and now. So you're not looking at two-tiered story but at one, unified landscape. One adventure, which started a long time ago. The connection between the adult we are and the child we were, keeping that bond alive in order never to settle for watered-down versions of our dreams, is a very important theme for me. My first novel, Ma Reine, was very much about that.

Had I written this book in English (which I'm incapable of), I might've called it The Spectacular Remains. Spectacular, adjective, and Remains, noun. But I liked that underneath, one could read: Spectacular, noun, and Remains, verb. I'm not asking you to call the book that! This is just to illustrate that after everything Stan goes through, magic and life and beauty survive, enhanced by his experience and yes, even his death. That's the meaning of the last line of the book. Stan's quest, as strange as it may seem, is a success.