Its translation into English, published as Tender Is the Flesh (Scribner 2020; trans. Sarah Moses), was a finalist in the “Horror” category of the Goodreads Choice Awards (2020), a prize awarded to the best books of the year from one of the world’s most influential communities of readers, alongside authors such as Stephen King, as the only book on the list originally written in Spanish. Four years later, the novel has reasserted itself by earning a spot among the top hundred most read books in the world as part of the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, coming in as the fourth most popular in its genre.

With her latest book, Las indignas (Alfaguara, 2023), soon to be published in English as The Unworthy: A Novel (Scribner, 2025; trans. Sarah Moses) and already on its way to becoming another major success, I spoke with the author at a Buenos Aires café about her perspective on the political dimension of literature, the present phenomenon of Latin American women writers, and some hitherto-unmentioned keys to reading her most influential book.

Fernando Valcheff García: What do you see as being literature’s role in the construction of a political aesthetics? How do you think your creative process joins the individual dimension with the collective?

Agustina Bazterrica: I don’t know if literature can really change things, but I do believe it often offers new perspectives on the world. And I’m not interested in creating partisan, moralistic literature. I am interested, though, in the book moving people, asking them questions, making them reflect. Maybe my book can at least generate a different perspective, an understanding, a sense of empathy with the other. 

There is no individual dimension, as far as I’m concerned, because as solitary as the act of writing may be, you’re never alone. You bear on your back everything you’ve ever read, all the authors you carry with you, whether consciously or not. While I’m writing, I read, reread, study other books so I can think about my own work. And, in that sense, it’s a collective thing.

My creative process implies rewriting everything I’ve read and thought, all the experiences I’ve lived through and what I’ve felt. I return to my own texts, my own reflections, and to what speaks to me, what strikes me as unjust, what bothers me about the world. Good art, or the art that interests me, is art that keeps bringing up new questions or making me feel uncomfortable. And, for me, that’s a political position. Apathy is also a choice. I choose all the time to try to go beyond, to surprise myself, to keep reading, to keep learning. And I’m interested in doing the same thing with literature. 

F.V.G.: Do you see writing and literature as forms of activism? How do you think you can affect and be affected by them?

A.B.: With my friend Pamela Terlizzi Prina, who is a poet, writer, and feminist, we put on the “Siga al conejo blanco” (“follow the white rabbit”) reading series from 2015 to 2020 (with a special edition in June 2024 put on by the National Library of Argentina). All the videos are on YouTube. We invited a ton of writers—well known ones, up-and-comers, everything—to read once a month. So, on the one hand, there’s the activism of sharing your colleagues’ work, and on the other hand, it’s been so enriching for me because I started reading my peers, I’ve met incredible writers. All of that influences your way of writing and looking at the world. Because when you look at your peers you take the pulse of your era, of what’s going on. 

Then there are the experiences I’ve had visiting schools. Talking to young people about human trafficking and modern-day slavery, about empathy. What matters to me is that connection to things, to literature, to readers. I never had that opportunity in high school, I never talked to a writer. So the fact that they can see me after reading my book, that they can complain to me about the ending, ask me questions, ask me for book recommendations, I think all of that helps build and illuminate this cruel matrix in which we’re living. 

Plus there’s my experience in workshops. Liliana Díaz Minurry, who’s been teaching me since I was nineteen, has always been very generous. I started out in her workshop and she taught me to read with a critical perspective, to start understanding the tools with which you build a universe. Now I lead workshops, sometimes with other colleagues and sometimes alone, and teaching enriches me all the time.

F.V.G.: What is your relationship with the feminist movement and how do you think it has changed?

A.B.: Feminism has spoken to me my whole life. I think we’re all in a permanent state of construction and deconstruction, and thus I consider myself a feminist, but I also recognize that I’m constantly learning and rethinking and thinking again. It’s important to keep reading and updating yourself. There are injustices and issues that I think need a great deal of work, but that must be addressed every day if we are to keep expanding rights.

In the end, we are all victims and victimizers of the patriarchy. But I, as someone with a certain sensitivity, have to do something about it, from wherever I may be. So I’ve read about feminism and I follow feminists and I try to express that in my writing, but I never try to give marching orders.

It’s wonderful that space is opening up, but a great deal still needs to be done. Because there are still people who think it’s all a trend. For that reason alone, you have to be a feminist. You’re losing the chance to understand the perspective of the other half of the world.

F.V.G.: In recent times, critics have often turned to the metaphor of “the fall of the lettered city” to describe the current phenomenon of large-scale publishing of literary works by emerging and canonical women writers. Do you agree with that assessment? If the lettered city is being deconstructed, what is being built in its place and what’s the role of feminist struggles in new modes of thought, speech, and literary endeavor?

A.B.: They say authors used to be almost on a different plane, where, for example, they would never have gone and given a talk at a school, and that the underlying idea beneath “the lettered” was a patriarchal matter, but now, somehow, other kinds of writing are coming in from the margins—people who decide to come into contact with their readers through social media on a much more horizontal plane of relatability. I think it all comes from the same place, which is empathy: with another “woman,” another “dissidence,” another “non-human animal,” another “nature,” another “victim.” We understand we are all permeated by the matrix of capitalism, which teaches us cruelty—which teaches us, above all, to sever our bonds with the other.

What you do has an impact on the other; I think what one does, what one thinks, has an impact on the matrix. So feminism, for me, also has to do with this question of not seeing the other as a threat, of nourishing or cultivating those bonds. It has to do with an exchange of ideas, with sitting down to talk, with being under permanent construction and deconstruction, learning and rethinking. The patriarchy excludes, all the time. Feminism, on the other hand—the feminism that interests me—includes, converses, and respects. It generates something fluid.

F.V.G.: Do you think the current focus on literature written by women is helping to do away with a patriarchal logic of exceptionalism, or, inversely, might it exacerbate this logic through categories such as the “new boom”? What are the possible alternatives?

A.B.: On the one hand, what’s going on now with Latin American women writers strikes me as very positive. The fact that they are winning prizes, being translated, and having international careers is putting the subject of gender in the spotlight, leading us to read more women and raising awareness of everything that’s not being read, of libraries empty of women, of prizes with all male judges. 

So, I think for many more years—hopefully not centuries—it will be important to continue raising women’s visibility. In a different sense, I would like it if someday we didn’t have to talk anymore about the writer’s gender, because it also ends up that they invite you to panels at book fairs to talk about women’s literature while men get invited to talk about issues. I want to be invited because they think my work is worth it, not to fill a quota of women. The fact is that women have been writing for centuries; we have told stories orally, in writing, with pseudonyms like Charlotte Bronte… I think, in part, feminism and all these waves of feminism are helping to raise awareness of these inequalities, and helping people want to start reading women and voices of dissent.

But calling it the “new boom” seems inaccurate. The boom was a literary happening, but more so an economic one, with four male writers under the wing of literary agent Carmen Balcells. Every one of us women writers has our own agent, we all sell differently, and we all reach readers through our own means. Obviously Cortázar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez, who represented the boom, are now classics… I mean, what they were writing is incredible. But what would have happened if they had included Clarice Lispector or Elena Garro in that group? Writers who, thanks to their own bodies of work, their literature, are now classics too?

F.V.G.: On the topic of your novel Tender Is the Flesh (2017), I thought I observed a troubling ambiguity in the construction of the women characters. What were you trying to show with the suggestive contradictions we see in them?

A.B.: I’m not interested in writing about women only as victims, because there are also victimizers among us. I’m deeply bothered by the idealization of women. That image of the loving woman, surrounded by flowers, perfect. The world is full of women who are bad people, who have all the nuances and complexities of any other human being. I tried to show that in the novel, working with the logic of capitalism: do you serve me or not, are you useful to me or not.

Doctor Valka is this admirable, alpha-female boss, but one who has taken on a lot of men’s vices. Spanel—who emerged from a portrait by Marcos López, a famous Argentine photographer—is beyond good and evil. She’s a child abuser, because she has sex with Marcos when he’s a minor, but she’s also the first woman to get up the nerve to open a butcher shop for human meat. She takes hold of that place of power and survival. Marisa is over-adapted to the world; not only does she not question anything, she also takes its paradigm to the extreme. And Jazmín represents all those silenced women, but also represents and questions the blurred border between an animal, and a person. She will always be something in between a product, a human, and a pet.

F.V.G.: Tender Is the Flesh stages the complex relationship between words and the world. What is the bond the novel builds between language, silences, and what, in previous interviews, you observed as the “neverending circle of violence” of capitalism?

A.B.: When you want to impose a new paradigm—like, in this case, eating human flesh—language is fundamental, because language creates reality.

For me, the crucial part of any work is the point of view. What you have to find as a writer, and this is one of the hardest parts, is the perfect narrator to tell the story. What came to me first was the idea that the narrator should be a head that escapes. It would have been experimental, impossible to read, and it wasn’t what I wanted to do. So I sat down to write and the voice of Marcos came out—I mean, the first paragraph of the novel, or the first page, is written just as I sat down to write it the first time. There were virtually no changes. “Media res” were the first words.

There are no synonyms in the words—each one has its own nuance, its own weight, its own sound. I think the violence is in the language, which is so dry, so narrative, so visual. If I had written the novel in much more complex language, much more baroque or poetic, it wouldn’t have generated what this generates for me: nightmares, nausea. Since it’s so easy to read, the reader is deceived. Suddenly, you start entering into these images that aren’t so pleasant to you. In the novel, I also talk about smells, I talk about textures, the environment, the characters. On the other hand, when you only talk from a somewhat abstract place, it’s very hard to get involved in the story in a bodily sense.

Then there’s the matter of staying detached as you tell the story, because I’m not judging what the characters do. The narrator is focused on Marcos, but doesn’t judge him and never names him; that’s one of the novel’s silences. And why doesn’t he name him? I don’t know if this is respected in all the translations into thirty-one languages, but in English we made sure it was respected because it gives the book its texture. The reader has no conscious idea, but still somehow feels how the narrator is not naming Marcos.

The euphemisms, the whole matter of the Transition and practically not explaining how it was—that was on purpose. For example, you never know the name of the virus. I say that, after the GGB (which is the Gran Guerra Bacteriológica, or Great Bacteriological War, for me), a virus appeared. Many readers believe the virus is real. Well, I don’t know, in the novel that’s called into question; maybe they start reading and, not having all the information, the paradigm starts to feel natural to them, this world, and they get to thinking about how they would be: if they would eat, or if they would be heads.

F.V.G.: What are the common points and differences between Las indignas (2023), your most recent novel, and Tender Is the Flesh? How has the book been received so far?

A.B.: It’s been received beautifully. In Argentina it’s on its fifth edition, it’s being translated into other languages (I’ve signed ten contracts so far), they’re reading it in tons of book clubs, people are recommending it. I’m very grateful and happy with how it’s going. Its common point with Tender Is the Flesh is the question: Why do we believe in what we believe in? Why do certain paradigms become natural to us? It’s also a novel with violence and darkness, but, unlike Tender Is the Flesh, its register is poetic; so, many readers feel pleasure as they read it. They tell me they suffer, they cry, they get excited, they feel afraid, but they also find beauty in the way it’s written. And, while both novels could be categorized as “dystopian,” I think we have to break out of classifications and literary straitjackets. What interests me is my work generating different dialogues, different questions, and expanding.

Fernando Valcheff García
University of Michigan

Conducted with support from the Tinker Foundation and the U-M Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
 

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Photo: Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica, by Lina Botero.

The novel invites us to inhabit a world where the boundaries between the sacred and the fantastic were blurred, in which indigenous myths were viewed as having “infected and deformed our systems of knowledge,” that saw the publication of religious missives and tracts while books deemed “harmful to the mind” were condemned, and in which the Church is corrupted from within by plotters working in the service of the Peruvian Viceroy of the day. 

With this latest work, Roncagliolo traces the contours of a story where witches, nuns, and an Inquisition prosecutor named Alonso Morales seek to uncover the true provenance of a creature born in Ciudad de los Reyes in 1623. Running the gamut from saintliness to sorcery (the young woman Rosa, for instance, is rumoured to be able to converse with God and the Devil), this novel masterfully traces the hidden corners of political and religious thought in a period when outsized concepts of good and evil were cast as direct opposites.

Juan Camilo Rincón: You initially set out to write a novel about twenty-first-century witches, but the archival research process led you to the 1600s. Had you any prior knowledge of this period? 

Santiago Roncagliolo: No, I was pretty clueless, and had no special interest in it. At the same time, there was a personal connection via my grandfather, to whom the novel is dedicated. He was a historian. People said he was a conservative historian, but that’s not entirely accurate. Conservatives want things to remain the way they are; my grandfather wanted a wholesale return to the eighteenth century, which seemed to him like a much more reasonable, more comprehensible and more civilized place than the country he had grown up in, which was pure chaos, a disaster no matter what period you were living in. Chaotic in a general sense. His feeling was that, back then, at least there had been order. I started studying his books, which in reality constituted the world he inhabited, a much more tolerable one than the world he existed in physically, and I started to see the world through his eyes. This was partly my motivation. He wasn’t a leftist exactly, and he saw the act of interpretation as a Marxist move. For him, history was just there, it was what had happened and there was no reason to repeat it. His books are full of details; he was like a demon in the archives and he found gold in the personal lives of the people of that time and in the theatre of the time; a whole chapter in the novel takes place in the theatre, which comes from a book of his, and from there I also began to encounter this universe in which everything was sent by God or else sent by the Devil, full of witches, saints, flagellations, heavens and hells. The more time I spent there, the more I became obsessed with this world, because of how it lies at the root of the one we live in now, but also because of its visual splendour and how fascinating it was to set a story there. 

J.C.R.: Tell us a bit about the book Las hijas de los conquistadores, one of your sources. 

S.R.: It’s a book by Luis Martín, who I believe was a Jesuit. That’s where I got a lot of my ideas for the portrayal of the convent, which is really a kind of liberated territory. Martín’s book has these wonderful details, like the letters sent by a bishop to Rome saying he has already told the nuns in his convent they cannot sleep in pairs, and so he’s bought them mattresses, but with their new mattresses they continued sleeping in pairs and they just don’t get it! In many of these convents, the women might be lesbians, or sexually active, or writers or singers, and they were freer than the women on the outside. Many convents were violently raided by the army to contain these nuns with their decadence and their scandals. But there are also the holier types like St. Rose who, in their own way, find a way to avoid being somebody’s wife; marrying God was one of the best escape routes. 

J.C.R.: They also tell us a lot about the spirit of the age. 

S.R.: The thing is that the nuns were the wives of God in an official sense, but the truly holy among them were also wives in the sense that they were in direct communication with Him, receiving instructions and performing miracles. At the same time, it was a way of life that was not so far off from witchcraft—after all, what’s the difference between talking to God and talking to the Devil? Or between casting a spell and working a miracle? However, these women also found a way to acquire power, admirers, and dedicated followers. When St. Rosa of Lima died, the crowds threw themselves on her corpse to tear off strips and keep them as relics: a fingernail, a tooth, or a hair. Another kind of path that could be followed. And then there was the rebellion; out of that there emerged characters like Mencia, Jerónima and Alonso’s own mother, who also found a way to live, to try to help her son… It’s more warped, but it is still a way of living and of trying to survive in that world. 

J.C.R.: Have you always thought of Alonso Morales in the first person?

S.R.: For me, it was very important that he wasn’t a person who thinks like someone from the twenty-first century, that he wasn’t just some guy plonked down into a seventeenth century setting. I had to get inside his head for this project to work, for the reader to be able to follow his thoughts and from there to see the world he inhabited; otherwise, it was going to be very complicated to get into the story. He’s trying to figure out why the Devil has appeared, so to begin with he needed to have a lot of internal monologue going on inside his head. The archaic language is another crucial element here; it was the most difficult thing to reconstruct, but it helps you to get into the seventeenth-century mindset. The first version was formally accurate, but I realized it was also unreadable. In any case, the whole exercise was already fictitious by nature because, to begin with, he would never have written about his own life in a report. If I became overly concerned with verisimilitude, the story would be impossible to write, so I had to play with what I knew of the language to create one that would be convincing, but at the same time would be entertaining, and that readers wouldn’t have to struggle with on every page. 

J.C.R.: Someone was saying this is a novel about bodies, and it made me think about how, during this period, the body was a vehicle for many things: sacrifice, public torture as a mode of instruction, the liberated bodies of the nuns, the immaterial body as a pathway to God…  

S.R.: The Catholic church has a blatant hatred for the body; it regards the soul as that which brings you closer to God and the body and its appetites as doing the complete opposite of that. In fact, one of the things that struck me was how flagellation was viewed as a sign of virtue: you flagellate and punish yourself, hurting your body in order to be a good person. I remember one time I got hurt playing soccer and my grandmother told me: offer that suffering to the Lord. This idea has survived until very recently in Catholicism, the idea that your body is bad and therefore pain is good, because it punishes your body. Rosa is constantly destroying her body; she spends her whole life doing it, nailing spiked chastity belts to herself, sticking her hands in quicklime because her body could attract men, and was therefore wicked and impure. Many of today’s political struggles revolve around having ownership of your body. From abortion to transgender rights, most of today’s progressive causes are about defending the right to do whatever you want with your body, that it’s up to each person to decide. Nowadays, the novel’s witches would all be political activists. They are the ones leading the marches, rather than ascending the scaffold to be hanged. I guess that’s a kind of progress.

J.C.R.: What was your biggest challenge in writing this novel? 

S.R.: The language, which I started working on in a very rigorous way before realising it wasn’t necessary to use seventeenth-century language; instead, I had to invent a language that sounded sufficiently like the seventeenth century, and that would allow Alonso to tell his own story while still retaining the register of an official report. The main difficulty was not that it was very complex language, but quite the opposite: it is very simple. It’s a very simple society where everything is binary: God is good, the Devil is bad and so there isn’t much room for nuance or grey areas, but you can’t sustain a novel with such two-dimensional ideas and characters. The characters had to be complex; they all have positive attributes as well as woeful ones, but it had to work within this language that, on the surface, is so basic and notarial. That was the hardest part.

J.C.R.: Which is your favourite character, or which was the hardest to construct, for example? 

S.R.: The women were the hardest. Mencia, for example, who is terrible, overbearing and egotistical but is also a heroine; she has freed these women from the outside world, which is a much worse prison than the world of the convent. Jerónima is another, because I like this idea that she was real (she’s also taken from Luis Martín’s book). Women were very liberated inside the convent, but black women were still black; there was no equality of races or backgrounds. However, a dark-skinned woman could become a nun if she sang well because the choir was where the nuns’ voices rose up to God, and if those voices were beautiful, God would be more inclined to listen. Indeed, there was a Hieronymite nun who was dark-skinned and who was accepted as a nun because she sang. And then Rosa herself, whom I still find difficult to classify: is she psychotic, is she a witch, or is she a saint, or simply an ambitious woman who has found a path to obtaining power? I don’t think we will ever know, and that ambiguity fascinates me and makes me fall in love with her. Alonso is like my proxy in this world, he represents my own inability to understand these women or what it is that motivates them, maybe because you always want to think they are just one thing and in the end they are all things at the same time.

J.C.R.: And also the characters have many nuances; there aren’t any all-out good or all-out bad guys. 

S.R.: That happens a lot in my books. Things get inverted and the detective ends up being almost indistinguishable from the monsters. And the monsters end up being not too different from the detective. I like the idea of genre fiction where there’s an investigation. It’s important that it be a personal investigation on the part of the protagonist; that they find out something about themselves and that it changes their life. That the detective not only solve an external mystery but that they undergo a change in the process; that neither detective nor reader can ever be the same afterwards. I think, in the end, we all see everything as being about ourselves. If we’re drawn to a protagonist, it’s because they embody things we carry within ourselves. 

J.C.R.:  What was the discovery that most surprised you while you were trawling the archives?

S.R.: On a historical level, everything I’ve just been talking about, but what constantly surprised me were the things that still haven’t changed to this day. Like the city in which the story takes place, which is this walled enclosure inhabited exclusively by white people, away from other races and socioeconomic classes. I mean, just look at this neighborhood we’re in right now, or my neighborhood in Lima, or Latin America as a whole, which is still full of these exclusive, gated settlements. The Inquisition-era ideas of women as inherently guilty and of public punishment are now at the heart of how social media operates, with its show trials and its merciless shaming of those who don’t play by the rules. I believe twenty years ago we were more modern than now; today we are getting closer and closer to the seventeenth century. Modern democracy (which we thought had triumphed as an idea, at least in the 1990s) was based on a very revolutionary principle that had never been applied before in history: the idea that if someone is different from you, they are not a bad person, but just another person with whom you agree to coexist. The financial crisis, then the pandemic, resource depletion, and then corruption… Many things have been causing people to doubt democracy’s viability as a system, but if there’s no democracy, we are left with what we had in the seventeenth century: the tribe. We’re the good guys, and everyone else is wrong and must be punished, canceled, silenced. Social media lets you gather a tribe together in five minutes flat, two hundred thousand people or whatever, and what’s more, they’ll make you feel good because you can post your thoughts and if those thoughts are witty, you can have ten thousand people giving you a “like” and making you feel like you’re on the right side of history. Suddenly you are the inquisitor: you’re the one who knows how people should be. 

Translated by David Conlon

Photo: Peruvian writer Santiago Roncagliolo, by Xavier Torres-Bacchetta.

Eduardo Suárez Fernández-Miranda: Fernanda Melchor has described you as “one of Mexican literature’s best-kept secrets.” What can you tell us about Brenda Navarro that would reveal some of this secret?

Brenda Navarro: Zero secrets; I’ve been a totally public writer since 2019. What makes me laugh is that, since that phrase appeared, every time they like a new book from a Latin American writer in Spain, they refer to it as a secret. Perhaps we’re not a secret, but rather, it’s that insufficient consideration is being given to the diversity of literature worldwide. I’m grateful to Fernanda Melchor for the affection she has for my novel and for my work, and especially for her collegiality as a fellow writer. It was her recommendation that opened many doors for me, and I will always thank her publicly for this, as I now do here. I enjoy writing, and through the creative process, I’ve found a sense of meaning in life whereby I try to understand the world, and it continues to present me with questions. Gospodinov once said in an interview that sometimes it’s better to ask a good question than to have an answer, and I totally agree with him.

E.S.F.M.: In Casas vacías, your first novel, the kidnapping of a boy serves as a launchpad for you to talk about motherhood from the perspective of two different women. Why did you choose such a tragic event to create a reflection on being a mother?

B.N.: I would phrase it differently: I selected a relevant fact like motherhood in Mexican society so that I could write about the various acts of violence that women experience, and how, as an offshoot, disappearances in Mexico and the impunity that surrounds them are intrinsically linked. When I wrote the novel, I was constantly thinking about disappearances as the zeitgeist of the story. The disappearance of a person disrupts the world, leaves it dislocated, incomplete, and that’s what happens to the two women. One loses her son, but the other has a disappeared brother. In both cases, the starting point is the same pain. Motherhood becomes a consequence of the circumstances that prevent these women from acknowledging an autonomy they are denied, regardless of their social class or personal desires. A person you love disappears and, in Mexico, that’s a sociological and political fact that I’m interested in continuing to decipher, but also, when you are a woman, it’s as if, as you mature and become embedded in the world, you disappear and turn into the stereotypes and desires everyone else foists upon you.

E.S.F.M.:  Ariana Harwicz in Matate, amor (translated as Die, My Love by Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff) and Samanta Schweblin in Distancia de rescate (translated as Fever Dream by Megan McDowell) have already looked at motherhood in literature. What motivated you to write a novel about this topic as well?

B.N.: As I was saying earlier, I never thought of motherhood as the main theme of my novel, but I’ll try to explain myself better. There’s no question that motherhood continues to be “the issue” for women, because socially, we are biologically destined for it. It is “the issue” to such a degree that I have been saying since 2019 that my novel is not about motherhood, but reading it inevitably leads one to talk about this topic as fundamental. It is a reading that is foreign to my personal objective, however. I understand that the literary fact is submerged in the presence of those who are reading, so I’m not going to tell whoever is reading that their interpretation is wrong. What I can defend is that I didn’t intend to make motherhood the problem, but rather, everything that surrounds it. I like to start from a strong event and then recount the debris. I like to think that what I write is closer to the dissection of the debris than “literature about women.” Why do I make the case that the novel is not about motherhood? Because motherhood is a consequence of various decisions and events involving these two women, but if you were to look at them from the perspective that what they most desire and suffer from is the loss of a leg, rather than not wanting to be mothers, there’d be a different reading of these characters. It would be understood that this fact, which triggers everything, is a consequence, not a cause. But since it’s socially impossible to stop assuming that motherhood is “the issue,” we’re still talking about this in 2023.

E.S.F.M.: On the back cover of the book we read that Casas vacías is “located in a context of profound physical and emotional insecurity.” Why did you settle on this environment in which to place your characters?

B.N.: The back covers and blurbs required by the publishing market are not in the hands of those of us who write. I remember that when I read the back cover, I asked my editor, José Hamad, about this, and he explained to me the need for the publisher to have a specific take on the novel and, to be honest, I’m not going to get involved in matters to do with marketing. I have my own voice and space to explain the novel and the publisher will take charge of promoting and selling it. It’s a shared effort, but not the same one. Having said all that, I don’t know if I believe that there’s physical and emotional insecurity: the two women are full of extremely complex and contradictory emotions, but precarious, no way! They have a lot of everything. 

E.S.F.M.: In Ceniza en la boca, your most recent novel, one of the topics you tackle is bullying in schools. Do you think literature can help to solve this serious problem to which the weakest members of society are exposed?

B.N.: I don’t think literature helps solve anything. At best, it sparks conversations, and that’s where I believe literary language is definitely powerful. Humanity is what it is because we’ve been shaped by stories and tales that help us to make some sense out of the chaos that is life itself. Telling stories about ourselves throughout history serves to give us meaning, to structure ourselves, create power relationships, concoct wars, proclaim heroes, spread lies. We’re a fabrication which constructs fictions and I find that extremely interesting. It provides me with my own sense of meaning as a person. The construction of truth is a theme that inspires me: the nuances, what is told and from which perspective, not just in literature but also in politics, geopolitics, etc. And analyzing these tales, dissecting them, problematizing them, has a great deal to do with the field of literature. Those of us who have the chance to dedicate time to writing and being read are very fortunate. And if that generates conversations, I think the person whose life is changed by them is me as a writer, but nothing more.

That said, I’ve been promoting Ceniza en la boca since 2022, and when they tell me that it’s a powerful book to use in the public space to talk about various topics, like school bullying, I’m not going to deny the link and I’ll continue to feel flattered by it. And to the extent that I can, I’ll continue to participate in political topics as a citizen more so than as a writer. I don’t believe that literature has to have a message. And I’d go even further: an aesthetic decision I definitely made was to write complex characters, but I’d never describe them as weak. They are anything but weak.

E.S.F.M.: Immigration and precarious jobs are present in your novel. Based on the way you tackle these topics, it looks like you’ve used actual testimonies. Is that the case?

B.N.: I don’t like to be influenced by actual testimonies before I write a story; I’m not a journalist or an ethnographer, although my university training has led me to be interested in the tools of the social sciences. Observation definitely strikes me as fundamental for anyone who wants to write. You have to be alert to what’s happening in the world, and feed on everything that you hear, that you see, that you experience. In any event, I’m not interested in the type of literature that denies it’s fueled by reality. In that sense, there can be many realities and, as a writer, you have to choose the point of view from which to narrate things and construct an aesthetic piece of work. When people tell me that, in one way or another, my literature is “social,” I feel that what they are doing is denying me the possibility of being a creator of fiction. And I reaffirm myself time and again as a creator of fictional literature. If I wanted to be a journalist, I’d be a journalist, and I’m not.

E.S.F.M.: An element which triggers this type of emigration is the violence that’s being experienced in Mexico, and which you portray in Ceniza en la boca. Why did you introduce it into the novel? Is it risky for a Mexican writer to talk about this violence?

B.N.: No risk, no fun. If you don’t take risks in what you write, then why are you writing? It’s a serious question. I’m interested in the complexity of the human condition, and that has to do with violence. There’s violence in Mexico, but also in Spain; that was my approach. But there’s also violence in love, in sadness, in care. We can’t go through life creating only “good” characters, because for me, every sort of buenitud or “goodness” verges on the fascistic. To be good is to deny diversity, the complexity of every human being, but literature speaks of humanity in general, which is why it continues to be a weapon against the narratives of power.

E.S.F.M.:  The title of your book, Ceniza en la boca, relates to something that happens at the end of the novel. Did you already have that in mind before you started, or did it emerge as you were writing?

B.N.: If what you want to know is did the title come before the story, then no. The title came much later. What does strike me as important to clarify is that I’m not just an intuitive writer, I’m also methodical. I can’t write a story if I don’t know where it’s headed. Whenever I start a story, I know who the main character is, what his or her conflict is, and what ending I’m going to give him or her. If I don’t know the end of the story, then I don’t write it. I’m very bad with titles, I take a long time to find them, and I always involve a lot of people to help me decide.

E.S.F.M.: You’ve worked for various NGOs connected with human rights. Has that experience helped you to create your characters, to make them more authentic?

B.N.: I think all the life experiences I’ve had throughout my four decades have given me the tools to write what I write. The question I would ask is: How do other writers create their characters?

E.S.F.M.: The brothers of the protagonists in both your novels come to a tragic end. In Ceniza en la boca, Diego commits suicide, and in Casas vacías, the brother dies in a work accident. Was this a coincidence or is there a “hidden” meaning?

B.N.: There’s nothing hidden about it. I like the fact that you found this connection of which I was totally unaware.

E.S.F.M.: In one of your novels we read the following: “What happens to postponed dreams, the ones that don’t arrive because there’s a nightmare stuck in your brain which isn’t letting you sleep?” Your characters are immersed in tragic lives, there seems to be no hope for them. Consider the protagonist of Ceniza en la boca, or Leonel’s mother in Casas vacías. Where do you think their lives might go, once the novel ends?

B.N.: I think their life experiences give them a perspective on the world which makes them more human, and in any case, freer. It’s hard to talk about freedom, but I’ll risk it: freedom isn’t free will intended only for actions, but an awareness of the world in a Platonic sense. And in that sense, I think in the two novels I like to make an issue of the notion that it’s precisely in those places that are considered full of oppression where there are cracks and glimmers of freedom. I like the notion that pain doesn’t make you stronger, but rather wiser, but in the Platonic sense, I insist.

E.S.F.M.: In telling your stories, you use the first person. Is that a way of getting more involved in your characters? Or do you use it to reach the reader more directly?

B.N.: It’s what the stories required in order to unfold.

E.S.F.M.: Sexto Piso has published both your novels. How did your relationship with the Hispano-Mexican publisher come about?

B.N.: My then-literary agent presented me with various offers, and we chose the one we considered the best. It seemed important to me just then to be close to the Mexican publishing market, but also with editors in Spain to accompany me in the process of exploring the Spanish market which has, moreover, been very generous to me.

E.S.F.M.: Your work has been translated into several languages. Do you tend to take part in the translation of your novels?

B.N.: To the extent that the translators allow me to. Sometimes they get me involved, sometimes I don’t even find out that a book has been translated until the very last moment.

E.S.F.M.: And finally, I’d like to know, what literary projects do you have in mind for the near future?

B.N.: I’m writing the third novel, which will bring to an end what I believe is a sort of trilogy, in which I problematize themes to do with debris. We’ll see what happens with the fourth one, but at this stage, this third novel begins with one of the characters from Ceniza en la boca. But I’m in no hurry; it will emerge when it’s ready to.

Translated by Lilit Žekulin Thwaites

Photo: Mexican writer Brenda Navarro, by Noelia Olbés.

In February 2024, Arthur spoke with Bruna via Zoom about this award-winning translation and other aspects of her practice. The full video of their conversation will soon be available in English on the new LALT blog.

Arthur Malcolm Dixon: Today I’m excited to talk to a wonderful translator and writer, Bruna Dantas Lobato. She translated The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel, which won the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. It’s great to have the opportunity to talk to Bruna about this book. 

First, how did this project come to be? How did you first hear about Stênio and how did this project end up in your hands?

Bruna Dantas Lobato: People kept telling me about this book because of my interest in Northeastern literature. I grew up in the Northeast of Brazil, which is an area of the country that is marginalized, that isn’t as represented either in Brazil or abroad. And we speak in a certain way, we have a certain accent, there’s a dialect, and many cultural influences that are unique to that region. The population is made of more people of color than in other parts of the country that had different waves of European migration. We have a bigger Indigenous presence, a bigger Black community, etc. I’m very fond of the Northeast. I love everything about it. My Portuguese is accented in that way. Any Brazilianist or anyone from Brazil would say, “You talk like one of the underdogs.” It is what it is, I was born into it. 

So I’ve been trying to push more literature from that part of the country. Not always very successfully, because I hear, “It’s niche” or, “It didn’t get big recognition in Brazil,” but it wouldn’t get big recognition in Brazil, you know? It’s not like it’s a cosmopolitan white man being a flaneur in São Paulo, that’s not the kind of literature that is being made, and it shouldn’t be.

But this book did well in Brazil. I kept hearing about it, and I got a PDF from the agency that represents Stênio, and I wrote some reader’s reports for publishers. I ended up also reading some samples by other translators, and they were interesting, but they mostly erased the fact that the book was spoken in a certain way. There is a spoken quality to the prose, and it is very much written in the Portuguese I grew up speaking. It’s not the dominant, national-TV Portuguese. 

So I wanted to highlight that, and I ended up getting an email from Michael Wise, the editor at New Vessel Press, saying that he was interested in buying the rights to the book. He wanted to know if I had a take on this kind of dialect, what would I do differently, or how could I capture this dialect in English? I did a little sample for him and wrote quite the long treatise explaining my ideas and what I thought was important to privilege, and that’s how the book came to me.

A.M.D.: What were some of the things you chose to privilege? How did you emphasize elements of a very specific place while changing the language? 

B.D.L.: Well, not a single word has remained, but all the words remain. First, I didn’t want to write the dialect in a way that was foreign just for foreignness’s sake. To me, what is interesting about the Northeastern way of speaking is not that it sounds different from dominant Brazilian Portuguese, but that it’s witty and self-deprecating and poetic and full of imagery and sometimes full of exaggeration: everything is huge and aphoristic. That’s what I wanted to highlight. And there’s an oral quality to it. Everything needed to sound very literary, very written—because it is a very literary book—but it also needed to sound spoken, like this could be somebody waxing poetic at home or on the phone telling their life story. That was my goal. 

A couple of different kinds of imagery were really important to me. One was the river. There are all these floods and rivers and drownings and these different images there, in a place that is marked by droughts, so it’s quite the counterpoint to how the region has been portrayed before. I saw the crossing of the river—and there is a cross that marks the river as well, a physical cross—I saw that as representing the book itself. It needs to cascade and flow and follow its course in its own way. That’s not something I ascribed to the book, it’s already built into the prose. You saw the punctuation, the unusual stream of consciousness: that is how the book was written. That was important to me.

It was also important that a character like Suzzanný, who’s hyperbolic and noisy, could be noisy in her own way. She has two labels that are pretty heavy on her shoulders: one is that she’s travesti and the other is that she’s from the Northeast, and a person of color and all of that, so she needed to be loud in a way that was not just going to be Black or just travesti or just Northeastern: it needed to be all her own. This is pretty much what I did with all the characters. I didn’t want to think, “Oh, they’re supposed to be a certain way, this is signalling Northeast, so I’m going to go in that direction.” That might have meant making them sound folksy, as if they were from the American South or something like that. Instead, I wanted them to seem invested in language. 

A.M.D.: I’d like to hear more about your own novel and other writing projects. To what extent do you differentiate between the practices of translation and writing? Do you feel you’re doing something similar when you do these two things, or do you see them as completely separate disciplines?

B.D.L.: I do think I’m doing something similar, though when I’m translating I’m writing on style alone, which is every writer’s dream, to just be surfing on words. And, of course, in my own writing, I have to take care of the content. For example, there are structural concerns: it needs to rush a certain way and escalate a certain way and land with this particular emotional effect. Those are the same concerns I have when translating, it’s just that I’m using slightly different material. In my own writing I think, “Okay, maybe I need a more dramatic outburst from this character,” while as a translator I think, “Maybe here I need to switch out this sentence or I didn’t do a good enough job with this character’s words because I’m not getting enough of the outburst that Stênio put in.” They go hand-in-hand.

My own novel is also short. I guess that’s in line with what’s in vogue in Latin America. I like a short novel. Mine is about a young Brazilian woman’s first year at an American college and the relationship she forges with her mother over video calls. Long before the Zoom era, so many of us were already celebrating the holidays over the computer. I wanted to use a space like this one, the split-screen, as a sort of stage. It’s all the characters can see of each other, and what can we do with that? I really loved it, I thought it was an experimental, form-oriented approach, and it was an interesting way for me to explore loneliness, financial precarity, foreignness, all of that. And I’m very dialogue-driven, so all of that is in there. But it doesn’t have the kind of plot that Stênio’s book has. They have completely different intentions. It’s not meant to be that expansive, to show a character’s entire life from youth to old age. It has completely different ambitions. As much as we share a style, or at least an interest in style and poetics, and we have a solid sense of aesthetics for our writing, we are using completely different tools. That’s fun. 

But translation is a part of my process. There’s one short story by Caio Fernando Abreu that takes place entirely over the phone, and I adore that story. It taught me a lot about how to sustain a narrative with only two characters, and with limited physicality—one person can hear the other one coughing, or clearing her throat, or making a sound, and they think, “I wonder if she’s playing with the cord.” Many other stories I’ve translated have taught me a great deal. Stênio has certainly taught me a great deal as well, though I translated his book after I was done with my novel. But maybe my next novel will use some of his influence too.

A.M.D.: Speaking of Caio Fernando Abreu, we featured an excerpt from your translation of Moldy Strawberries, which is now out from Archipelago Books, in a previous issue of LALT. Caio Fernando Abreu was a key writer of queer literature from Brazil, and The Words That Remain is a standard-bearer of that literature. Do you see that as an important part of your practice? Why should these voices be brought from Brazil to English-speaking readers?

B.D.L.: I didn’t set out to translate only queer literature, but I think my interests are clear. In a way, it chose me. I’m drawn to that kind of perspective. I’m drawn to books that show a side of Brazil I don’t see often, mostly because I see the translator as a curator. I have a lot of responsibility in choosing the very limited facets of Brazil to which we have access in English, and I usually go for the books I haven’t had the chance to see in English yet. Queer books are a big part of that. Translating a book from the eighties that’s known for being cosmopolitan and going through the AIDS crisis and all of that felt like an important dialogue for American literature to have with Latin American literature. I can’t believe Caio hadn’t been translated widely before—it still shocks me. But I think a lot of it has to do with homophobia. Not just on the translator’s part, but the general market not being welcoming or prepared for it. Translators like Gregory Rabassa touched on all the authors around Caio and never touched him. So there was some kind of barrier there, I think.

I’ve since worked on other queer books. I just finished one, I’m still working on a title in English: E se eu Fosse Puta by Amara Moira. It’s a trans sex worker’s memoir. In many ways I’ve ended up writing and researching and doing a lot of translating around queerness or around identity in general. I also translated The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório, a book about race in the south of Brazil—the whitest part, really. It’s about a Black man in this very white place and police brutality and all of that. All these books around identity show Brazil in a way that might not be the easiest to market or reconcile—those are the books I tend to be drawn to. And I’m very happy and privileged to be working on books around queerness.

A.M.D.: Speaking of unfair biases, for many years we’ve been told people should translate into their “native language.” But now a lot of people are realizing that’s not the case: people can translate in all different directions. What’s the importance of recognizing the work of translators like yourself, who are translating books and languages from their own place of origin?

B.D.L.: I love talking about this. There are many entry points we can have into a text. For example, I’m not a queer person and I translate queer texts. My entry point for that, a lot of the time, is being an immigrant. I understand how this character feels lonely or excluded. I may have different experiences I’m drawing from, the way an actor might draw from personal experiences of grief to render grief they have not experienced. Of course, it’s perfectly fine for anybody to translate books from the Northeast, but maybe I will bring something they wouldn’t. In the same way, Toni Morrison writes in Beloved about the African-American experience in ways I can imagine, but I can’t feel. I can empathize, but I can’t know. I think there is great value in that too. 

As for my relationship with the English language, I think I am a better translator for being a foreigner. I think my English is thoughtful in different ways. I think when it’s just me and the page, when I’m writing and there isn’t an audience in front of me, my relationship with the language has to do with hearing it, feeling it, it’s sensual, it’s textured, it’s artistic. Honestly, it was being a foreigner that made me so self-aware of language, of syntax, of shifting connotations and the weight of a different word if I shift the order around. All of that. 

The Words That Remain is available now from New Vessel Press. Watch out for these other titles in translation by Bruna Dantas Lobato:

• The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório (Charco Press)

• Tokio Suite by Giovana Madalosso (Europa Editions)

• E se eu Fosse Puta by Amara Moira (Feminist Press, English title TBA)

• No Point In Dying by Francisco Maciel (New Vessel Press)

And don’t miss Bruna’s own novel, Blue Light Hours, coming this October from Grove Atlantic!

Photo: Brazilian writer and translator Bruna Dantas Lobato, by Ashley Pieper.

Bruna Dantas Lobato is a writer and translator. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, and The Common. In 2023, she was awarded the National Book Award in Translated Literature for The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel. She was born and raised in Natal, Brazil, and teaches at Grinnell College. Her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, is forthcoming in October 2024 from Grove Atlantic.

Irina Troconis: The title of the first chapter, “Lengua madre,” which is also the title of the collection, alludes to a sense of community and belonging that the remaining chapters seem to both confirm and destabilize. That double game is reflected in the cover image, which belongs to the photographic series Pending Memories by Cuban artist Adrián Fernández, in which we see a structure that both clashes with the landscape and completes it, in the characters of Lengua materna—all imperfectly Cuban—and in its style, which is not that of a traditional essay, instead combines the essay format with fiction, autofiction, biography, and autobiography, resulting in a sort of speculative nonfiction. Why did you choose to use this format? What does it allow you to say and do that any of the above genres, individually, does not?

Osdany Morales: A few days ago I received an anonymous package. Something as simple as the absence of a sender is useful for moving us to the horror genre and creating the discomfort of an unexpected gift. It didn’t have an apartment number either. I saw it in the entryway, and as soon as I read my name, I picked it up automatically as if it were something I had ordered; it wasn’t until I opened it that the fear began to rise up. You could describe it as a cigar box with an acrylic lid, which instead of cigars contained a miniature bookcase, empty, that you were supposed to fill with the books included in the package. And when you’re done putting everything in place, you close the lid and shake it until all the books fall out; then you can put them back again however you like or leave them as they are. It was an anxiety bookshelf; a name that I can now say with complete naturalness, but which at the time I was only able to define by googling the object I had in front of me. Who sent me an anxiety bookshelf anonymously? As our conversation grew closer, I thought of the gift as a possible definition of national literature: a bookshelf that you arrive at without looking for it, and the most intuitive thing you can do with the anguish of its existence is to shake, alter, and then abandon it in some other order. I still don’t know who sent it.

It’s also useful for genres. The essay strives to be transparent, to arrive at the final consequences of an idea, and to demonstrate the strategies by which it advances to achieve it (its bibliographical appendix is an invitation to its reliability). For its part, fiction tends toward opaqueness, because one of its desires is infinity, the illusion that the reader finishes the book and that reality continues to exist elsewhere; it’s infinite not because its story continues but because even if everything in it ends, even so, we’re not part of its world. Papyrus was a sequence of fictions that an essay seeped in among; here the materials reverse that proportion, that is, a book of essays in which a fiction appears. And, yes, Adrián Fernández’s work is magnificent. He achieves a perfect balance between fiction and essay, taking as essay the visibility of the national landscape, and fiction being the artifact assembled from other fragments that weren’t there, announcing something we can only imagine. The title of his series, Pending Memories, also adjusts to a literature where, like imperfect national readers, we accumulate several memories yet to be recalled.

I.T.: Thinking a bit more about the subject of the national, in the chapter “Punto de fuga” you quote an interview with Guillermo Cabrera Infante in which he responds to a question asked about his unexpected, according to the interviewer, inclination toward eighteenth-century satire, as follows: “Look, my friend, who knows what to expect from a Cuban writer, or any writer anywhere?” And then you write: “You can expect anything from Cabrera Infante, because he can do anything.” This moment when we ask ourselves about the Cuban, or the Cubanness of literature, or Cuban literature, reappears when you mention Severo Sarduy (who talks about “writing in Cuban”) and in your reflection on a certain national gestuality in the face of reading that makes this a reading “in glimpses.” My question is: How do you negotiate in Lengua materna the relationship between national literature and world literature (whose canon includes several of the writers you mention, such as Italo Calvino and Gustave Flaubert)? What do you think is expected today of a Cuban writer and Cuban literature?

O.M.: As readers, for us there was a superimposition of two maps: one that separated national literature from world literature, and another, added to this one, that defined a border of accessibility, non-existence, or visibility between local and foreign publications. National reading was delimited by these two noncoinciding cartographies. Being a Cuban author did not guarantee inhabiting both territories. Reinaldo Arenas was a Cuban writer and his books were not available anywhere; Gabriel García Márquez was a foreign author and there was a local edition of almost all of his works. Thus, national authors could become as distant as if they were foreigners, and others were nationalized at the discretion of the state publishing houses. In preuniversity, along with the single copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, we’d also pass around Three Trapped Tigers and Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada, and read them simultaneously as both Cuban and foreign novels. Of those you mention, Flaubert was accessible in old editions, Calvino was more difficult to find. I think the phrase with which Cabrera Infante opens his interview for The Paris Review still holds true; when faced with a Cuban writer, it’s best not to know what to expect.

I.T.: The titles of the three sections that make up Lengua materna (“Duelo,” “Sueños,” and “Fuga”) lead us to think of a “between” (between people/characters, between realities, between spaces) that produces a certain spectrality that’s never resolved or exorcised and that at various moments permeates the exiled condition of the characters. What relation do you see between the spectral and exile? Between memory and exile? 

O.M.: Somewhat like the spectrality of not having had this conversation in person and now redoing it in writing, the past is ghostlike to the extent that it is no longer here and is still here. Exile allows us to see the ghost better, which we all have, but those who have not experienced that severing are perhaps more unprepared for its appearance; it would also be a mistake to consider that it’s the only past, that is, the only time that can establish a specter. In “Exilio e insomnio,” I think that’s the text you’re referring to, I was interested in reading how the dream, having become a problem of successive migrations, could acquire specific and contradictory forms. In Miami, Lydia Cabrera writes a book about her methods to teleport herself to Cuba on sleepless nights, a desire difficult to imagine today, where the same place returns to dreams in the genre of a nightmare with no way out. Do you dream that you’re in Venezuela?

I.T.: Perhaps I did during the first years I lived outside the country, but I don’t remember anymore. What I do know is that nowadays I only dream I am in Venezuela when I am in Venezuela: a result, I think, of Venezuelan bureaucratic violence that obsessively manufactures increasingly creative obstacles to prevent those of us who are outside the country from being  able (or wanting, or dreaming) to return. And even when I dream I’m in Venezuela, I do so in a mixture of languages, which takes away any illusion of belonging. Which brings me to the theme of translation, which has been central to all your work and appears here again. In “Tres traductores,” for example, you mention that to translate Spanish is to invent a plural language that turns readers into outsiders. What relationship do you see between translation and the mother tongue? Can such a language be translated? Is the mother tongue a plural language?

O.M.: As an expression, “mother tongue” acquires various meanings throughout the book. Sometimes it is textually a language, or its reflection in the translations made by Cuban writers; at other times it is the availability of a writing to be part of our experience as readers. I think, by giving the book that title, I was referring to the possibility of exploring national literature (the anxiety bookshelf) as a mother tongue. I have also thought about a language that does not pass through speech, but through the silence of reading, as a sound of sight, a familiarity with a register that exists only on the page and that we would reject in orality, a familiar silence in the letter, but a silence that we know as a language of origin. 

I.T.: Tell us a little about the archive, if not forgotten, at least peripheral, which serves as a trigger in several of the chapters and which includes remarkably diverse materials, such as the script of the film Vanishing Point and the first scientific book written in Cuba. How did you make that selection? Why include them as part of the creation of this hybrid genre? Did you leave anything out that you would have liked to include?

O.M.: Just like the repetition of Cuba in the flaps of Calvino’s books, Vanishing Point persists in Cabrera Infante’s flaps. They’re interstices where the book as an object ends and the writing remains in that outer limit that is the flap. The archive, as a less stable place than its institution, is also dispersed in those notes, waiting to be assimilated. My selection was based on reading from minute fragments: What could be behind the unexpected place of birth, the script that repeats itself passively in the author’s bio, behind a brief scene in a work apparently totally read, in the fate of secondary characters, in the resistant solutions of translations, in scientific or administrative books from centuries ago when the discourse loses its usefulness and becomes literature. I think everything I wanted to include is there. I was also looking for a balance that would save it from being a book about eccentric examples and instead make known books eccentric, in order to reread them.

I.T.: I think part of that gesture of making the known eccentric occurs through the play with the animal. In “Doce animales,” you say, “When an animal appears in literature […], we think we are attending a concert in its honor and we end up reading about our extinction.” In Lengua materna, many animals appear, in that chapter and in others where we read about dogs, mosquitoes, roosters, swallows, etc. What becomes extinct with the appearance of these animals? And, more generally, what role does the animal play in this text (in relation to, for example, language, translation, and the archive)?

O.M.: The animal is literature’s other because it cannot write; man could be the animal that writes. Because of this ambiguous quality, its inscriptions always create a resistant zone in which to project the limits of writing. With their appearances we become extinct, we quarantine ourselves, we mutate, we cease to be who we were. In the book, their presence describes a journey through national literature by way of the appearance of some beasts. And, in other cases, they push the essay to the fiction of the archive, following a note in the Havana press of the eighteenth century that records a nest of swallows, following the connection between Cuba and the parrot in a famous story by Flaubert.

I.T.: Finally, speaking of the relationship between Flaubert and George Sand, you ask the great question “for whom does one write?” Now I want to ask you the same question, thinking about this collection and how the hybrid genre you create in it may—or may not—create a reader who is also hybrid and impertinent (who does not belong totally or perfectly). 

O.M.: I’ll read the part where the question appears, with the hope that what I’ve written better resolves the impromptu answer: 

His friend, the writer George Sand, had pointed out to him the rationality of his fictions, the inability of the cruelties (the sense of humor) of realism to excite the reader. Flaubert wrote this story to prove the opposite. “I want to arouse pity, to make sensitive souls weep, being one such soul myself” (translated from the original French by F. Brown). 

But its reader dies before he finishes “A Simple Heart.” In the same letter where he shares the plot he details the burial; he remembers her weeping and the rain: “It resembled a chapter of one of her books.” 

The situation surreptitiously answers the renewable question: for whom does one write? The anecdote reflects the fleeting traits of the reader. Flaubert was writing the story for George Sand, but she dies before he finishes it; the writer could have stopped writing, put down the pen, said at this point, my friend has died and will never read “A Simple Heart,” why go on? However, he finishes it, knowing that she will not read it. He perfects it, even, because he’s sure that his reader, the only one who had considered his previous book, The Temptation of St. Anthony, a masterpiece, will not be attentive to his sentences. It could be said that he continues to write because if he doesn’t finish it, she would be deader for him…, but that is only the profile of an offering. To finish writing, according to the terms in which the writing of “A Simple Heart” is completed, is the guarantee that reading occurs elsewhere, in an unreachable place, that of our ghosts. Death and reading are not the same, but the dead and the reader are equally inaccessible, and that distance is only established when the writing is finished.

Translated by George Henson

Photo: Cuban writer Osdany Morales.

In her books Cuerpo extraño (Literal Publishing, 2013), Cuaderno de faros (Tierra Adentro, 2017), Línea nigra (Almadía, 2021), and Punto de cruz (Almadía, 2021), there converge themes such as motherhood, bodies, loneliness, family, isolation and, among them all, many questions. Through diaries and fragments—which she considers versatile literary tools—and explorations on themes that preoccupy her, Jazmina Barrera has built a body of work that today is read in five languages and with great attention.

Here we converse with the author about her work, the points of convergence between her books, and the current state of Latin American literature.

Juan Camilo Rincón & Natalia Consuegra: Regarding some of your works, you mention an intersection that transcends genre, that what some call a novel you consider an essay, uncoupled from any academic connotations or categorial assertions…

Jazmina Barrera: I think what I associate immediately with the essay is freedom. I studied in a primary school outside of Mexico City where they used a system called Freinet. One of the elements of that system is that, every so often, the teacher asked us to do a free write; they didn’t say a story, an essay… They said: a free write. Then we printed those texts, because we had little movable-type printers, and we made books. I remember perfectly the first text of mine that was printed and the excitement of being able to share my ideas, the collective creation, writing as a game, the satisfaction of having a product that emerged from your creativity. That’s when I started to associate writing with pleasure and with freedom, a free write. I feel like I still write free texts. And then in canonical texts, which we have to understand are subjective definitions, classifications that we build out of texts that already exist… From those texts we decide to make classifications. Sometimes it seems like the classifications exist prior to literature, but that’s not true. First come the texts and later the classification, and we have all the freedom possible to write those texts. We can take any literary tool that we associate with the novel, the essay, poetry, they’re there and we can use them. Of course there are certain rules of the game and those are different for every person, in every country, in every culture. For example, the “memoir” genre is something that in Spanish we hardly ever use, maybe we would instead call it “essay.” Our classification of nonfiction is distinct from the English-speaking world’s. So we must understand that these are subjective, cultural classifications and they operate like the rules of a game; for some people they work for their writing or as a departure point for their writing. They don’t work for me; they disorient me, upset me, constrain me. I prefer to think very openly about what I want to say and the literary tools I need to say it. And that, what I do, I call “essay,” because in the essay we find experimentation, process, staging. On the other hand, the word “novel” tells me nothing; it speaks of novelty, something that for me is a value that’s not very useful in writing. And that’s why I think every good book is an essay; on the other hand, a novel… I don’t know.

C. R. & N. C.: Right, to impose a label and a genre ends up limiting the expressive possibilities. It can be complicated for writers as well as for readers…

J.B.: Yes, I think it’s a category that works above all for marketing. It tells the booksellers where to put them and it works for some authors who even play with it, who want to write a novel thinking of the possibilities of the novel, bringing it to its limit, responding to a tradition. There’s lots of people for whom it really does work. It’s like writing a sonnet within those rules; for plenty of people it works and they do it really well, but we can see that for some it doesn’t. As opposed to, for example, visual arts, where alternative media have existed for a long time, or there’s more flexibility for hybridity, the literary industry is still much more ordered according to these canonical genres. If you’re competing for a prize, you have to select a category; if you apply for a master’s program, you have to select a category. And it turns out there’s much more than just that.

C. R. & N. C.: Turning to your books, in Línea nigra you say that one needs a tribe for childrearing, and in Punto de cruz you suggest that weaving is richer as a collective exercise. Is there a dialogue within your body of work? When you reread it, do you find that thread?

J.B.: Well, I don’t read and reread myself; it’s more like I published the book and said goodbye. Unless I have to do it for some specific reason, I prefer not to go back. César Aira said each book is corrected with the next one, and I have faith that that’s true. But I do think there are, of course, like everyone has, manias, obsessions, even defects that repeat from one book to another. I think I can visualize almost all of my books like a collection. I think of it that way because my mother is a painter and my father is a museologist, so the idea of a collection has always been very present in my life; I have a book that is a collection of lighthouses; I have a book that is a collection of stories and visual works that talk about birth, pregnancy, and breastfeeding; I have another book that has a collection of memories, on the one hand, and a sampler of ideas and references that have to do with embroidery in many expressions around the world and in different times. So I think, in that sense, all are books that go from the subjective to the collective, from the personal to the political, and that use fragments also, in different ways and with different pretexts. I’ve always found some motive to make my books fragmentary.

C. R. & N. C.: Among those fragments appears the family. How does that work in and for your writing?

J.B.: Family, in my case, has always been a broad term. I grew up with my mother and my father, but I never had siblings; my cousins are the closest to that. As a girl I was very close with my paternal grandmother, who lived close to my house, and also to my maternal grandmother and grandfather, with whom I spent every weekend. My aunts were very important in my life, my second cousins. It’s an extensive family that has been fundamental in my life, not only in my emotional development, but also in my intellectual development, and now that I have a child it is also a very important part of my support network. Of course, my family also had cats, dogs, friends… I believe in chosen family, and sometimes you can choose within that family that is your biological family, sometimes not. I think family is a very important component of our identity. Its history, its layout, its attitude, its lexicon, as Natalia Ginzburg would say, influence in a determining way the people we are, for better or for worse; often they work as a counter-example. Now that I am a mother, they are also the primary reference point I have for childrearing and caregiving.

C. R. & N. C.: How have you addressed that topic in your literature?

J.B.: In my work, family is above all a group of stories, the ones I feel closest to and that touch me emotionally the most directly, and that have influenced the people around me and who I am. I use those stories as literary material, and often I put them into dialogue with other things, with the outside world, with other stories, other families and lots of other ideas. I go back to Natalia Ginzburg with her book Léxico familiar, which to me is a wonderful example of what you can do with family in literature, how family creates our first language. For example, to say we speak the same language is always an exaggeration, because there are always phrases we don’t understand, words we don’t know, and with family we share more words, more sayings, more local jokes, that maybe mean something different to us than to the rest of the world.

C. R. & N. C.: Do you think we have achieved a fluid dialogue between our literatures, at least in Latin America? 

J.B.: I think we are more and more independent from Spain, although still the two largest Spanish-language publishing houses have their headquarters there. This fact, clearly, determines to a large extent what we read and how we read. I think the hope here is in independent presses, because it seems to me that they are the ones who have made sure to investigate, read, look for what’s happening in other countries, make rights trades, co-editions, editorial lines that very explicitly look for a Latin American catalogue, like the case of Laguna in Colombia, for example. Although there are initiatives at large presses as well: at Random House there’s Mapa de Lenguas, which possibly brings more authors to new places, but I think it’s still lacking.

C. R. & N. C.: How do you read literature that addresses violence? Someone spoke about the importance of those books that now call things by their names (in the case of femicides, for example). Are we facing new narrative forms?

J.B.: I don’t know. The dilemmas are still the same as always. Whether or not to aestheticize violence, whether to address it in a literal, crude, and stark manner or in a more indirect and subtle manner… I think the aesthetic and ethical dilemmas are still the same. Possibly, as we were saying, women have more freedom to write about these topics than they had before… But still, some of the books I like most lately are not that far from what Faulkner would do. To talk about novelty in literature is very complicated for me because there are things that come and go. We really feed on what existed in the past, and I think, in the case of violence, there is a new vocabulary to talk about it, but I’m not so sure that literature in particular has a direct effect. I think language that comes from academia and the social sciences, in part, is very useful and indispensable to name things we didn’t name before. Nevertheless, I also think that language sometimes alienates, intimidates, complicates, and confuses a lot of people. I, at least, when I write, always try to avoid that vocabulary, because I think doing that allows me to reach more people. I think that has been an error of the left in recent times: maybe we stay too much in our own world and we assume everyone talks like we do, so it becomes hard for us to open up, to reach other audiences and convince more people of the things of which they still need to be convinced.

Translated by Madeleine Arenivar

Photo: Mexican writer Jazmina Barrera.

Denise Kripper: La librería y la diosa tells the story of two transformations, two stories marked by desire: leaving the first, family home; and building a new one. Books punctuate the narrative, both of becoming a bookseller, and a mother. What’s the relationship between the fertile and communal literary space that the bookstore Lata Peinada opened up for you and the fertility challenges that you faced in your path to motherhood?

Paula Vázquez: Your question already contains the root of my answer. At the beginning, the bookstore appeared in the text only as the daily background that witnessed the story of my quest (and losses) that marked the beginning of my motherhood process. But then I had an epiphany: the bookstore had been an essential part of the discovery of a new kind of desire for me, a new way of living, where there was indeed a space for becoming a mother. That’s why in the book there are ultimately three threads: the opening of the bookstore, a reflection on pottery, and the desire for motherhood. In these three elements, the collective, the communal, and the genealogical are key. 

D.K.: Lata Peinada was founded with the explicit goal of bringing to Spain the catalogs of independent Latin American publishing houses, that is, books that are otherwise not available there. The bookstore then offers an “arrow in the opposite direction of many ships for hundreds of years.” I’m interested in learning more about how we’re being read in Spain, and more specifically in Catalunya. Is the main audience of the bookstore Latin Americans who live there, or is there a local audience interested in its offerings? Who are some of your bestselling authors and why do you think that is?

P.V.: There are many Catalonians, and Spanish people in general, as well as other Europeans who live in Barcelona or who are simply passing by, who are regular customers or come specifically to visit us. In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in Europe in Latin American literature, although it’s not uncommon for labels to come up that reduce very different writing in our continent to certain phenomena. The exoticizing of violence could be one of the current reductionist lenses of the times. That’s why our project seeks to always open up that viewpoint and engage in the circulation of diverse writing, both contemporary and from the past. What sells the most can be pretty eclectic. This year, for example, one of our bestselling books was El cielo de la selva by Elaine Vilar Madruga. She’s a fantastic writer, and very prolific too, so I’m sure we’ll have more books by her soon. But in this case, the value of this novel was recognized. Babelia even included it in their classic, annual ranking. Also a bestselling book was La compulsión autobiográfica, an essay by a Mexican author called César Tejeda, published by Alacraña, which we brought specifically for our book club. That’s where our work of spreading the word comes to fruition, when a good book finds new readers. 

D.K.: In this memoir there’s also a lot of reflection on the book as medium, on the writing process, on naming as an exercise. The literary workshop by Fabián Casas you attended is key in this regard. Referring to poetry, you remember him saying “a poem needs to create a state of uncertainty, not an answer.” And your book indeed is full of uncertainties. Everything is a gamble: opening a bookstore in another country, bringing a child into the world, even putting a pottery piece in the oven. How can we “make room for uncertainty” in this time and era?

P.V.: It’s always an exercise, a question. In my case, it was first about dismantling a very strong rhetoric around control, certainty, definitions about the world and my own life. We are living in a time very much marked by definitions of who we are, so the challenge is, once again, an opposition exercise, not without resistance, of finding an edge to open up a space, expand the label of what’s our own and do some digging in the collective, in all that surrounds us, and what came before us. Identity can be a poor experience. It’s not about jumping into the void either, it’s really about finding a behavior away from the rationality of productivity, but maybe it doesn’t need to be defined or named, and that’s how it can keep the mystery, or as Fabián used to say, the uncertainty required by poetry. 

D.K.: Mishal’s pottery workshop is the other key space in your book, one that inaugurates the possibility of creating in silence. It’s in this space, prime for listening, that you first allow yourself to verbalize what was going on with you, open up about your miscarriages, and find a different reaction in those around you. At several times in the book, you mention your inability to write, to move forward with the diary you were keeping. I wonder then about those spaces, pauses, silences. What did those moments allow you to write later on?

P.V.: Writing is so paradoxical, because it implies silence and words, listening and voice. But in the face of certain very painful events that created deep breaks in my life, such as the death of my mother or my miscarriages, my writing only came to me in fragments, like remains of a lost world. In those moments, I needed to seek refuge in my body, go to yoga, or do pottery in this case. I don’t assign much weight to silence in those settings but to the turning on of the body’s potency, which puts things forward both in the world and in my life.  

D.K.: Your pottery practice goes hand in hand with your motherhood, linked by common threads: care; patience; frustration; what’s yours, made by you, but yet is something different, new. I think about your pottery pieces on display in your home, but also other everyday objects that served an analogous function: your aunt’s inaccessible books, your mother’s tablecloths, your niece’s jacarandas. Tell me a little bit about your relationship with those objects around you.

P.V.: Yes, I keep and care for objects and plants as if they were amulets. I assign them power or essence. It’s kind of embarrassing to describe it in those terms, and I’m also not sure what it means to do so, to have embodied material elements around me. It’s a kind of inventory of roots, of important moments; foundations of my life that can take shape in anything: a shirt that belonged to my mother and which I wore to her funeral because I was all out of clean clothes, a gold-leaf glass jug which belonged to my great-grandmother, a huge agave named Pocho, the sculpture of the goddess, the dictionary I received as a present for my sixth birthday. I think my tattoos also work in that way. 

D.K.: And speaking of objects, in Lata Peinada there is a section devoted to “gems,” which includes first editions, impossible-to-find books. What are some of the gems on your personal shelves? What books relate to your emotional relationship and your indestructible bond with books?

P.V.: My dictionary, the red-cover Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado, which I got for my sixth birthday, some first editions of Plástico cruel by José Sbarra; of Extracción de la piedra de la locura by Pizarnik; Borges by Bioy; of Los pichiciegos by Fogwill; of El affair Skeffington by María Moreno. I used to have a first edition of Obsesión del espacio by Ricardo Zelarayán, author of Lata Peinada, an amazing poetry collection, and I gifted it to Caetano Veloso this one time I had to present him with an award. I’m now looking to buy another copy again, but I haven’t had much luck yet. I also have books that I love because they’re all underlined and because they remind me I found in them something that shook me: Las palmeras salvajes by Faulkner; Cien años de soledad by García Márquez; La furia by Silvina Ocampo, and more recently, I can name Apolo cupisnique by Mario Montalbetti; A lo lejos by Hernán Díaz; and La cresta de ilión by Cristina Rivera Garza.

D.K.: In La librería y la diosa you discuss recommending books (a daily occurrence at a bookstore) almost like an act of love. What are the books you currently recommend and why?

P.V.: El cielo de la selva by Elaine Vilar Madruga, a very prolific, unruly author, who creates very peculiar universes, and whose language is always excessive, effusive, joyful. She has a previous novel (published in Spain with a prologue by Cristina Morales) called La tiranía de las moscas, which is also great. A lo lejos by Hernán Díaz, is a novel deeply rooted in the Argentine literary tradition, and it’s a lot better than the more celebrated and award-winning Fortuna. Limpia by Alia Trabucco Zerán, a Chilean author who will undoubtedly be among the best things we’ll read in the future. El occiso by María Virginia Estenssoro, and La amortajada by María Luisa Bombal, both recently republished, are essential readings as predecessors of Latin American fantastic literature. 

D.K.: In November of 2023, after almost three years, the Lata Peinada branch in Madrid closed its doors. In the book, your business partner Ezequiel Naya suggests the idea of opening a branch in Buenos Aires, and you both entertain it. What’s next for the bookstore?

P.V.: We’re going back to the clay, to our beginnings of friendship and literature. Let’s see where we find our fire again and what the result of that is this time. 

Translated by Denise Kripper

Photo: Argentine writer and bookseller Paula Vázquez.

Paula Vázquez (Provincia de Buenos Aires, 1984) is a writer, bookseller, and cultural manager. She’s the co-founder of Lata Peinada, a bookstore devoted exclusively to Latin American literature in Barcelona. She’s the author of the short-story collection La suerte de las mujeres (2017) and the novel Las estrellas (2020). Her work has appeared in Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, Infobae, Pliego Suelto, and Revista Crisis, among others. La librería y la diosa (Lumen, 2023) is her latest book. 

Rodrigo Figueroa: You Dreamed of Empires is a novel that shows us an alternative history of a crucial moment in the foundation of Mexico. Why is it so important for fiction to engage in counter-histories like these? 

Álvaro Enrigue: It’s a game. Fiction, literature—if my books can be said to attain the status of literature—is always a game. A game guided by political concerns and that draws on a tradition, but still a game at the end of the day. And a fundamental element of all games is wishing. Whoever plays agrees to temporarily replace the hierarchies and demands of productivity that govern our lives with another system of rules and hierarchies that allow us to imagine a different order of things. That’s what makes literature important. It’s a cliché, but it also happens to be true: there is nothing more serious than a game, even if we die of laughter playing it. The idea of shaking up history through fiction in order to attain a fresh perspective on the present is fundamentally based on wishing. Let’s say the coin toss between Moctezuma and Cortés had come up suns instead of eagles. Maybe then we’d be able to see a way through one or several of the problems that seem insurmountable to us in our present reality. Imagine what a joy it might have been, a world in which Europeans had stayed in Europe, colonizing only themselves and attacking each other and extracting resources to their hearts’ content from the Carpathians and the Pyrenees. There would of course still be insurmountable problems—Americans also colonized one another and attacked one another—but perhaps the world in which we live, and which is now disappearing from beneath our feet, would be a little better off. American societies had a concern for equality that European societies didn’t acquire until the eighteenth century and which they didn’t act upon until the twentieth, for example.  

No doubt there would still be racism, but it would not be the sole criterion for deciding who has access to greater life chances and who does not. Likewise, the environmental concerns that began to arise in the 1970s were already a fundamental part of everyday political decision-making in America before the European invasion, and so on. You Dreamed of Empires is a political meditation—serious and serene—on the world that grew out of the first contact between Europe and America, but it is also a game. People can read it however they want, but I can tell you that I wrote it thinking of a slapstick opera about how ridiculous Western values appear when viewed out of context, as a comedy of errors, or as another chapter in the mythic battle between punks and rockers, which the punks will finally win.  

R.F.: Gerónimo de Aguilar and Jazmín Caldera are two characters who straddle two worlds, showing they are not as different as we are led to believe. How do these characters function in the novel and how do they differ? 

A.E.: I imagine talking to the novelist kills the novel. Caldera and Aguilar are characters, but they are also functions. Jazmín has a broad and cultivated sensibility; he is a renaissance-era victim, but with the ambiguities and nostalgias of the modern temperament. And within him lies the germ of another way of seeing the world with which a more or less enlightened, progressive person can identify. His disagreements with the project of Cortés and Alvarado could be interpreted as drawing on Las Casas, Mariátegui, and the Zapatistas, or whatever. He can see things that other Spaniards can’t and he doesn’t like the idea of the prodigious floating city of the Tenochcas going to shit to satisfy the confused ambitions of the brute Cortés. It’s all part of the internal logic of the novel: the historical Cortés was a war criminal, but he was no fool and, in fact, he always regretted the destruction of Tenochtitlan for which he was responsible. In his fourth letter to Charles I, he argues that if the extermination of natives and the destruction of indigenous communities continues, the project of constituting New Spain as a profitable territory will be doomed. His concern is only with exploitation, but it reveals the same underlying anxiety from which Las Casas’ thinking also derived. Aguilar is the translator; he translates words, but he also mediates between cultures—including our own, which sees things differently from how the Europeans and the Americans of 1519 saw things. He translates for the Spanish, but also for the readers. He, specifically, has an important aesthetic function for me: he is an infiltrator who lives in the abyss between the two worlds, a shaman, a punk among the rockers. Along with Cuauhtémoc, he is the character who owes the most to the thousands of comics I read as a child because of my terrible respiratory problems. I missed a lot of school and my parents went to work early each morning. My mother was a lab technician in a public hospital; she couldn’t stay at home to prepare herbal infusions for a kid with an earache. My father was also a public employee. I stayed in our apartment in Nápoles, supervised by a neighbor who kept an eye on me and in the unbeatable company of piles of comic books.   

R.F.: Atotoxtli gives Malinalli or La Malinche the opportunity to change sides. Malinalli is a much-reviled figure in Mexican history, but she rejects the opportunity. What is the significance of these two women in the novel? They do become close friends, but it seems their destinies will be divided in the future.  

A.E.: My kids always outsmart me. I do my best, but at the end of the day I am a fifty-something criollo educated during the foulest period of Mexican revolutionary nationalism. They are progressive by nature and I listen to them attentively. When I was writing, one of them set me a test. Are there strong female characters? I replied that although Cortés and Moctezuma feature in the novel, Malinalli and Atotoxtli are much more important than either. Ah, he said, but they are wives. That’s the way it was, I replied. So he goes Mm-hmm and says: that’s the way it was? And after a pause that was as probing as it was humiliating, he goes: And do they even talk to each other? Without meaning to, he provided the key piece to how the story was going to be resolved. I worked my way backwards through the manuscript and set up the conditions for Mallinali and Atotoxtli to become true agents, beyond the will of their partners, and in that way I was able to work out how the story would be resolved. That said, we could go on talking about the subject of Malinalli’s vilification for hours. But it’s worth noting that, to my mind, we interpret her differently nowadays. At the time, there was no “them” and “us.” She didn’t work for the European colonizers because it was not even conceivable—regardless of whether you were Tyrian or Trojan—that the whole of America would become a colony, that the children of the arrogant Tenochca macehuals would die as de facto slaves. The Spanish were initially thinking of annexing a territory—which is very different from exploiting a colony—and the Mexica wanted to avoid being subject to Tlaxcala, which headed the huge multinational army of which the Spanish were a well-armed but minority part. Malinalli was Nahua—she spoke Maya because she had been a slave in the court of a king to the south. She was neither Mexica nor Tlaxcalteca. The welfare of her descendants was the only thing at stake in that war. She did her job and helped to secure victory for the side that she needed to win, which was the Tlaxcaltecs. She didn’t betray the indigenous people: there wasn’t even a word for “indigenous” in Nahua. After the fall of Tenochtitlan, when it became apparent that the European model of development was completely different and much more cruel to the continent’s inhabitants than the Mexica or the Mayan rulers had ever been, the Nahua term “we-who-are-from-here” was coined to define Americans, but at that time, for her, the Spanish were simply warriors from another altépetl—one located across the sea—who valued her knowledge as a multilingual person. 

R.F.: In the letter to the publisher that you include at the beginning of the novel, you mention that for someone born and raised in Mexico City, Nahua cultures can seem as exotic as they are for someone who is from further afield. While the novel posits an alternative history, it’s still possible to see an attempt throughout the text to paint a picture for readers of a highly complex Tenochca society filled with tangled political intrigues. Can the process of fictionalization demystify this society, or does it just add another layer of myth? 

A.E.: The intimidating sophistication of Mexica culture was already made clear in the Decades of the New World by Pedro Martir de Anglería, who was the first European to write about Mexico in Europe—which, at the time, was in the thrall of the captives and the treasures sent there by Cortés in 1519. My effort to naturalize the characters and intrigues in the novel is more of a response to the tendency to romanticize pre-Hispanic cultures, which was just as pernicious and ridiculous as the more common and identifiable tendency to condemn the Mexica for failing to share European values. For the novel to work, I had to take Tenochtitlan out of Diego Rivera’s Stalinist mural and Alfonso Reyes’ Greco-Latin idiom—picking a fight with both Left and Right, although of course neither faction is even aware of my courageous declaration of war. But it’s not like I’m making anything up either: the only book I’ve found really convincing on the poignancy of the 1810 Independence movement is Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s Los pasos de López, a brilliant comedy about the misunderstandings that led a group of rather wealthy but small-town criollos to declare war on Napoleon on September 15, 1810. This really happened, by the way. The movement that followed was something else entirely and has a lot of merit, but at the outset the uprising was not against Spain, but against Pepe Botella, Napoleo’s older brother. 

R.F.: The idea of the dream is central to the novel, both as a physiological phenomenon and as something induced by consuming magic tomatoes. With the latter, Cortés and Moctezuma manage to elucidate the meeting points between their two cultures, which can be taken as yet another possible alternative history. Do you think that the story of the conquest of Tenochtitlan can still serve as an abundant well of inspiration for writers of fiction? 

A.E.: It’s very interesting that you draw a connection between the narrative possibilities of the conquest and the psychedelic dimension to the novel. The story’s tempo is indeed carried by the considerable quantity of hallucinogens that Montezuma administers to himself during the five hours that the action lasts. I have had friends like that, and some of them are still with us. I was reading for the first time one of those classics that one keeps putting off, The Aztec Image in Western Thought by Benjamin Keen, a monumental history of European perceptions of the Mexica. Keen highlights the persistence of the tropes introduced by Francisco López de Gómara—the first historian of the Spanish-Mexica war—who depicted the people of the pre-Hispanic world as cannibals, sodomites, and drunkards. Cannibals they were—but only during rituals, the same as all of the other cultures that have practiced cannibalism. There is still no better argument for the purpose of defending this practice than the one put forward by Montaigne in the sixteenth century: symbolically eating a representative of one’s enemies is more civilized than exterminating them. Sodomites, I don’t know, but I think it’s great if they were less repressed than the Europeans. Keen does not know either, but he repeatedly laments the fact that a culture that had rules that were almost as strict as those followed by Muslims in relation to the consumption of alcohol could be accused of drunkenness. It does not even occur to him that the drunkenness of which the conquerors and chroniclers spoke was the product of a regulated but widespread culture of hallucinogen consumption. You cannot understand anything of the pre-Hispanic world if you do not understand that the art, cuisine, architecture, everything, is designed with the idea that different rituals—from the reading of codices at school to the sacrifice of a Tlaxcalteca in the temple—implied a short journey to different zones of consciousness.   

R.F.: At the end of the novel you provide a list of sources to make explicit the novel’s points of historical and literary reference. Besides the sources you mention, are there any writers of speculative fiction who were important to the writing of You Dreamed of Empires?  

A.E.: No. I was never a big reader of speculative fiction. Right now, I’m really interested in it and I’m starting to discover a wonderful continent there, but I’m playing catch-up.  

R.F.: In the twenty-first century, there’s an idea of the “failure of the mestizo,” a figure who was once the cornerstone of post-Revolutionary Mexican identity. To what extent does You Dreamed of Empires enter into dialogue with this idea?  

A.E.: I don’t know of that idea or its context, so I’d better shut my mouth so as not to talk nonsense. 

R.F.: In the passages that can be interpreted as autofiction in your previous works Hypothermia or Ahora me rindo y eso es todo, the narrator appears to adopt a specific posture with respect to the Mexican diaspora, and a very personal one at that. In You Dreamed of Empires this autofictional vein is less apparent, although it is still there, in the manner of “The Aleph.” How does this Borgesian “I” of your latest novel relate to that of your earlier work?  

A.E.: That Alephian “I” is more anecdotal and perhaps theoretical than autofictional, isn’t it? It tries to inscribe the book in a tradition: it’s not a historical novel, it’s a fantastic novel. But books, like the land, belong to those who work them and anyone can say whatever they like about mine if they have granted me the inestimable honor of reading one of them. You Dreamed of Empires has about as much to do with my boring and conventional real life as Hypothermia or Ahora me rindo: nothing. The family travelling to the Southwest in Ahora me rindo serves a narrative function. There are episodes that bear some resemblance to funny or intense things that happened during research trips to Arizona and New Mexico, but they serve only to underpin the extraordinary story of Chiricahua Apache resistance. The characters that bear our names aren’t like us, they just have things happen to them that move the plot along or plant an idea. And Hypothermia has nothing to do with my life at the time I wrote it—when I was a married graduate student, and not a divorced professor. The divorce story functioned as a metaphor for the brokenness of living as an immigrant in the United States by choice. The book ends with a descent into hell and hell does not exist—although if it did, it would be in Mexico, as is suggested there. Later I had terrible romantic failures, but at that time I had never experienced that heartbreaking thing that is the breakup of a family. You learn to live with it, but it doesn’t heal. More than autofictional, Hypothermia was prophetic, and I would have preferred if it hadn’t been. What I do hold to be true in relation to this topic is that if the time in which we live inevitably marks what we write, there is no reason to hold onto the nineteenth-century nonsense about suspension of disbelief. The fourth wall is a convention as unnecessary as the scripts that precede lines of dialogue between characters. It’s all rubbish. The family in Ahora me rindo has that function: they are the ones who speak for the present. The same happens with the equally celebrated and condemned “I don’t really know what this book is about” that opens the section on Vasco de Quiroga in Sudden Death; or the chapter in You Dreamed of Empires narrated in the pluperfect, in which Jazmín Caldera walks through the citadel of the temples of Tenochtitlan. These are fissures or openings for the reader: what I am writing is of course fiction, but what we know of that context is this, and what I sincerely think about it all is this other thing. Having said all that, if someone wants to read my novels as historical or as autofiction, they have the right to do so, and I am equally grateful.   

R.F.: The narrator of the novel is located in the reader’s present and in Mexico City. The novel’s temporal and spatial games are of central importance in order for characters like Jazmín Caldera to function. On the other hand, the characters who share the world of the Tenochcas range from Jesus to Diego Rivera and López Velarde. Although the idea of an Aleph appears in the novel, how is it that this same idea appears in the context of Tenochtitlan? 

A.E.: That’s a beautiful question. The great Sergio Pitol has the perfect answer to it: “Everything is in everything,” isn’t it? I guess in the end it’s easier to believe in the sacredness of the world after a mushroom trip than after the celebration of the Eucharist, in which you have to have a lot of faith to believe something really happened. You Dreamed of Empires is a comedy. We can be certain that Moctezuma never listened to “Monolith” by T. Rex, not even in his wildest peyote trips. But there remains something enviable in the Mesoamerican religions, which are still alive, but with five hundred years of mestizaje: our world and that of the gods have become superimposed onto one another, and you just have to change the channel for a while to see the divine foundation of things. It gives a comfort that Judeo-Christian abstractions instead take away. “Turn the other cheek.” What kind of bullshit is that?

Translated by David Conlon

Photo: Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue at the 2016 Hay Festival, by Keith Morris News / Alamy Stock Photo.

Diego Recoba: From the book’s epigraph comes this idea of giving order to disorder. How did you manage that, bearing in mind how biographical the material you were working with was?

Ana Negri: Although it’s at the start of the book, I put the epigraph in towards the end of the writing process. When I started writing, I was almost working as an editor, curating my notebooks and private thoughts but without knowing why I was doing it, or what for. Then I realised it was all a mess, a very singular one—mine. And I realised that to make all of that legible, I had to make sense of some things, make others more plausible, cut out and exaggerate certain events. Fiction, I’d say now, is what brought order. 

D.R.: What were the initial questions that made you pull on this thread?

A.N.: The first one was to do with a very personal question relating to my mother’s status. That made me wonder about a lot of things from her life during the dictatorship, and her life afterwards, in exile. It was a really crucial question for me, whether this idea of exile really included me, whether being born in my parents’ exile made me an exile or not. And I understood it’s a really ambiguous place, and as a result quite uncomfortable for everyone because you’re not exiled in the strictest sense of the word, but at the same time you don’t belong in the place you were born. They’re not the same consequences that an exile might face, but they’re consequences all the same, and they’re still directly related to exile. It’s not the same as our parents, who had to start from scratch with regards to money, family, and friends, where there was no common history with the people in that place, where their traditions and words and ways of life were so different to everyone else’s; we’re the children who have to shoulder the destruction of our families post-exile, the trauma that can’t be healed by an order of democratisation. 

When I started to understand it all, I decided I wanted to follow those tentacles and see how they spread, and then more aesthetic questions began to crop up: how I was going to give form to it all or from where, what to change, what to keep, what to throw out, how much, how exactly, in what order…

D.R.: Did those tensions also exist in relation to language? How did you go about resolving the issue of the languages that you live in, in your writing?

A.N.: Coming at it from that angle was inevitable because it’s what I work with. Playing out this constant contradiction, this rivalry, this hybridity. I’m not sure exactly how it came up—it was there in my notes before I had even thought about it. And for me it was essential that the protagonist had that linguistic duality, because with it you can show something that doesn’t require explanation, and that defines it in a very precise way. The two Spanish registers that coexist within Clara show what it’s like to live in a language where you have to be constantly alert, where you can never let your guard down. Not just because it involves two types of Spanish (or maybe even more, so you really can’t relax), but because the little details that either allow you to become part of a community or expose you as a stranger are so subtle. 

D.R.: There’s a strong focus on connections and the new families that are forming. Like a palimpsest. How did you work with that growth?

A.N.: It’s also related to disorder and the separation that’s still present. When all your connections are broken, damaged, or far away, it’s almost instinctive, I suppose, to look for new people to fill those gaps. It’s a very on-brand thing for exiles, that need to build new connections, and to redefine family with those connections included. Really, I think all exiles and all children of exiles are overflowing with unofficial aunts and uncles and cousins and siblings. It creates a more horizontal family tree, like a mycelial web. I realised I had to explore that as well, the difference in the structure of the supposed “family” unit, because Mexico is a deeply traditional country in that sense. Family is at the heart of everything, held in the highest regard. It might be the only thing that the drug dealers and traffickers respect, or try to. In Mexico, the character of Clara, for example, is really shocking because mother-daughter conflicts are dealt with so differently, and seeing those shouting matches is very unsettling, and it all has to do with that, the difference between the tree and the mycelium. 

D.R.: With respect to Los eufemismos, there is a story in the unsaid, the elliptical, but also in the masks and the stagings we adopt so as to connect to one another. Did you run into and have to disassemble your own masks while writing?

A.N.: It happened when I was in the fledgling stages of the novel; I was getting very attached to the main character. And I realised I wanted everyone else to love her too, and in order to do that, I had to make Clara a kind of heroine to her mother. In the first drafts there were hints at the turbulence in that relationship, but they were almost unbelievable because Clara was all love and patience. And I realised not only was the story going to be really boring, but I had no interest in perpetuating this stereotype of the selfless daughter who sacrifices everything for her mother just because she’s her mother. So then I started, quite viciously, to move to the other side, and make this character irritable, intolerant, have her made hopeless by her circumstances. And I really enjoyed putting an end to the idea that those masks of unconditional love and tolerance are real faces. 

D.R.: When writing or revisiting the past, what did you resign yourself to? What did you accept was impossible?

A.N.: It’s contradictory. On the one hand, I resigned myself to the idea that there was no way of recounting what had happened as it had happened; and, on the other, that it was impossible for me to claim that people wouldn’t believe this is my story as it happened. 

D.R.: Exile, memory, and dictatorship were all words that were present in the day-to-day lives of the children of the exiled, although they never fully understood what they meant. Carrying the weight of others, it says in the book. Did you shed that weight through the writing process?

A.N.: The fact that my first novel is this isn’t random or by chance. I think I needed to write Los eufemismos to be able to write whatever comes next. Now, I think I understand better where I write from and why I do it. Regarding that weight, I don’t know. 

D.R.: It’s related to an idea that appears a lot in the book, that even with the passage of time, the effects of such events never really end. 

A.N.: I don’t know if they never end, but I do believe the effects of a dictatorship like the one in Argentina at the end of the seventies don’t go away overnight. They’re not erased by a decree or by reparations, they’re long, painful processes. Sometimes the process lasts longer than the life a person has left, sometimes their descendants carry the consequences—different ones, but still stemming from the same source. 

D.R.: At times, these books are very intimate, but on occasion they also deal with broader public issues like job insecurity and gentrification. There’s a back-and-forth between the private and the public. 

A.N.: Yes, I love that you’ve said it like that because, of course, from the conversation we’ve been having, it would seem that the book is a book all about the dictatorship, but it isn’t at all. Yes, it’s always in the background, but as context, as an antecedent. I think the book can come across as an intimate story, even a simple one, because there’s no proselytising or campaigning; but there’s a mountain of things hidden in language, in gestures, in tiny codes that are established between characters, in the sequences between one passage and the next, in what goes unsaid. And that’s where human rights issues come in, identity issues, the ignorance towards caregiving roles, towards mental health. I was quite pleased because I think I managed to talk about the public and the private in a fluid way and, a lot of the time, without being judgemental. I hate moralising literature. 

D.R.: The protagonist is very irritated by her mother’s solemnity. But much of the time, writing about the recent past can lead you into solemnity. Was that a problem you faced? 

A.N.: Undoubtedly. In fact, the first artistic works that dealt with the dictatorship that I saw—Garage Olímpico (Marco Bechis, 1999), for example—I found very solemn and confrontational. They were necessary at the start to highlight what had happened and fight against the silence, but I think now you need to do something different with it. A while back I came across Los rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003), and that’s exactly what it discusses: what we do with all of it now. It was awful, terrible, it changed the history of the nation, our families, it’s true, but we can’t stay still forever. Like Walter Benjamin’s idea of a past that consumes you. So with that in mind, my aim was to make something different. When I was writing, I realised the stories I wanted to incorporate were extremely heavy and I had to leave a lot of things out because the book was becoming a melodrama. I don’t know, my mum, for example, was in hiding for the whole of her first pregnancy, and went into exile with my three-month-old sister in her arms, but that isn’t something that had to be in the book. It wasn’t my intention by then; it was enough just to mention that Clara’s parents had been exiled. What Carri does in Los rubios was interesting to me: what is it? Is it memory? Yes and no. I looked for contrasts, added in some elements of black humour, and some easy-going moments that showed the absurd or funny sides of all of this nonsense, this madness. Because the weight of it can become unbearable, in both life and literature. 

Translated by Issy Emmitt

Photo: Mexican writer Ana Negri, by Victoria Egurza.

Set in the seventies, in a convulsing Argentina one year before the military coup led by Rafael Videla and others, Sacheri’s new novel, with its measured emotive tone and rich shades of irony, recapitulates this complex period in which the actions of a few guerrilla organizations promised the advent of a new country after the death of Juan Domingo Perón.

“People think death is supposed to be meaningful. But the more bodies that pile up, the less each death means,” says El Cabezón to his friend Alejandro, referring to the modus operandi of the ERP. Nosotros dos en la tormenta is a book about doubt and questioning one’s beliefs, with a look towards a past that could easily have been the present day.

Juan Camilo Rincón: What was it like to build a storyline with such a complex history as the backdrop?

Eduardo Sacheri: This novel gave me a good amount more work than others, even if every novel is work. In this case, I knew I’d be grappling with a painful period of conflict. The novel is set in 1975 (I was eight years old at the time) and it seemed important to study this period—please note the verb I used, study—to remove it from the realm of my own personal, family memories, which were in many ways the emotional driving force behind this story. I would say that first I did an entire academic study. A lot of work has already been done in Argentina on armed organizations, ideology and organizational structure, as well as the connection between these things and political power and social relations, or lack thereof. In addition to that, I had conversations with ex-guerrillas and their victims or relatives of their victims—it seemed important to bring a human dimension back to those whose lives were so spectacularly affected. Only then did I begin on the plot. I asked myself: What can I tell about this period? What kinds of characters can I construct? At that point I envisioned them as paths that cross. I didn’t want to impose a way of reading, independently of each individual’s ideas. Instead, it was more interesting to create a point of dialogue, or at least to let the story be seen from different perspectives—my perspective being just one of many. I think that was the biggest challenge of this novel. 

J.C.R.: The dictatorship has been portrayed extensively in Argentine cinema, music and literature, but your novel precedes this period. How did you address this period in your novel?

E.S.: The entire novel takes place in 1975. I picked that year because it was extremely turbulent, even if it was before the coup. In Argentina, the military government has been given enormous attention in the cinema and in literature, with good reason, but that’s not the case for the preceding period or the period directly afterwards, even though a ton of things happened, a ton of situations and political actors intertwined in the story. Perón had returned to Argentina in ’73. Two months before that, a general election took place in which he was not allowed to participate, and it was won by Héctor Cámpora, his assistant, his right-hand man, his proxy. Cámpora stepped down almost immediately afterwards, and new elections were called. Perón was elected, with his wife María Estela Martínez de Perón serving as vice president. Several revolutionary organizations were active in that Argentina, especially Montoneros and the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), whose base was Trotskyist, Maoist, and Guevarist, a very orthodox left. Although Montoneros had the same objective of social revolution, a socialist paradise, they made the decision to support Perón. This was a conscious decision made voluntarily: if the people are Peronist, we have to be, too. When Perón was in exile, this youthful agitation for his return was beneficial to him, but when he returned, his order was: now you must be disciplined, fall into line, follow orders, you are part of the movement. This was a Perón that was clearly more a creature of the right than the left.

J.C.R.: And therein the source of the split…

E.S.: Right, because Montoneros refused to fall into line. Perón died almost immediately afterwards, and at that point Peronism descended into a violent confrontation between the Peronist right and left. In the novel, it wasn’t my preference to get into the nitty-gritty of this conflict. Rather, it was to feature the project of both these organizations, but this was an Argentina where violence was considered a legitimate weapon for a large number of political actors. These young people were convinced that violence was a good thing; a short while later, the military would carry out a coup d’état based on the same concept; and Isabel Perón’s government also implemented an extremely violent program of repression of the left. It was a violent society, but all of that was seen as par for the course by masses of people. This is where I feel that while Argentina today has an infinite amount of problems, it’s not that often that you meet people who legitimize violence. But in my childhood, these young people were a good example of that violence.

J.C.R.: Let’s talk about the young militants who are the protagonists of the novel. How did these characters come about?

E.S.: The majority of these young people first began their association with leftist organizations in high school or university. Since I was thinking about two people who were friends since childhood, I decided that one would take the path of the ERP, and the other Montoneros. These were not enemy organizations, nor did they fight each other—they ran in parallel. This setup allowed me to have them criticize each other in their conversations and distance themselves from the other group’s party line. Between these two friends, Alejandro and El Cabezón, I also liked the idea of one of them having more conviction, being more sure of himself, more determined, and the other one being more full of doubt—I have the sense that when a person takes up the flag of an ideology, the certainty of it is soothing. In anything, not just in politics, doubt leads a person to a more agonizing place, although that’s more interesting to me. So they make life-and-death decisions because they puff themselves up as these ultimate judges: So-and-so deserves to be kidnapped, while this other guy deserves to die. Zealots believe this is the way things are, period, but the other character does not feel that way. This affords the reader an escape from ideological claustrophobia. That’s why Cabezón is full of doubt: why did we choose this person? Something that has always given me pause is this thing about choosing someone and deciding they’re the enemy, and that’s what Cabezón wonders at one point: why are we against this person? What makes them worse? No, it’s simply because they’re close by.

J.C.R.: And that’s exactly it—you develop your characters without a Manichean vision…

E.S.: I don’t tell you who is good and who is bad. I have my own ideas about it, but that doesn’t matter. The novel came out this past June in Argentina, and I’ve already gotten feedback from readers. A journalist asked me what my position was. I asked her, “What’s your position?” Her view was much more sympathetic to these two young people. In another interview I had, the journalist clearly had a very critical view towards them, and it seems like a good thing to me that both these journalists thought the novel was good. There are things that we cannot agree on, but we can at least read the same things, because sometimes it seems as if art has to subordinate itself to our preconceived notions, and I don’t like that. This whole thing about “I can only read people who say things I ascribe to” is not a good thing. But be careful: if as a reader I feel I am being given a sermon from a position that is too far removed from mine, I don’t like that either, and I put up a wall against it.

J.C.R.: Which of the characters is closest to your heart?

E.S.: I identify most with two characters. One is the father of one of the protagonists. This father does not agree with his son’s ideas. He believes the idea of revolution will fail and his son will die. He says to his son, “In this, you and I are alike: we both have dreams that will never happen. The difference is that I know it.” The other character is Mónica, the daughter of professor Mendiberri. This is a university professor who is purposely not constructed like the stereotypical radical professor, and he is further away from events. He is a geologist who is mainly interested in the Earth’s crust, but a string of mishaps puts him in the crosshairs of the authorities. All that matters to him is rocks, so he is completely alienated from what is going on around him, but his daughter isn’t. I imagine being a witness to the dangers and being unable to do anything about it. In regards to the tragic inexorability of events, it must have been grueling. This is a character I identify with a lot.

Translated by Slava Faybysh

Photo: Argentine author Eduardo Sacheri.