Valeria Luiselli Interview / Blog / Untitled Books 12/12/12 11.

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ISSUE 50 / NOVEMBER 2012

NEWSLETTER
November 2012
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VALERIA LUISELLI INTERVIEW
October 2012 below to be the first to
Valeria Luiselli is a rising star of Latin American literature whose debut novel Faces know about upcoming
September 2012
in the Crowd is a dazzling piece of metafiction that weaves a vertiginous path stories, events and author
around history, memoir, fiction, time and space to explore the art and life of the August 2012 interviews, as well as our
writer. Mark Reynolds is absorbed by a winding conversation about her influences,
July 2012 literary lonely hearts and
instincts and inspirations.
the best new books of the
Faces in the Crowd is a haunting and wondrously inventive June 2012
month.
debut novel built around a fragment of a letter by an obscure
May 2012 Email address...
Mexican poet in 1920s Harlem in which he confides to a friend
that he believes he might be disappearing. It turns out that the April 2012 Subscribe
reason for Gilberto Owen's gradual demise is that his life is
March 2012
dissolving into that of a twenty-first-century novelist in Mexico
City who is cooped up in her apartment with a crumbling February 2012 UNTITLED BOOKS
marriage, a hyper-imaginative toddler, and recent memories of About us
more carefree times working at a New York publishing house. January 2012 Contact
As the two lives migrate from one to the other and become a Links
December 2011
single entity, time, place and identity collapse, and the novel
takes on the quality of one of those vivid dreams that offers November 2011 YOUR ACCOUNT
tantalisingly profound insights only to crumble to dust on the October 2011 Register for an account
instant of waking. It's a quality that Mina Holland in the Observer acutely describes as and review books,
"downbeat supernaturalism". September 2011 comment on articles and
August 2011 build a list of your favourite
In Untitled's May issue, Luiselli wrote about "reality's vulnerability to becoming reviews. Coming soon.
fictionalised". One of the early instances of this in the novel is a moment where the July 2011
narrator's sister writes an email suggesting she visits 115 West 95th Street, where she
March 2011
discovers an imaginary house.
February 2011
"At some point someone sent me that address," Luiselli explains, "and I did visit it,
many, many, many years ago, but I haven't been back in ten years or so. It's a wall December 2010
where there's a fake window that's painted and - I don't know if this is me adding fiction November 2010
or not - there's a cat on the window ledge and a fake door and books, and it's between
other windows that look exactly the same, so it's a trompe l'oeil. I think I need to go and October 2010
look for it again." (If you google it, the address can also take you to another charm-filled April 2010
discourse about the real and the invented, which Luiselli insists is simply a delightful
coincidence.) March 2010

February 2010
I'm curious to know more about her choice of Gilberto Owen as a figure through whom
to channel her first fiction, and she paints a picture of a group of radical Mexican poets January 2010
of the 1920s.
December 2009
"They were the first to produce magazines where they brought in English-language
modernist poets and the French avant-garde at the same time as writing and publishing November 2009
their own work," she relates. "They were the first to publish 'The Waste Land', in a really October 2009
crazy prose translation which is wonderful. Gilberto Owen was a collaborator on the
magazines but he left Mexico very early, when he was twenty-four, so he became a sort September 2009
of phantom figure, a ghostly presence in the Mexican avant-garde. Nobody really read August 2009
him. He was very untidy in his own work, in the sense that he lost a lot of things. For
example, he says in a letter that he translated four hundred of Emily Dickinson's poems, July 2009
and someone found eight of those translations in this obscure magazine in Columbia
from the 1940s, but where are the rest? They're probably lost, but maybe they'll turn up
someday. So that group of poets interests me, but Gilberto Owen especially, also for
personal reasons. He was living in Harlem at the end of the 1920s just before the crash,
and I was living in the same neighbourhood just before the crash of 2008, just a block
away. And his letters became really important to me in the sense that they articulated a
reality that I was experiencing, and his Harlem seemed much less of a wasteland than
mine. There was a sort of barrenness in my experience of Harlem; this very gentrified
space where Columbia University is taking over. You can still hear a mix of languages
and cultures, but at the same time, I don't know, it's sort of being washed away. His
letters were very important for me to read. I made a contact with the space that I hadn't
had; and so I started working with his character, because the way he lived in that same
space interested me."

The structure of the parallel lives of the two narrators slowly converging across time
grew organically as the writing progressed.

"It could have been a lot more conventional I guess, more linear. It was meant to be only

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Owen in the beginning; the female voice came in about a year later. No, that is not
precise," she demurs, "because many of the things I wrote while thinking of the novel
were written from this female narrator point of view; I just didn't know it was for the
novel. So the female narrator had already begun to take shape, and at the same time,
but conceived as something independent, I had begun to work on some of the Gilberto
Owen pieces. That went on for about a year, and then after I had my daughter the
female narrator somehow had to come in and make space for herself, and that created
a relationship between the Owen voice and the narrator, and the novel changed
completely once I decided to bring the two together."

The female narrator's son shapes the story to a large degree. Things he invents or
imagines take on real substance in their cramped apartment life, and even begin to
cross over into Owen's story.
"The key to shaping the novel was about going to the language of the family: how
private language games develop within a family," she recalls, "and I was particularly
interested in how the boy's language creates and foreshadows everything that happens
in the novel. She really uses the little boy's imagination in the fiction she's creating. Not
in a geometrical way, because I'm not interested in everything being geometrically tied
to an origin, but the house falling, and the cats with and without tails - all these tropes
and figures and symbols, things that are very concrete for the boy, become part of the
fiction that is told, in the present moment, but also in Owen's life and in her past life. So
it's as if the boy's language is the primary stuff, the primal matter of the whole novel and
its construction."

When she's working at the publishing house and forming the idea of forging 'new'
translations of Owen, the first narrator states that literary recognition is "all a matter of
rumour, a rumour that multiplies like a virus until it becomes a collective affinity". In her
job, the narrator is also tasked to discover, like many a literary scout before her, 'the
next Bolaño'. Bolaño seems to cast a shadow that every contemporary Latin American
writer has to dodge.
"First of all, Bolaño is not only a good writer but an important writer on the Latin
American map and also outside now he has been internationalised," Luiselli asserts. "He
is an important figure, and for good reason because he is a writer who touches readers
and changes things. I don't think everything he writes is great, but The Savage
Detectives especially is a very important book. Then on the other hand, he's no great
exception. Inevitably new writers that are being translated now, into English and other
languages, are being read in the light of Bolaño. I prefer that to being read in the light of
Isabel Allende and the other post-boom collateral damage of magical realism. I hope
Bolaño's generation and the generation between the boom writers and him are
eventually translated, and the map becomes clearer to other readers, so that Bolaño
doesn't seem to be this island in a very stale pond, but other amazing writers that also
explain Bolaño can be read."
In middle age in the 1950s Owen professes that he wants to write a book in which "all
the characters are dead, but they don't know it", but suspects he may have already
been beaten to it: a nod to Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, the influential classic that gave
Luiselli the impetus and confidence to bend time in this book.
"Absolutely, of course," she enthuses. "Of the Latin American boom writers, he's the
one I respect the most. Cortázar also for a time. Cortázar is one of those writers that you
read when you're fifteen that determine the way you understand love and Paris and
everything for some time, which is great, but then probably you don't go back. Whereas
Rulfo I think is the one who really pushed things further. He was less about being overly
experimental, but paradoxically he was the most daring, how he broke the temporal
structure in narrative and in doing so created a great freedom for others. I would not
have felt this freedom in playing with time without having previous experience as a
reader of someone like Rulfo, who pushed things and made the space wider."
The narrator's husband, a rather dull architect who has fallen into the habit of spending
spells away from his young family, has a copy of Rousseau's Meditations on his bedside
table, which he says he needs for an article he's writing for about urban planning. What
are we to read into his surprising choice?
"Basically the figure of the walker, the flâneur who goes around the city and writes
about his musings while walking, and the way the figure of the walker has become
intellectualised, is almost a cliché of the modern personal essay writer. It's something I
have laughed a lot about, in a very respectful way, in my first book, where I speak
against the intellectual walker from the viewpoint of a bicycle, to sort of contest those
ideas of the intellectual Rousseau-like character who walks and speaks about the city."
Luiselli's book of essays Papeles Falsos (Fake Papers) was published ahead of the novel
in Mexico and Spain, and it's extraordinary reception led to publishing houses all over
the world clamouring to read the novel. She describes it as "a book of hybrid personal
essays, something between fiction and non-fiction". I query whether it's possible to
think rigourously while riding a bike.
"I think so," she smiles. "I used to only move around on a bicycle when I was younger
and still had convictions about those sorts of things. I would always pre-write while
riding on my bicycle, and I think that reflects in the rhythm of that first book I wrote; the
book is really fast-paced, a bicycle sort of pace."
Her translator, Christina MacSweeney, just finished her first draft of the essays, which

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will be published by Granta Books next year. Luiselli had a great time working with her
on the novel.
"It was the best part of the whole process," she declares. "I think it was better than
writing the book, because I didn't have that anxiety about not having the next page yet. I
felt a lot of freedom because I can read and write in English, so I felt I could still work on
it. I decided to give Christina a lot of freedom too in terms of experimenting with
language. It's a novel where there's a lot of words that don't exist perhaps, or
expressions that are extraneous, or 1950s expressions in Spanish that have no
equivalent in English. Christina put a lot of creativity into it. She had a lot of ideas about
how to do these things that were difficult. So I gave her a lot of freedom, and she gave
me a lot of freedom too, because many translators prefer not to have so much contact
with the writer. She would send me three pages, four pages, then twenty and we'd work
on them, I'd change stuff around and make suggestions and she'd agree or not agree
and we'd discuss, and so it was a real collaboration. It was like rewriting it in the best
possible way, with much more English vocabulary than I have, with much more
command, because she was providing all that."
It's standard in a literary interview to ask about the next thing a writer is working on, but
I'm immoderately intrigued to know what Luiselli will conjure next - and she doesn't
disappoint. "I can tell you a little bit... just a little bit," she teases, before going on to
unravel an enthralling association of ideas encompassing the early years of the ANC and
a couple of eccentric medieval diarists.
"Originally I was planning to write something autobiographical about the 1990s in South
Africa where I grew up," she explains (her father was Mexico's first Ambassador to
Pretoria when Mandela came to power), "but I can never really write straight non-fiction.
I always end up inventing a character or lying about things. So I decided I don't want to
write a biography because I know people would get angry if I included stuff that plainly
didn't happen. I'm going to work with the genre of autofiction, which is a little scary as I
find a lot of new autofiction really boring: fictionalising yourself I just find uninteresting.
But in the last few months I've been reading some really insane medieval semi-
autobiographies. There's a mid-fifteenth-century author called Pedro de Portugal - Peter
of Portugal - who decided to write an autobiographical love story, and he starts writing
in a small space in the middle of the page, and then two pages in he realises maybe it's
a little bit boring for others only to read about his life, so he starts explaining other
things. So he writes, say, 'life is like a labyrinth', then he underlines 'labyrinth' and in the
margins - because he has a lot of space for marginalia and glosses - he writes
'labyrinth' again, and starts narrating for example the myth of the minotaur. He then
does the same with every trope and metaphor and figure he mentions, until at some
point he really self-effaces, the central narrative of his life becomes completely
irrelevant, and all these micro-narratives in the margins start getting really interesting
and start connecting, and it's brilliant! My editors would kill me if I did something like
that, I don't think they would let me use marginalia, so I've been developing a way in
which to play a similar kind of game: how to do it without that physical layout, how to do
it within the story. I'm working with that, and I'm working with another amazing text
written by a nun who became deaf and who writes about the world from her sudden
deafness. She also writes about the books she's reading, and she starts speaking to the
characters in the other books. It's really fascinating. So that's where I am. I've been
taking notes for some time, and it's probably going to end up being a very
contemporary book as well, not always going back to childhood, but bringing it back to
now."
With her genius for association and energy for discovering new inspirations, Luiselli
leaves the strongest sense that the autofiction genre is about to be blown apart.

........................................................................................................................................................
Faces in the Crowd is published by Granta Books.

Mark Reynolds is a freelance writer and editor, and Literary Editor of The Drawbridge.

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Monday, 16 July, 2012

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