Roberto Bolaño: Hay que mantener la ficción en favor de la conjetura / Eduardo Cobos

Roberto Bolaño: One Must Maintain Fiction in Favor of Conjecture

Roberto Bolaño and Eduardo Cobos at the entrance of the Hotel Ávila in Caracas, 1999. Photograph: Lisbeth Salas.

Editor’s Note
July 15 marked ten years since the death of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. In 1999, when his reputation was beginning to acquire the delirious dimensions of his particular condition of literary auteur and editorial success, he visited Venezuela to receive the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for The Savage Detectives. This interview was previously published by its author, the journalist Eduardo Cobos, in the magazine Mezclaje, which he edited at the time with Anwar Hasmy. To commemorate the mournful anniversary of the author of 2666, Cobos now offers this corrected version for the enjoyment of readers of Letralia.

Roberto Bolaño surprises us with his good mood and the unexpected turns his assertions take. In any case, his conversation isn’t the least bit intellectual, instead he likes to explain or provide examples with what he knows how to do: telling stories, one after another, and confirming what one suspected, that many of his characters, as incredible as they might seem, have existed in the flesh, beyond the verisimilitude demonstrated in his writings, or they serve as the undeniable confirmation that Arturo Belano, the character in several of his books, is the alter ego of this prolific writer. For anyone who has read him, there is no doubt that with him Latin American fiction will recover the vitality from which it had seen itself excluded since the death rattles of the Boom, as the structures of his works reveal an original complexity.

During the month of August, the rain is sporadic in Caracas, but it’s always threatening to show up. This is the city that received Bolaño, of Chilean origin, who came from Blanes, a little town in Catalonia, to receive the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize (1999) for The Savage Detectives (1998). He stayed in the Hotel Ávila, whose name is a tribute to one of the mountains that surrounds the valley, and which owes all its prestige to the Modernist architecture from the time of Isaías Medina Angarita, when the sudden economic development begins in Venezuela due to the extraction of petroleum. We spoke one afternoon, in which the constant running around at times prevented us from being more at ease during the interview.


BOOKS

You published a novel with Antoni García Porta, Advice from a Morrison Disciple to a Joyce Fanatic (1984). Can you talk about the experience of writing a novel with someone else?

Toni’s a good friend. He wrote a text and gave it to me. I took the pages of the novel and did nothing but destroy it, absolutely all of it, and then I put it back together. I played with that. By the way, the title is a nod to a poem by Mario Santiago, he’s a great Mexican poet with whom I started, in Mexico, the Infrarealist movement, which is the Visceral Realists in The Savage Detectives. In the novel, he’s the character named Ulises. Mario wrote a poem called “Advice from A Marx Disciple to A Heidegger Fanatic,” in the year seventy five, which was emblematic for a whole generation of young poets, whether they were Infrarealists or not. It’s a marvelous poem, quite long, with about twenty sections.

I saw Mario read that poem aloud, it had a supernatural force. He died a few days after I finished correcting The Savage Detectives, in early ninety eight. And it was a violent death; since he was run over by a car on the street. He existed on the complete edge, he was passing through a very bad time and each day he was acting more and more violently, in an intransigent manner. Mario is a great poet, for me he’s the best poet of the last twenty years in Mexico. He was really impressive, the closest thing I’ve seen to Rimbaud’s proposals: the radicalness and the absolutely biased glow. He was one of those people that frightened whoever he was near.

One can observe two types of narrative voices that speak to others in your books. On the one hand voices that, in fragments, put together stories and on the other, the ones telling the narrator an anecdote that will be developed further. In this perspective, what’s the structural necessity of the story that makes you set up those narrative voices?

I believe, I presume, I’m not telling you this as something that’s set, it just occurred to me, that the intention is to maintain fiction in favor of conjecture, which means: this guy told me that someone else said to him and also, stories that arrive in some type of an oral manner. This attenuates the work of the structure. If I put it in there as is, if I didn’t give it the lightness of orality, the narrative structure might become too arduous for the reader and especially for the writer.

Does that, perhaps, makes sense if one thinks for example of One Thousand and One Nights?

From that point onwards everything is said. In One Thousand and One Nights, or in medieval European texts, the orality that advances is key within the interior of the tale that’s being narrated, that moves the different perspectives. This makes the work’s shell, which sometimes can’t help being heavy, become lighter, softer and it allows us, in this manner, to enter into its core.

This last point might relate to something very alluring in your work, which is the repetition of characters, who each time gain new dimensions. What relationship exists between voices and stories?

They're voices that come and go, they’re faces that come and go, stories like Stendhal wanted: any story that goes, at some point returns, but it comes back transformed and in the process of returning it has become another story, it’s like the passing of time. Besides, I’m insatiable when something comes out right for me, I squeeze it until I get the very last drop.

In my work’s project —I say work with the understanding that it’s still in process— the initial plans encompass that: stories that bifurcate, that get lost but return. That’s how characters like Abel Romero, the researcher that appears in The Savage Detectives, although that’s not the case with Amulet (1999), is included in my most recent work. Belano runs into Romero at a Chilean party in Paris, they talk about causality and chance. And Romero returns in another novel I’m writing, which is called Woes of the True Policeman, settled in Chile with his funeral parlor, he has carried out the promise he made to Belano in Distant Star (1996), which was to set up that strange business. In the same way, he has invested the money they paid him to eliminate Carlos Wieder. In any case, Romero has an ethics, which he sometimes overlooks, but he has one.

Like the detectives in Raymond Chandler?

Abel Romero is what in Chile is called a tira, and moreover a leftist tira, with class consciousness. But it’s best not to put both one’s hands in the fire for a tira, it’s best to just put one in. In the novel I mentioned, Romero is in Chile and he’s given a case, which will be his last, because from that point on this character is finished. The truth is I actually don’t know what happens with him, since I haven’t finished writing the novel yet. This is how other characters and places keep appearing: Villaviciosa, the town in The Savage Detectives, is really a city that appears in a very old poem of mine, from ninety or ninety two.

How did you elaborate the structure, for example, in The Savage Detectives?

It’s the only one it could have. It was an enormous task. It doesn’t seem like it, but the work I put into it was enormous. On the other hand, Distant Star was written in a state of grace, it took a month and a half. That one has changes regarding “Ramírez Hoffman, the infamous one,” the character from Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996), which is where I got him from. There was a moment when I was taken by the desire for the well-made work, the game or experiment, and there are moments when emotiveness is more present, when it imposes itself above luxury, above the text’s sumptuous aspect.

On the other hand, in Amulet, where a story that was profiled in The Savage Detectives is recovered, the writing maintains the project with a complete coldness, even the original commas are respected. That is, the pages that provided its origin are the same as the hundred and fifty definitive ones; the incisions are surgical. That’s the relationship I’ve had with certain types of painting, I love variations in painting, serialization, despite the fact that in literature this can only be done with short texts. In that sense, Raymond Queneau has a book that clearly illustrates what I’m saying, it’s called Exercises in Style, where he repeats an anecdote a hundred times, with dissimilar techniques.

The most surprising of your books, because of the imagination you handle, is Nazi Literature in the Americas. There we see the presence of literature in many dimensions. How did those fictions originate?

Without a doubt, that’s a novel where literature is the character. And yet, it’s the latest fruit from a great branch that goes from Rodolfo Wilckoc’s The Temple of Iconoclasts, passing through Borges’s A Universal History of Infamy, and also includes Alfonso Reyes’s Real and Imagined Portraits. Of course, the itinerary falls back on Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, stopping in the prose in capsules of the French encyclopedists.

In Nazi Literature... there’s nothing beyond an exercise that turns to that tradition and in that sense it’s the most literary, where literature is the protagonist, because even though it seems to be a book of short stories it’s a novel in chapters. Besides, it’s a satyrical novel about the misery of writing, the misery of writers, the picaresque rabble of a world so apparently distant as literature apparently is and where Nazis are merely the mask to make a caricature of the modus vivendi, any writer’s existence within literature.


ARS NARRATIVA

Regarding your ars narrativa, how do you resolve writing’s day to day difficulties in a practical manner?

By waking up early, sitting in front of the computer and working. Writing lots of junk that will eventually be eliminated. I have a pretty rigorous method, I work on the structures and infrastructures of the novel; I elaborate the argument quite a bit, which is dragged along for a long time until it’s completely clear. Without a doubt, the structure gives you the material’s order ahead of time, the structure is the material, the plot enters within the structure, it’s all prepared from that point onwards.

And what about the correction of the text?

Polishing the text is like molding in sculpture: correcting, reading, rereading. Each time I correct less, I think I have more of a trade. However, in terms of a text’s correction I think Flaubert’s is the most radical project. I’m incapable of spending five or eight years writing a novel. But in relation to the text’s sedimentation time, I’m closer to Stendhal than Flaubert. The former took fifty three days to write The Charterhouse of Parma. That’s a writer. He’s the novelist in all his aspects, I feel closer to him even in terms of sexuality.

Could you give us a type of short story writer’s Decalogue?

I was once asked to write a Decalogue about how a short story should be written, and I did it as a joke, but the last point was quite serious, I said the two greatest short story writers were Anton Chekov and Raymond Carver. For me Carver is a giant among short story writers, better even that Hemingway, his capacity to create an atmosphere that has weight in any situation, he’s unrivaled. We’ve all learned from what they call the atmospheric short story, which weighs on you as a reader, where the characters move by pushing things aside, you feel the physical pressure, as though you were on another planet, in another gravity.


THE NOVEL IN CHILE TODAY, JOSÉ DONOSO AND THE TOTAL NOVEL

As for the authors who stayed in Chile, those who were formed under the dictatorship, the ones that began to publish in the nineties, people who today are between thirty and forty years old, what’s your opinion of them?

The truth is I don’t know them very well. Personally, I met Carlos Franz during a recent visit to Chile. He was one of the presenters for the new edition of The Skating Rink (1993, 1998). I also met Gonzalo Contreras, Arturo Fontaine Talavera and Diamela Eltit.

Honestly, Eltit bores me. Now, this doesn’t mean I like Luis Sepúlveda; between Spúlveda and Contreras I’m not sure which one I’d choose. I think neither of them. Although, without a doubt, there’s more inquiry in Contreras than in Sepúlveda. However, when I want to read Henry James I read him directly and the last thing that would occur to me is to read a Jamesean from Santiago de Chile.

Does it seem to you that Chilean fiction today has no weight?

A Spanish poet pointed out that poetry is a danger zone. Or it isn’t. This applies to all literature. The novel isn’t, as they think in Chile, a social island or a social display window, it’s not about marrying ministers or about being discotheque stars.

Literature is a lot like a samurai fight, but the samurai doesn’t fight against another samurai, he fights a monster, and he generally knows he’ll be defeated. To be brave, knowing ahead of time you’ll be defeated, and going out to fight, that’s literature.

Could José Donoso be a Jamesean?

It’s different, Donoso has a certain disproportion. And additionally, he wanted to be a disciple of James, but he was really a writer who didn’t owe much to the North American, with the exception, of course, of Three Bourgeois Novelettes. In certain texts, the influence of Virginia Woolf is notable, for example, in parts of The Obscene Bird of Night, or the closeness to Ford Madox Ford.

It seems Donoso was a fan of the English language, he grew up reading the classics in that language.

That’s right. But there’s even shameful things in him, that actually come from French literature. The influence of André Gide on him, the prose of The Catacombs of the Vatican could be decisive, that can be detected. Although Donoso was a very complex author and with very pendular tastes, which is something I don’t see in more recent Chilean authors.

In that sense, Donoso’s ambition corresponds with the Boom, where the search for the total novel stigmatized that generation. Does the ambition for the total novel seem valid to you?

I don’t think the total novel exists. But it seems magnificent to me when the writer says: I’m going to achieve the total novel. That seems admirable to me. The work of a Lezama Lima, of Cortázar, of Vargas Llosa, got very close; the work of Fernando del Paso or Donoso himself in The Obscene Bird... and later on with A House in the Country. With the latter he tries to cover the entire tragic destiny of Latin America. In him, that experience is crucial.

The way you say it, it seems to be an act of great heroism...

All those protean writers that confront the impossible novel, they seem to me like the advanced Spaniards who came almost adrift on the ships. The attempts to seek the total novel seem magnificent to me, no one will achieve it, because the very nature of the novel escapes totality, there is no total novel; if it ever existed, it was made by Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Flaubert. The latter, in that respect, had an extreme lucidity, superior to all of us. Bouvard et Pécuchet is a laboratory where, among many things, the impossibility, not only of the total novel but of the novel itself, is demonstrated time and time again.

Besides, that appearance and disappearance of characters in different books of mine, I can see it as proof of my impossibility of arriving at the total novel, as a symptom and as a demonstration, both things at once. I love unattainable challenges.

On the other hand, we have the writers of “minor” works.

Indeed. Magnificent writers who opted for the minor work, for the miniature. In that regard, I refer myself to perfectionists of minimal prose, such as, for example, Julio Torri, Augusto Monterroso or even Juan José Arreola, all of them Latin American authors who are opposed to the conception of the novel that we’re talking about. Well, there’s also Rodrigo Rey Rosa, among the more recent ones, who opts for the apparently minor text, not even the perfect text, if one compares him to Donoso. There are short stories by Rey Rosa where you check a phrase and it makes you think that phrase could have been written in a better and more effective manner, and yet, he has constructed it in that way while being fully aware of what he was doing.

You met Donoso, you even refer to your encounter with him, in a cyphered manner, in The Savage Detectives. What impression did he make on you?

Yes. The encounter is described in the novel. I spent a whole afternoon with him, he seemed like a good person, very simple, from all points of view. On the other hand, he had the sincerity to portray himself in a ruthless manner. That’s how I see him in The Garden Next Door, his last great book, besides the lucidity with which it’s written, he describes himself with an astonishing cruelty. This is a characteristic of worthy novelists.

Donoso’s fate is quite a paradox. It’s sad. He returned to Chile to take up the position of rector in literature. That is, the place of the rooster in the chicken coop. But you can’t be a rooster without critical thought, and he was a born fiction writer, who barely had any other aptitudes. His nature didn’t allow for the leader’s rude temper, he didn’t have the Nerudian or Huidobrian boldness to be a rooster and he was basically a good person, because in order to be the rooster in the hen house you have to be a bad person. The figure of Donoso is respected in Chile, but not very much and his fate seems to me that of the typical Latin American writer, a very sad fate.

Roberto Bolaño at the Hotel Ávila, in Caracas. Photograph: Eduardo Cobos.

{ Eduardo Cobos, Letralia, 5 August 2013 }

Ricardo Azuaje: Escribir para mí es compulsivo / Eduardo Cobos

Ricardo Azuaje: Writing Is Compulsive For Me

I began writing at around age fifteen, but more seriously at nineteen. At first, like everyone, I wrote poetry. Then short stories very influenced by García Márquez and by Francisco Massiani. The latter was a voice that felt very close to me; he had a big impact on me when I read him between the ages of sixteen and seventeen: Piedra de mar, Las primeras hojas de la noche and El llanero solitario tiene la cabeza pelada como un cepillo de dientes. Also another Venezuelan writer, Norbith Graterol, with a short novel titled La invención del fuego, which I must have reread several times. There’s Renato Rodríguez with Al sur del equanil, first, and then El bonche. But the truth is I read everything: pulp fiction, many Latin Americans, Julio Cortázar above all. His novel Hopscotch was very important for me for many years, although it’s been a while since I’ve reread it. I also read the Venezuelans from the collection El Dorado from Monte Ávila Editores. I particularly recall Marzo anterior by José Balza; a book by Oswaldo Trejo, También los hombres son ciudades, and Iphigenia by Teresa de la Parra.

In 1978 I left Caracas to study literature at the Universidad de los Andes. I chose the major of Classical Literatures which only had five students enrolled, almost everyone chose Latin American Literature. I was very attracted to the possibility of living alone and changing cities. At the time I was more dedicated to politics than to anything else. However, Mérida was very important because that’s where I began to write seriously. I wrote a first novel in some high school notebooks, which I sent to José Balza. He simply said they were unpublishable, but that the possibility of a writer existed and he encouraged me to keep going. So, as time went on, I published short stories in a few university magazines. I was able to place on in the magazine Zona Franca, then another one appeared in Papel Literario, more or less in the early eighties. But the possibility of publishing a book was given much later.


First Books and Caracas As Sustenance

In the mid-80s my first book of short stories is published, A imagen y semejanza (Monte Ávila Editores, 1986); most of the stories in that collection I had written between Caracas and Mérida, with the exception of “Sanguinela gens,” written in La Gran Sabana. In fact, that was a thicker book. There have also been attempts at long novels, which haven’t been completely successful, because my fiction tends to be short stories that go on much longer or novels that resolve themselves quickly. And really, despite the fact I’ve made a few, I don’t intend to make short novels. Actually, the first one, Juana la roja y Octavio el sabrio (Fundarte, 1991), which is published independently, was going to be included in A imagen y semejanza.

The protagonist of Juana la roja..., Octavio, has a more or less programmed life, he knows he knows he’ll get his Law degree and that he lives with a certain amount of comfort, but he rebels. And this might be one of the most frequent characteristics in what I write: almost all the stories have something like that, at some point the characters become aware of what’s happening and they rebel; they also know that this behavior can lead to failure or calamity, but at the same time they know that, suddenly, they’ll return to their normality, which is to be aware of their surroundings. That rebellion is what makes people more human. Of course, it’s not original at all, we’ve seen it in the stories of Anton Chekov or Raymond Carver, those types of things, common people who suddenly act after a momentary trigger, it illuminates them for a moment and they see life as a series of flashes.

Another constant that’s found there is Caracas. My family came to Caracas in 1972 from the state of Guárico; but in some way or another my entire experience has revolved around this city. So much that when I first left for La Gran Sabana in 1983, I would come to Caracas every two months and spend a couple weeks here, which is to say the contact was permanent. That’s the relationship with Caracas, which has been an important sustenance of what I do; and yet, more than urban texts it has to do with how one lives life here, the unsatisfactory relationships in work and in love, structured life, because in the end you’ll die and nothing will happen. In any case, there’s always an initial idea in my stories, something I want to develop, and if need be I’ll do research. For example, in Juana la roja... I wrote almost from memory about the time period the novel is set in, which is 1982, and I wrote it in 85-86, and I more or less remembered the year of the events in Cantaura. Later I went to the newspaper archives, so the information came after the first draft.
[Translator’s Note: In October of 1982, the Venezuelan military attacked a guerrilla encampment near Cantaura in the state of Anzoátegui, killing 23 people.]

Likewise, with La expulsión del paraíso (Memorias de Altagracia, 1998) there’s some of that. In relation to the fiction of Oswaldo Trejo, to whom I allude in that novel, I tried to read a few essays, but they didn’t help me too much and what I did was take the idea from what I wanted to put into my piece of writing; above all, whatever had to do with my character. The narrator is more cultured, though I try not to make the references too exaggerated; because I think that, in general, no one from our university-educated middle class is extremely cultured, they manage information from newspapers and magazines, television, they have some literary reference that comes from high school, things like that, with exceptions in a few circles of society in Caracas, but they don’t have books as an immediate reference. La expulsión del paraíso is my most literary text and it’s one of the most extravagant ones, because the character’s life is completely changed; the characters in my stories don’t end up doing well; all of them undergo many trials.

Regarding Viste de verde nuestra sombra (Fundarte, 1993), I wrote it more or less during the same time as Juana la roja... and it’s inspired by an issue of the Spanish magazine El Viejo Topo, which included a dossier on the “metropolitan indians,” a radical Italian group that would occupy abandoned buildings. I suppose it was also influenced by the fact that at the time I was living in La Gran Sabana and I was dazzled by what I was learning about the Pemon people. Although I don’t think any of that is reflected in the story. I might have been more influenced by an illustration in the dossier that showed a police officer in riot gear with an arrow piercing his shield, with that we’re already in the story. On the other hand, Ella está próxima y viene con pie callado (1) was written in Caracas during a time when the country seemed to have no future (that no man’s time between the fall of Carlos Andrés Pérez and the second presidency of Rafael Caldera), and I think some of that is reflected in the story and above all in the character. This text appeared in Tenerife, Canary Islands, thanks to the mediation of Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez and Ernesto Suárez, accompanying other short stories, although it also functions as a short novel.


The Art of Rewriting and the Legion Nearby

On another note, writing is actually something compulsive for me, since I can go for months and years without writing; then an idea begins to move around me and I start writing until I achieve something that might be a starting point. I don’t make outlines. And in fact I start stories whose ending I don’t yet know, I really try to be consistent with the anecdote, once it takes off I don’t try to force it. That’s a piece of advice from Cortázar: to be consistent, that the story be credible even if it’s fantastic. That’s why I try to maintain a rhythm. In any case, if I don’t finish a story in one night or in one week, it’s likely that I’ll never finish it and if I do finish it after a long time has passed it will definitely be a bad one. Actually, a few years ago I sent a story to a magazine, I wasn’t convinced it could be published, because I never managed to finish it and I sincerely think I should have never sent it.

That’s where one is left more exposed to criticism. Though I’ve really had a lot of luck with critics considering that if you add up the copies of all the books I’ve published they don’t reach three thousand. And despite this there has been a certain response, I say it because I know of writers who can publish eight or nine books, with readers even, and they don’t have the same resonance. In that regard, the truth is I can’t complain. And I’ve learned a few things from that. Above all because, in some cases, I’ve made myself revise more profusely, to be more responsible with readers, since one can sometimes become a bit arrogant when one has published. Regarding critiques that have pointed out errors in the writing, I’ve given myself the task of rewriting some texts, polishing them a bit more; this is the case with Juana la roja..., which had errors relating to grammar, although I have to say the editors created true disasters. Now that it’s been republished I have revised it and I hope it turned out much better. (2)

People always ask me if I feel I’m part of a generation of writers or novelists; what I think is that there was a group, we didn’t always share the same opinions about literature or about the matter that everyone in this country talks about, which is politics, but that group that wasn’t quite cohesive was interesting. In the 90s we were all working in cultural institutions: the Dirección de Literatura, Monte Ávila Editores, Fundalibro or the Consejo Nacional de la Cultura. And I think chance made it possible for us to know each other because we were all close to the world of books. Even those who weren’t had attended conferences through Fundarte or events that were organized in the book festivals; it was simply impossible not to meet each other. There were ideas about fiction of interest in the group like, for example, those of Slavko Zupcic y Armando Luigi Castañeda. I don’t know if they continue to write bu they, who were the youngest of that cohort, had a writing that was forward-looking. Writers, in many instances, are immersed in the country and express what’s happening, but only on extraordinary occasions do they give clues about what will happen. We’ll have to see if that group or generation, or whatever we might call it, from the 90s, which was very heterogeneous, with very different tendencies, will continue to say things to the country, and if it truly did so at one point.

Notwithstanding, it seems to me that this group belonged to a certain literary tradition. Because I think that in Venezuela we have a strong literary tradition, but one that’s not necessarily tied to the academy. There critics who affirm, many times correctly, that Venezuelan writers don’t know their literary tradition. There is one; but for a writer it can be another one that’s not the national one. A writer, like any Latin American, is formed by reading a Japanese writer or the North Americans, to give an example. There’s a web of dissimilar influences and readings. Many of us who began in the 80s and 90s were influenced by Renato Rodríguez, and we continued to discover him in conversations. Even Rómulo Gallegos has been a reference point for everyone; in this sense I can say there were people who wrote against him. Guillermo Meneses, who was less frequented but had a certain importance, has also been present; there is Julio Garmendia and Salvador Garmendia, the early novels of Carlos Noguera, that are extraordinary, those of José Balza that despite generating so much rejection opened up spaces and influenced other writers; such as Humberto Mata, among others from the house.

That whole tradition of writers I’ve mentioned, regrettably, with specific exceptions, has not been projected outside the country. And maybe that’s one of our writers’ biggest frustrations. Though I think that transcending borders is more of a commercial problem than a literary one. The country’s market can’t sustain a writer because you have to publish abroad and have wider distribution. The truth is I’m convinced the best writers have had to work in other fields since their work has distanced them from the market. There you have William Faulkner, among many others, who didn’t make a living from literature until his final years. Or like the character in La expulsión del paraíso, who when he starts to make a living from what he writes has already betrayed his writing. That’s been the temptation for many writers.

Notes

1. Novel published alongside the short stories “De las mutaciones,” “Carro rojo,” “Puertorrico,” and “Buscando su muerte natural” in the book with the same title: Ella está próxima y viene con pie callado (Canary Islands, Spain: El Lobey Ediciones, 2003; republished by Monte Ávila Editores, 2010).

2. Juana la roja y Octavio el sabrio, Viste de verde nuestra sombra and “Ella está próxima y viene con pie callado” were published in a single volume titled Tres novelas cortas (Universidad de Oriente, 2007).




{ Eduardo Cobos, Letralia, 22 April 2013 }

Roberto Martínez Bachrich: Nos gusta quejarnos de la ausencia de Literatura / Eduardo Cobos

Roberto Martínez Bachrich: We like to complain about the absence of Literature

The poet, fiction writer and essayist doesn’t think there’s a boom going on in Venezuelan fiction or anything of the sort. “It’s simply one more chapter in a tradition that’s always been alive,” he affirms.

Photo by Williams Marrero

Martínez Bachrich (Valencia, 1977) is a poet, fiction writer and essayist. He was selected by the 2011 Guadalajara International Book Fair as one of the 25 Best Kept Secrets of Latin America. With his essay about the poet and novelist Antonia Palacios, Tiempo hendido, he received the prize for the Concurso Anual Transgenérico awarded by the Fundación para la Cultura Urbana. In this interview he talks about his recent short story collection, Las guerras íntimas (Caracas: Lugar Común, 2012).

Books have been fundamental for Roberto Martínez Bachrich in his life. He began to read from a very young age and with literary maturity it became a career, he graduated with a degree in Literature from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, got a Master’s in Creative Writing from in Turin, Italy under the auspices of Alessandro Baricco, and managed to complete another Master’s in Literary Studies, also at UCV.

With these tools for study and a stubborn university teaching practice, he has been able to study Venezuelan literature. And perhaps from that experience surges “a passion that might seem forced though it’s actually not.” In any case, he assures he doesn’t have a deep relationship with the fiction of Venezuelan writers. What has actually caught his attention have been particular aspects.

“Maybe I have an ample taste in that regard. I mean, I get excited about formal aspects of fiction, that aren’t related to me, with what I do. Things that I might not ever explore but which, being well-made, interest me as a reader. One can always gain something from what’s read, because each book demands a different pact. We like to complain about the absence of literature, and also about “literature that’s no good.” It’s a matter of how we look at ourselves. We judge half a century by two or three names, two or three works. And we don’t investigate further to see what else we might find. In the 19th century there were already, without a doubt, great writers, even during the Colonial era.”

As for new Venezuelan fiction, the cohort to which he belongs, he points out: “I’m not very up to date. For professional reasons I’ve been reading “old stuff” for years. What I’ve read by Salvador Fleján, Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, Carlos Ávila and Miguel Hidalgo Prince, among others, seems very good to me. But I don’t think it’s a boom or anything of the sort. It’s simply one more chapter in a tradition that’s always been alive.”


The Rewritten Version

It’s interesting that so many years passed between your last book of stories, Vulgar, and Las guerras íntimas.
The first version was ready in 2001. Some of the stories I wrote alongside Vulgar, except in another tone, with different themes. There were sixteen more or less short texts. It wasn’t published and I was able to revise them a great deal. I kept cutting sections. Meanwhile, I was writing other things. In the end, only five were left in this final version. And others I made until 2007.

Was there a maturation?
I suppose so. That distance, those years allow you to think a great deal, to rewrite and reorganize. And I think that, as they’d say, a more or less decent collection of short stories emerged. Something much more meditated, processed more slowly. There’s a deeper effort of rewriting that none of the other books had. Well, and that thing that if a story interests you and you rewrite it and it doesn’t convince you then maybe you throw it out. And you end up with the ones that produce in you a sensation that makes you think they work. Though I don’t know exactly when it happens. I read them and say “this works.”

When would you stop revising?
The reader inside you tells you: “This story’s ready.” If more years had passed, maybe it wouldn’t be this book anymore. But I feel less insecure with Las guerras íntimas. Precisely because of that extensive work of redefinition and rewriting. Maybe they’re not extraordinary stories. But I think, let’s say, that they’re ten stories with which I’m satisfied up to a certain point.

What would be the formal difference of Las guerras íntimas?
They’re stories that live on their own. Maybe a writer dedicated to his anecdote, without distracting himself as happened in the fiction within fiction of the previous books. Besides, there’s a change in self-awareness of the characters who think they’re literary or are a farce or a fiction. That, which was often in Vulgar, is now gone.

In any case, one perceives the constancy of your previous themes.
There are those who say one is always writing the same work. And if you look at these stories they’re also vulgar miscommunications, or the previous ones were already intimate wars. Because they’re battles in a closed environment, amidst a few characters. Very minor, domestic, private, intimate battles. And they revolve around family relationships that have come undone, fractured couples, crises at work, within friendships, of the heart, in the end.


The Disappearance of the Narrator

Does the need for expression reside in hiding the narrator?
It could be. Because how do you tell these stories, the one about a paranoid man who fears tables, the one about mythomaniacs who murder over the phone, the one about the ghost of a decapitated nurse, the one about a family that escapes a war, the one about painter who goes hunting and doesn’t come back, the one about the girl who goes from one boyfriend to the next within one circle of friends; how do you narrate these intimate wars while trying to not participate, letting the story live on its own. What can you do, as a narrator, so that will work. Maybe it’s to disappear.

There’s also evidence of different registers. For instance, the treatment of the atmosphere that’s present in “Aguas perdidas, aguas encontradas” and “Densidad de las mesas.”
Something about the work of the atmosphere, which I was obsessed with a while ago, must have remained there. And yet, they’re very different stories. “Aguas perdidas...” is a morose tale, with a situation that’s more tense than it is intense (but tension, Cortázar says, is another way of building intensity), which is the boy’s battle against death in the water. And that struggle between the character and the sea is seen by no one and no one cares about it. It becomes intimate again. But it’s reached by accumulating apparently unconnected situations that, nevertheless, are preparing that moment in the story: the final battle. While in the other story you mention, “Densidad...”, the rhythm is much faster. There are no detours. We follow the single narrative thread that goes straight toward consummation, toward tragedy.

Are you working on something else?
I’m writing new stories, but I’m not thinking about a book yet. What I’m working on needs a lot more before it can close. Things are emerging little by little, very slowly. I’m also writing quite a few essays. What I’ve definitely finished is poetry. But publishing poetry in this country has become very difficult: each day there are fewer publishing houses that might contemplate a collection of poetry. Poetry doesn’t sell, they say. An important reason, then, to listen to it and pay attention to it. A fortunate genre, poetry, that manages to escape and happily sidestep the market’s iron bars.




{ Eduardo Cobos, El Nacional, 28 April 2012 }