Selva Almada: Seven Questions
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Your novels have the succinctness, the resonance of poetry. The prose in Not A River, for example, is stripped back, concise, full of silences. And yet complex patterns are woven into the fabric of the text – shifting perspectives, fragmented time and careful use of motifs. There is a very impressive economy of means.
Can you describe the writing process behind Not A River?
It took me a number of years to finish that novel, and I must’ve spent five years on the first few pages alone. In those initial pages I’d already found the tone, but I knew how difficult it would be to keep up, precisely because of the economy you’ve described. For a long while I wrote not a single line, always turning the novel over in my mind, its plot, the possibilities of its characters. Finally, some six years after writing its first pages, one summer I sat down to write the rest. That style of writing involved constant editing. Sometimes I’d write a scene chronologically then cut it into fragments, others I’d write a scene in full detail before cutting it down to the heart. Purification and synthesis: that was the work. And a condensed language that has more to do with poetry than fiction – or at least, as a reader not a writer of poetry, that’s how I feel. I worked out the entire process as I went about the actual writing. I was constantly cutting things out and shifting things around, always thinking of how much more could be cut, with a scalpel almost, for a text that was more and more naked.
It’s difficult for me to write a linear story.
Your three novels – The Wind That Lays Waste (2012), Brickmakers (2013), and Not A River (2021) – form what has been called ‘The Trilogy of Men’. And certainly these novels explore relationships between fathers and sons, friends and rivals.
Why have you chosen to make men the primary subjects, almost the negative stars, of your novels?
It wasn’t a conscious plan. In fact, when I started writing The Wind That Lays Waste, the main character was Leni, the daughter of the reverend. But as I came to rewrite, the male characters grew until they took centre stage. In Brickmakers, for example, the real spark of the story was an anecdote I’d heard. It was a story with only men involved, in that most masculine of scenes: the knife-fight. When I started writing Not A River, once again I found myself writing about a typically masculine situation: a fishing trip with male friends. So when it comes to those two books, I think it’s the plot that puts men at the centre. I just kept exploring that world and its possibilities: the brotherhood, the deals they swear they’ll keep, the betrayal. Of course, it’s also true that I write following my own curiosity, and I’m certainly curious about the world of men, in how they act and why. Through my fiction and my imagination, I can find the nuance, the gaps and the hollows, the contradictions.
Time plays an important role in your novels. It is often non-chronological and fractured, to powerful effect.
What drives your interest in the fragmentation of time? Is this a literary choice that works to create suspense? Or is there a philosophical imperative too, a reflection on what it is to be human?
It’s difficult for me to write a linear story. My natural style is fragmentary: moving back into the past, or through a present interwoven with scenes from the past of its characters. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because, to tell you how a character is in the present moment of a plot, I have to go back and find the things that explain them. It’s also true that fragmentation helps to build the tension that is so important in my novels: the sense of something building beneath the surface, something imminent.
I was attracted to the image of violence in an otherwise happy atmosphere.
The Argentine northeast, its small towns and remote settings, is a powerful element in your novels. You come from Entre Ríos and your stories feel very attached to place.
How do arrive at your plots? Can you speak a little about the origins of the story in Brickmakers, for example?
The sparks of these stories come from strange places – but they’re never entirely imaginative. In Brickmakers, for example, it was an anecdote from a few years back in a town in the northern province of Chaco, a place I often visit. The story was that two families, neighbours and enemies, had gotten involved in a knife fight in an amusement park, killing one of each group. I was attracted to the image of violence in an otherwise happy atmosphere, the music and light of the travelling fairs only stay a little while and always bring such joy. After a time, I came back to the person who told me the story, looking for more details. There wasn’t much to tell. And yet that initial image was still such a powerful one for me, so I decided to start there and invent the rest. First question: where did that spite – that grudge – where did it all come from? What might have caused the fight? That’s when the romantic aspect came in: the obvious thing was that those two men were fighting over a woman. But what would happen if, instead of a woman, one of those men were in love with the brother of another – if the love were between two men?
Your fiction, especially Brickmakers and Not A River, makes use of ghosts and hallucinations, often ambiguously. This is interesting, as these novels are fundamentally works of realism, and the experience of ghosts and visions seems a part of reality, not an exercise in the fantastical.
Can you speak a little about what attracts you to exploring hauntings and marginal cognitive states in your work?
I grew up in a region where superstition, shamanism and pagan saints were relatively common. It was a place whose devout Catholicism was always interwoven – interfered with – by things more surreal altogether. I’d say that hauntings were a facet of that reality, constantly floating about through the air, part of the emotional education of the people. There’s a local saying that I think sums it up well, ‘creer o reventar’, literally, ‘believe or burst’, our way of saying that sometimes there’s nothing to be done but believe in seemingly impossible things.
The entire state of Argentina today – politically, economically, socially – is deeply distressing.
You are part of a remarkable generation of female Argentine authors. What explains the achievements of your generation over the last 10-20 years? How does that compare to the situation of publishing in Argentina today?
I think this can be explained by two major factors: first, the growth of feminisms in Argentina over the past ten years and the visibility it gave to women in various fields. The second, because women’s writing is so much more interesting for many reasons: each of us has our own sense of searching, a language of our own, the work and exploration and construction of that language. We’ve gotten together with every genre of literature and never married one. We’re always ratcheting up the pressure, and our achievements, I think, come from the fact that it’s newer than the literature men were writing. It’s also true that readers were tired of the narratives they’d been reading until then, and wanted to open something new.
Argentina’s publishing scene – and by this I mean the independent publishers who gave the scene the vitality and diversity of the last two decades – is experiencing an extremely difficult time, just like the rest of the country. Nowadays publishing a book requires a lot of money, and that money eventually leads to increased cost, which means people read less and less. I’m sorry to say that it’s a highly complex and difficult situation. The entire state of Argentina today – politically, economically, socially – is deeply distressing.
Who are some of the Argentine and Latin American authors that you like to read and why?
From Argentina I really like Hernán Ronsino, an author I’ve read since his very first book. I love his world and the things he searches for in his writing, how he works with language and the semi-rural environment that feels so close to me. Another Argentine favourite is Sara Gallardo, who died in the 1980s, leaving a brief but powerful body of work: January and Eisejuaz are two of the best novels in Argentinian literature. María Moreno is dazzling: our country’s best writer of short stories. And then there are the poets: Susana Villalba, Estela Figueroa and Diana Bellessi. I really enjoy poetry and I think that those three writers have something unique, something that will last and inspire a new generation of poets.
From more widely in Latin America, I love the classics of Juan Rulfo and José María Arguedas. It’s the music in their texts, the work they do with the sound of their own regions, how they turn it all to poetry. Bolivia’s Liliana Colanzi is a brilliant short story writer with a strange, surprising world all her own, cut through with fantasy. And Cristina Rivera Garza, from Mexico, with her sharpness of eye, her incredible lucidity and exquisite prose.
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Selva Almada is considered one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature and one of the most influential feminist intellectuals in the region. She has published several novels, a book of short stories, a book of journalistic fiction and a film diary (written on the set of Lucrecia Martel’s film Zama). She has been finalist for the Medifé Prize, the Vargas Llosa Prize for Novels, the Rodolfo Walsh Award and of Tigre Juan Award. Her debut in English was The Wind that Lays Waste (Winner of the EIBF First Book Award 2019), followed by Dead Girls (2020), Brickmakers (2021), and Not a River (winner of the IILA Prize in Italy).
Konrad Muller studied Arabic at the British Council in Cairo, before serving as an Australian diplomat in Egypt, Israel and the Occupied Territories. He now works on a small family vineyard in northern Tasmania. His writing has appeared before in The London Magazine.
James Appleby lives in Edinburgh, where he is editor of Interpret, Scotland’s new magazine of international writing. His original poetry has been awarded an Elizabeth Kostova Foundation Fellowship; his translations have been featured at individual events at the French Institute of Scotland and the Sofia Literature and Translation House.
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