A Gathering of Lonely Figures

A conversation between Carlos Fonseca and his editor Ben Brooks about Carlos’s forthcoming novel Austral.

Austral is Carlos Fonseca’s second novel with FSG. The novel was translated by Megan McDowell, whose translations have won the National Book Award, the English PEN award, the Premio Valle Inclán, and the O. Henry Prize, and have been nominated four times for the International Booker Prize. Austral is the story of an expat professor, Julio, who returns home to finish a novel written by his aphasiac friend, left incomplete at the time of her death. What results is a journey that is both geographical—from the United States to the deserts of the Southern Cone—as well as historical, as it explores the wide landscape of Latin America’s turbulent history—from colonisation to strange, experimentally Aryan settlements, to war and genocide. It is an expedition into cultural obliteration and to the edge of language, arriving finally at a reckoning between those things we chose to leave behind, and those we fight to preserve.

Ben Brooks: What was the origin of this novel for you? How did Julio’s trip begin to take shape?

Carlos Fonseca: I tend to work cumulatively. I have a small leather notebook where I gather ideas, metaphors, newspaper stories, and so on. I patiently wait, gathering materials until they begin to gain the shape of a world and of a narrative. I had been gathering ideas on loss and language for a while when a magazine asked me for the short story that eventually became the origin of Austral. I thought it would be interesting to tell the story of the last speaker of an indigenous language and his relationship to the anthropologist who is trying to rescue that language from oblivion. That story, entitled “The Last,” became the seed for the novel. It took me a bit, but the story and its characters began to grow on me, and I soon realized that the anthropologist who had so intrigued me could in fact be the father of Julio’s long-lost love, and that the story of Julio’s journey back home and to his past was indeed related to that world which I have set in the distant lands of Nueva Germania.

BB: Travel, movement, migration, these are all central to the characters’ histories in the novel. And all of them here have some geographical or cultural ties to Latin America. Can you talk about the novel’s scope and settings, and what’s important about having multiple perspectives telling the story of a place/region?

CF: The other day I was looking at a map that traced the routes of ships across the Atlantic during the colonial period. It was a mad arrangement of threads leading everywhere, from Europe to Africa to the Americas, but even from there to Asia. It became clear to me that Latin America is a place made of routes, and that to be Latin American is to be willing to follow those historical threads that lead us elsewhere. In Austral I wanted to trace those routes and the stories that go with them. So, if the novel seems to be a global novel, it is because I was interested in exploring this tension between critics, the contradictions inherent to an identity—a Latin American identity—that from the beginning was always in movement, always in transit. In a way, this all probably relates to my biography: I was born in Costa Rica, to a Costa Rican father and a Puerto Rican mother, and moved to Puerto Rico at a young age. So, I am always interested in what happens to identity when one begins to travel. What sort of new home one might find at the end of the journey.

BB: Autofiction remains a very hot topic in the literary world, for better or worse. And Aliza’s novel-within-the-novel is a kind of autofiction, at least it’s not totally explicit that we aren’t reading her own story. Even Julio, who shares some biographical data with you, could be viewed as a Carlos Fonseca stand-in. I don’t want to ask if you are Julio, or how much of Carlos is in this character, but I would like to ask about the kinds of points one can make in fictionalizing their stories and lives, and what kinds of advantages that has compared to merely record-keeping?

CF: I don’t dislike autofiction, as long as one stresses the fiction side of it. Life is, at the end of the day, the greatest fiction: a story we tell ourselves in order to keep going forward. The same for memory, which is one of the themes touched on in Austral. How could we think of memory without narrative, without storytelling? So, in that sense, I am interested in seeing the stories and fictions people build in order to keep a sense of who they are. I am also interested, particularly in Austral, in what happens when people suddenly see themselves—due to sickness, trauma, or social catastrophe—deprived of those stories. Who are we then, if the stories that we tell ourselves disappear? I can’t think of anything more lonely than just a record of lived facts without a story.

BB: Lonely, indeed! Speaking of records and the ways that we record the events of history, and who gets to decide what we record, can a more straightforward accounting of the facts of any given event or period also make for good literature?

CF: Someone mentioned to me the other day that my characters are always historians. I hadn’t thought about it, but it is kind of true: they all have a passion for recording the past. They are all surrounded by little brown notebooks where they keep track of the past and of the present. They seem to be compulsive recorders. I guess there is something there about who gets to narrate history and how that relates to who is in power. All of these characters are in search of alternative histories, recording in their notebooks attempts to unearth what lies buried below history. I guess what interests me are the characters that dare to face the web of dreams that constitutes colonial and postcolonial history.

BB: I have another Aliza question. She’s British, but at a certain point decides she’s only going to write and publish in Spanish. It’s an inversion of the status typically given to English as this global lingua franca, and reminded me a bit of Jhumpa Lahiri (and others) who have adopted learned languages throughout their careers. Can you talk a bit about Aliza’s choice, and more broadly, about the politics of choosing a language at all, meaning, making art outside of one’s native language? The liberties and the limits that it creates?

CF: Austral is a novel about language and about the politics of language. A book about the link between language and identity. In this sense, Aliza’s decision to latinize her name—her decision to become Alicia Abravanel—is not only an attempt to escape her past and her heritage, but also a political decision. I think she understands that, within the linguistic cartography of globalization, English is the hegemonic language, and makes a conscious decision to counteract that. But the novel also works in a similar way with regards to Spanish: it is aware of the fact that Spanish is the colonial language of power within a continent where hundreds of indigenous languages disappear each year. Somewhere in the novel the narrator refers to this in terms of Alicia’s “pasión de extranjería”—her “bold passion for the foreign”—and I think he is right: what drives her is always a desire to become other, to reach outwards. I am interested in that impulse that leads us to leave our stable identities behind and dare to become strangers to ourselves. I guess this is what leads me constantly to think about the figure of the journey.

BB: On this topic of linguistic hegemonies, the novel also addresses the nature of language extinction, and efforts to preserve or record those languages. Can you talk about Juvenal Suárez, the last speaker of his language, and what his presence in the novel means for the other characters?

CF: As I mentioned, Austral began with this character. “The Last” is as much a short story about the anthropologist as it is about Juvenal Suárez, the last speaker of the Nataibo language. Whereas Aliza Abravanel, due to her aphasia, is losing the words for a world that is still out there, Juvenal Suárez is losing the world that his words describe. They are, in a way, mirror images of each other, lonely figures in a world that, despite being more connected than ever, seems to exclude them. Austral is, in this sense, a gathering of lonely figures: a novel about the possibility of thinking about a community of outcasts.

BB: One of the reasons that I identified so much with the characters in this novel, and with you as an author, is that we have spent big chunks of time living outside of our places of birth, away from the places we grew up in, and that feeling of being an outsider is so central to this novel. There are all of these people trying to make sense of their place in the world, both geographically and existentially, and so much of that is mediated through language. How has migration and movement from place to place influenced your work?

CF: Italo Calvino has a beautiful quote that I never get tired of citing: “The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.” In our world of borders and nationalisms, our world of xenophobia, this means that literature is a haven for migrants and foreigners, for outcasts and exiles. Calvino’s quote goes on to give a brilliant definition of reading and writing: “Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.” I love this outward gesture, this idea that literature makes us reach toward identities that are still in process. For biographical reasons—my dual nationality and the fact that I have been moving around ever since—this quote resonates with me. I think identity is something to strive for—rather than something given—a route, rather than a root. If literature is utopian it might be in the sense that it finally constructs a hospitable place where the stranger can feel at home, a true cosmopolitan world beyond capitalist globalization.

BB: Several reviewers have compared the novel to W.G. Sebald, who, I confess, I haven’t read! How does the comparison strike you, and what do you recognize of yours in his work and vice versa? What is Sebaldian about the novel, or more importantly, what is Fonsecian about it?

CF: Ah, I know what to gift you next! Sebald means a lot to me. I think he changed the way that we approach history. Never before had history seemed so personal, so full of surprises and unexpected connections. He also gave us a new way of historically linking nature and culture. In the tradition of the great naturalists of the 18th century, he was able to “read” nature, finding there, buried beneath the layers of commonplaces, the stories of those emigrants to which he dedicated many books. Austral, I guess, plays upon those ideas. It tries to weave a narrative that tells both the history of nature and the history of culture, while focusing on those lonely outcasts that have been expelled from history. It is, also, a novel about survival: about the survival or persistence of the past in the present. That doesn’t mean Sebald was an influence. As a writer, I always feel that inevitably, whether you like it or not, you will always end up writing only like yourself. So, beyond Sebald or any other writers I admire, what always ends up showing up in my books are my obsessions: the world of colonial journeys, the world of eccentrics, the world of secrets buried in the past.

BB: I’m trying to formulate a good question about translation and the limits of language, how language is always an approximation of thought and feeling. Maybe it’s appropriate that I can’t quite land on how to ask this. But could you tell us about limitations in language, if you were working with any specific limitations in mind as you wrote this novel, ones that proved to be useful or productive for you creatively?

CF: I guess this is a novel about the limits of translating worlds and worldviews, and nonetheless, about the ethical imperative that compels us to strive toward it. There is a scene in the novel which I strangely keep thinking about, despite having finished writing it more than three years ago. It is that moment when the anthropologist comes to record the language of Juvenal Suárez, the last native speaker of Nataibo, only to find that Suárez stubbornly refuses to speak Spanish. He retreats into his own language, and that is in a way his end. Against that, translation and the possibility of translation feels a bit like an ethical task. Languages have that way of curling into themselves, of trying to hide secrets, closing themselves to the outside world. But the task of the translator is to show that communication is still possible and that no matter what is at stake—the expression of pain, of trauma, even humor—there is a way of establishing a bridge between languages and between cultures. This was a question I kept asking myself while writing the novel: how do you translate pain into language? Toward the end of the novel, I got the sense that, paradoxically, it is precisely in relation to those mute blind spots of language where we end up producing a sense of community.

BB: You have worked with the translator Megan McDowell on all of your novels, who is undoubtedly one of the best in the game right now. What is the experience of reading your work in translation, and how do you encounter your own work in English? You once said that Austral is the novel that most reflects your voice as an author. Does it still feel that way in the English translation?

CF: Yes, we have worked together on each one of my three novels and have known each other for over ten years now! I have been immensely lucky to have her by my side throughout all these years. Slowly, Megan’s voice as my translator has become internal to my own writing. This seems a bit out there, but I can explain. Contrary to the Hispanic world, where editing is not a big part of the publishing process, the Anglophone world puts a lot of emphasis on it. While working with Megan on her translations of my work, I began reading the novels not only as a writer, but also as an editor. It was through our conversations that I began to read myself differently and to edit myself. Today, every time I sit down to write, I have Megan’s voice, and her editing suggestions, at the back of my mind. Strangely, she has been fundamental in my attempts to find my own voice, if there is ever such a thing in literature. With Austral, I had the feeling that I was finally not hiding my voice. With Colonel Lágrimas, I had a sense of being a ventriloquist, mimicking a voice which seemed strange to me but whose cadence enthralled me, whereas in Natural History, I was paying homage to certain writers I admire. In Austral, I finally removed all the veils and dared to be myself, with all the tricks and deceptions that entails. Megan has done, as always, a wonderful job.

BB: There’s a special kind of joy that comes from discussing books with people. Especially when you’re really excited about a book, there’s something electric and so fun about talking about it with other fans. In your novel, Julio is friends with Aliza, who becomes Alicia to her fans and readers. Julio has known her from long before her career as a writer. His relationship and history with her is different from the kind she has with her readers, and there are points in the novel where people tell Julio about Aliza and her work as though they really knew her. And maybe they do somehow, or they’re just swept up in that excitement and feeling of devotion and admiration. Is there some insecurity on Julio’s part for not “knowing” (entre aspas) his friend as well as he thought? And is that part of why he’s determined to search for answers?

CF: In the months after his death, I have gone back to reading the books of Javier Marías. I think he was the master at depicting those secrets that always exist between people, despite knowing each other for years. Storytelling, for him, depended upon those secrets, just as friendship revolved around them. I think Austral is, in that sense, a novel about buried secrets and our attempts to come to terms with them: perhaps not necessarily by unearthing them, but by learning to live with them. Learning that not everything in the world is meant to be known, and that often friendships are based on sharing a secret without disclosing it. At one point in the novel Julio mentions the idea that Aliza’s last manuscript seemed like a text written in a secret key that only he could understand. I think his odyssey is a bit like the journey of someone looking for that secret key, only to understand that he must respect it and do it justice. Loving someone also means respecting their opacity and their mystery.

BB: The title of your previous novel is Museo Animal, translated to Natural History. But I love that there’s also this recurring element of the museo (museum) at the end of Austral. To cycle back a bit to our discussion of record-keeping and literature, it’s very much like a museum, in that the selection and curation process is subjective and the records or objects are more, well, objective. And the museum in Austral isn’t a conventional museum, necessarily. I wanted to talk a bit about museums, how “truth” is presented, and how memory, especially in this case the memory of conflict and violence, factors into moving toward the future? (I’m thinking also about truth and reconciliation commissions or post-conflict tribunals, how the telling and the testimony of an event become part of how to move on/heal from it.)

CF: Macedonio Fernández, the great Argentine avant-garde writer whose influence was decisive for Borges, wrote a wonderful novel entitled Museo de la novela de la Eterna, translated by Margaret Schwartz as The Museum of Eterna’s Novel. I think Fernández envisions a new way of thinking about the novel: as museum. The writer inevitably becomes, then, a curator, in charge of framing and telling the story of those museum objects that we have inherited from the past. I like this idea very much and I often think of it while writing. Writing as collecting, writing as framing, writing as producing constellations, mosaics, collages of bits and pieces that we have inherited from history. In the case of Austral, the novel revolves around issues of memory in the context of Central America’s—and in particular Guatemala’s—civil wars of the 1980s and the State-sponsored human rights violations that ensued. In that context, the museum becomes, as you say, a way of thinking about the politics of memory and about the possibility of witnessing in the aftermath of catastrophe. Just before beginning to write the novel someone told me that the Greeks used to build “memory theatres” in order to help them remember and I thought it was a perfect image for what all the characters in Austral were struggling toward: memory theatres to help them raise their voices against oblivion.

BB: As a fan of out there science-fiction and novels that stretch our brains, I was dying to read Aliza’s elemental novels! I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that she wrote three novels (air, water, fire) and was completing her fourth (earth) when she dies and leaves her manuscript to Julio. A manuscript that takes on a very different style and approach than the first three, which we as the reader of Austral only see short descriptions of. I would love to hear about how you came up with the premises of these novels and why it was important or interesting to organize them by elements? Also, possibly without giving too much away, why do you think she chose to save earth for last?

CF: Haha! I wish I could read them as well. I wonder what they would look like. The origin of that idea comes in fact from Natural History. One of the characters in the novel, a drunk bohemian writer called Julio Denis, boasts of being in the process of writing a sort of anti-novel, where the protagonists are not humans but rather the natural elements. He is writing a history of fire, with fire as its protagonist. In that novel the irony is that Julio’s ambition mimics the world of underground mine fires that begin to envelop the protagonists. Once I finished writing Natural History, I kept thinking about that idea of writing a natural history. So I guess Aliza’s novels are my way of playing with that project. I liked the idea of the last novel being devoted to the earth. I guess it is, out of all the classical elements, the most ambitious: to write the earth is to write the world.

 

Ben Brooks is an Assistant Editor at FSG x MCD. Carlos Fonseca was born in Costa Rica in 1987, brought up in Puerto Rico and studied in the USA. His previous novels are Colonel Lágrimas and Natural History, both translated by Megan McDowell. His work has been translated into more than ten languages. He is a lecturer at Cambridge University, where he is a fellow of Trinity College.

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