Abandoned Gods | An Interview with María José Ferrada
Interviews
By Elizabeth Bryer
“With well-shined shoes and the right outfit, anything is possible.” So believes M, the precocious seven-year-old protagonist of María José Ferrada’s How to Order the Universe. Throughout, Ferrada’s enchanting, witty humor brings the camaraderie of traveling salesmen and the idiosyncrasies of their coterie to life. Yet the novel’s setting is 1980s Chile at the height of the Pinochet dictatorship, and Ferrada undergirds the picaresque elements with a shadow narrative that gathers force until it erupts—with all its danger and sorrow—into M’s world.
To translate is, first and foremost, to engage in close reading, and I was awed at the specificity of Ferrada’s vision in every single line. The combination of beguiling imagination and precise language made me want to tinker indefinitely with my translation. Yet even that rationale started to feel like an excuse, so reluctant was I to leave the novel’s world. Its powerful insights somehow manage to speak both very specifically to the time and place of the narrative, and to us all.
ELIZABETH BRYER: You have mentioned before that you wrote your first book at the age of eighteen, as a gift for your three-year-old brother. Some three dozen works of young people’s literature later, you have written your first novel. Does that initial impulse to write as an act of care still animate your work? If so, how?
MARÍA JOSÉ FERRADA: Yes, there is a joke among my close family and friends—that, essentially, my books are either for them or about them. But, as you say, my first books were handmade creations for my brother, when he was three and I was eighteen. They were handwritten and hand-sewn editions, and I poured a lot of effort into them, imagining what my brother would say when he saw them. I wasn’t thinking about children’s literature, and I didn’t stop to wonder whether what I was writing would make a good children’s book. I was thinking about my brother’s face when I finally pressed it into his hands, this gift that I had shut myself away to labor over. How to Order the Universe has a similar origin story: I had specific individuals in mind, and this was written as a tribute to them, a gift for them.
EB: While in many ways this is a charming, funny novel, it is haunted by loss. It charts the disappearance of a way of life, that of the traveling salesmen, and shows the ripple effects for people connected—some of them tangentially—to a man disappeared by the Pinochet regime. And, of course, the novel is ultimately about the loss of innocence: how growing up means leaving behind the idyllic world of childhood. What was it about these three losses that made you want to explore all of them in the one book?
MJF: At first, the novel was solely about the disappearance of the trade. As the writing progressed, other disappearances started clamoring for attention: the falling away of the child’s perspective, those small beliefs and small gods that, so useful during our first years of life, we must abandon one day—everyone has had to go through this farewell. And another disappearance, this one of a more violent nature: the disappearing of bodies, because the story takes place in a specific time in history, that of the Pinochet dictatorship. While most of us would love for life to be orderly, much of the time it is an impossibly tangled skein, with one thread pulling on several more. Maybe if we could isolate the driving forces, our stories could find their denouements otherwise, without pain, without farewells, but the driving forces are not always something we can control on a whim. I wanted the novel to acknowledge in some way those moments when we become aware of how small we are as human beings. The characters in the novel are all at different points on the way to becoming aware of their own fragility. And, paradoxically, I think that this awareness—of not being heroes—is what saves them.
EB: The word cosas—things—appears many times throughout the work, so much that it becomes almost incantatory, hypnotic. Your focus on the life of objects feels like a modern-day animism. What is it about objects that makes them such a rich vein of literary possibility?
MJF: Part of my job when I am writing children’s literature has to do with observing how children try to understand the world they find themselves in. I think that their search for meaning is much like our own: they have fears and questions, but, unlike us, they cannot yet turn to theories or belief systems to make sense of these. What they have are concrete things, and that’s where objects come into play in all their smallness (which at the same time is what makes them loom so large). We have seen as much in these times of confinement: children have had to stay inside and play with what they have at hand—toys, yes, but also boxes that transform into cars, chairs that turn into seats on a train, and brooms that become horses. When observed by eyes that view the world from a diminutive height, these are not only objects but also beings; beings that, if we observe them with curiosity and tenderness, return our gaze and play with us. That game rids the world, at least for a while, of its chill, of the pragmatism with which we are so often burdened. Children and their interactions with small-scale gods—the lamp god, the mug god—teach us a fascinating but simple lesson about how our gaze is capable of transforming reality.
EB: To detour for a moment into psychology, schema theory is a cognitive framework that helps us organize information. We have this network of abstract structures, which we are constantly adapting as we take in new information, but because of the shortcuts that those structures allow us to take, they cause us to exclude pertinent information in order to focus only on the things that confirm our preexisting ideas. A friend happened to mention schema theory in the week I was working on these interview questions, and it struck me that in many ways How to Order the Universe charts the growth of such a schema—and, ultimately, the moment it fails. M is devastated when her schema is no longer adequate and is forced to come to grips with pertinent information she had previously ignored (for example, when shiny shoes become not the possibility of walking on the moon but a tactic to draw attention away from her father’s worn-out shirt). If this was a conscious decision, what is your interest in psychology? And what inspired the brilliant idea to fuse the most practical of cognitive frameworks—hardware supplies—with the cosmic?
MJF: I think what I mentioned in my previous response has something to do with this. My knowledge of psychology is no more profound than most people’s, but I love observing, and I have seen how children who come to my workshops ask themselves questions and add whatever they discover to what they already know, or else modify that knowledge in cases where contradictions crop up. The more flexible the framework that we build, the more resilient it is. In any event, we are talking about fragile constructions, because we are human, which means we have access to only small pieces of information that other people gift us, and those other people are as human as we are. They carry their own pain and come with their own protective mechanisms. M, the main character of How to Order the Universe, is a seven-year-old girl who is in the middle of constructing one of those frameworks. She uses what she has at hand: the catalogue of products that her father sells, the stories the traveling salesmen tell, the silence of her mother. It is a small construct, a fragile world that will not survive the passage of time or the violence of the political moment in which the story is taking place. I often wonder how many constructions of the kind we each carry around with us were destroyed back then. A family, a friendship, a love are extraordinarily delicate systems that fit inside larger histories and interact with each other, impact on each other. Often, that coming into contact looks more like a collision, and, in the collision’s wake, the smaller parties—those who don’t have power or any instinct for heroics—end up either destroyed or picking up the pieces. The good news is that we have a remarkable capacity to take up whatever is left and use it to repair and rebuild. I tried to create characters who, despite being damaged, retained their instinct for survival. As for the cosmic elements, those had to do with that determination to live on . . . with those big moments in history, with cosmic times, with geological times, which make us feel small, but which also somehow assure us that life, understood as movement, goes on, independent of our joy and our pain.
EB: Lists are put to both poignant and comic effect in this work, and are an important narrative technique, reflective of M’s attempts to order the universe—to make it comprehensible. Yet even as M acts on her desire to name things so that she might understand their place in the world, she does not refer to the other characters by their given names, only initial letters. All except one character, that is: a ghost. Could you speak to the reasons why?
MJF: Lists appear because I think of them as a basic expression of our need to order chaos. And because of something very concrete too: traveling salesmen use them a lot—product lists, offer lists, sales lists, returned items lists (you would always hope for next to no entries on this last one). As for the characters being referred to by initial letters only, it has something to do with the fact that they are representative of anonymous people to whom history—I mean political history, the savage neoliberal system that brought an end to so many things—has given not one iota of consideration. I mean, has history ever cared what happened to a traveling salesman? Or to a seven-year-old girl? There were more important, more pressing things to worry about (restoring democracy, for example). But for me, maybe because I experienced it up close, that history was infinitely interesting. Because they weren’t huge, those pains, those joys—and there were joys; the traveling salesmen were full of life, and they were very entertaining—they were lost in the shadow of the greater tragedy, which was the dictatorship. As for the single name that appears in the book: Jaime Andrés Suárez Moncada is the name of a detained man who was disappeared. Through his absence he makes his mark on the story. His name is written like this, with both given names and both family names, for two reasons. The first: this was the way that the families of the disappeared referred to their loved ones in the marches, demanding to know what had happened to them. Photos pinned to their chests, they would cry out the name and everyone else would say, “Present.” Once heard, it is not easily forgotten. The second reason has to do with the fact that names were all that remained. There was no body to mourn, no date or place of death. In the face of such loss, names acquire an enormous, painful weight. I could have played with other things, but not with that.
EB: You’ve told me that How to Order the Universe is enormously special to you, in part because of its autobiographical elements. This came as a shock to me, albeit a delightful one, I think because of how crafted and almost fable-like the setting of 1970s Chile is throughout. I hope you don’t mind me mentioning that here, and I wonder if you could speak a little more about how you drew from your own life in writing this novel? Put another way: What about this book makes it so precious to you?
MJF: This novel was a gift for my father and the traveling salesmen I met in my childhood. In fact, I also gave these characters initial letters in lieu of names because they were inspired by real people. I wanted those people to recognize themselves in the book. It was something like a private joke between us. I wrote How to Order the Universe because I wanted to express my gratitude for all those times I knew I would find those people at the end of the road, smoking, drinking and cursing their luck. I wanted them to know that even though the motley family of traveling salesmen had dispersed, relatives like me still remembered them fondly. I knew they would be tickled by the idea of inspiring characters in a novel and that they would shake their heads at the fact that I was such a traitor, revealing the tricks of the trade. I think it was also a way to order my own story—to assign each thing its name and place amid the chaos and within my own personal cosmos.
María José Ferrada’s children’s books have been published all over the world. How to Order the Universe has been or is being translated into Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, and German, and is also being published all over the Spanish-speaking world. Ferrada has been awarded numerous prizes, such as the City of Orihuela de Poesía, Premio Hispanoamericano de Poesía para Niños, the Academia Award for the best book published in Chile, and the Santiago Municipal Literature Award. She is also is a three-time winner of the Chilean Ministry of Culture Award. She lives in Santiago, Chile.
The novels Elizabeth Bryer has translated from Spanish include Claudia Salazar Jiménez’s Americas Prize–winning Blood of the Dawn; Aleksandra Lun’s The Palimpsests, awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant; and José Luis de Juan’s Napoleon’s Beekeeper. Her debut novel, From Here On, Monsters, was joint winner of the Norma K Hemming Award.
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