Stories Can Wait | An Interview with Federico Falco
Interviews
By Jennifer Croft
Federico Falco is an exquisite writer—generous and accomplished, painstaking and distinctive, genuine, probing, and wonderful. I was lucky to meet him in 2012 at the University of Iowa, where he was in residency with the International Writing Program, and later, in Buenos Aires, I was lucky to get to see him for coffee once in a while and even attend his creative writing workshop, which met in his light- and plant-filled home in the leafy neighborhood of Colegiales.
When I read Un Cementerio perfecto in 2016, I cried. Spending the summer in Berlin, I took the book with me to the sprawling, joyous Volskpark Friedrichshain every day for five days and read each of the five stories in a single sitting. I cried at the end of “Silvi and Her Dark Night,” and I cried at the end of “A Perfect Cemetery,” and I cried at the end of “Forest Life.” I cried because Fede made me care about his characters so much that when those stories were over and I knew I’d never get to see Silvi, or Víctor Bagiardelli, or Mabel again, I felt devastated.
I overcame my grief by talking Fede into letting me translate A Perfect Cemetery into English. That way I got to get even closer to my friends from his stories, to live with them and even put words in their mouths. As novelist Jonathan Vatner puts it, “It’s been a long time since I’ve read characters possessed with such intense emotion, such single-minded focus on their desires.” Each of the stories in this marvel of a book pulls off a kind of magic trick: each one enlists us in those intense emotions and makes us, too, desire.
Fede has written four short story collections, a book of poems, and two novels, including the brilliant Los llanos (The Plains), which was published by Anagrama late last year after being named a finalist for the prestigious Spanish Premio Herralde. In 2010 he was selected by Granta as one of the Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists. He is also the director of Chai Editora and the co-founder of Cuentos María Susana.
Fede and I chatted over email about his writing, reading, and editorial work, his favorite authors, his relationship with nature, how desire informs and is informed by the written word, and more.
Jennifer L. Croft: I wondered if we might begin with the difference, for you, between short stories and novels. How did you land on short stories first, and how did you come to write your most recent novel The Plains?
Federico Falco: As a reader, for me a short story is kind of like a drop of ink that falls into a glass of water. A highly condensed substance with a lot of specific weight to it that once it gets inside my head expands at maximum velocity and dyes everything at once.
Mavis Gallant wrote, “Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.” I find it almost impossible to read multiple short stories in a row. I need a certain amount of silence between one reading and the next. I like to let the text grow in that silence. I like for it to challenge me, to make me use my imagination to fill in the gaps. I like to feel its reverberations in my mind for a long time after the last word.
A novel, meanwhile, is a different kind of companionship. A companionship that is perhaps less intense and perhaps a bit friendlier. A person lives with a novel, spends hours and hours with its characters, becomes fond of them. I like to think that reading a novel is like going through the interior of a cathedral that has frescoes all over its walls. The reader may pause in front of some of them, turn around and walk back, keep walking, go by others without paying too much attention to them, almost without seeing them, with their mind still on one of the images they saw earlier.
The short story, on the other hand, is a solitary painting in the middle of a large room with white walls. An image that may even lack a frame yet demands our full attention—that forces us to focus our eyes, to surrender to it completely.
I feel there’s something about the genre that really suits me, that really goes hand in hand with my way of life and way of doing things, and certain parts of my personality, both when I’m reading and when I’m writing. Maybe that’s why I wrote short stories for such a long time. In fact, The Plains is a novel I started writing without even really realizing it. When I was writing A Perfect Cemetery, I sensed I needed to change my relationship with writing and started to think about writing as a sort of daily practice, beyond the story and the characters I had in hand. Some days, when I didn’t know how to continue, I put the stories aside and wrote on other subjects, wrote other stories, scenes I’d overseen on the street, dialogues I’d heard in passing. Later on came notes on a garden I was cultivating at the time, reflections on language, on relationships, on landscape. Slowly I began to accumulate a lot of material. My first impulse was, from all of those passages, to extract different fragments that seemed to me to relate to each other well and work on them as though they were short stories. But at some point I realized that all those parallel projects in reality were one project, and there arose the possibility of a novel. There was a lot left to rewrite and polish. I had a lot of doubts about writing, but in some way the biggest thing was done: I was sure the novel was already there, and all that remained was just to work on it.
JLC: You’re the director of the short story series published by Chai Editora, a new publishing house based in Córdoba, where you’re from. What books have you published so far, and how have you chosen them? The short stories in A Lucky Man by the astonishingly talented Jamel Brinkley seem to me to respond perfectly to what you said above about stories being drops of ink that fall into the water and expand and change everything so that when you stop reading and put the book down you have to take a minute to get used to that other world from before that surrounds you and lacks all that magic.
FF: Jamel Brinkley was a revelation for me, and my sensation on reading those stories for the first time was exactly that: being captured by a world and by characters who then continued resonating in me forever. And it was so great to be able to publish A Lucky Man with Chai because it’s a book that unites everything we were looking for in that series: formal innovation, profundity, subtlety in the way it treats the conflicts between its characters, a real complexity in the plots, and above all an approach to the short story as a genre that doesn’t allow commonplaces, stale structures, repetitive formats. Those are kind of the coordinates that guide us as we put together the series. The idea is to publish books that inspire enthusiasm almost to the point of fanaticism. That’s what happened with the stories by Donald Antrim and Deborah Eisenberg, the other authors we’ve published so far. And it’s the same with the books we’re planning for the coming years. Each in its own way will take its readers in that direction.
JLC: You also translated that book by Deborah Eisenberg, which is titled Your Duck is My Duck in English and Taj Mahal in Spanish. Did you change the title because of 222 Ducklets, your 2004 short story collection that was recently republished by Eterna Cadencia? What is the relationship between your writing, your readings, and translation?
FF: I did translate Your Duck is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg, an author I admire profoundly, but the change in title had nothing to do with 222 Ducklets (a duck coincidence I hadn’t been too conscious of), but rather a request by the editors who felt that something of the impact and the wordplay of the original title would be lost in translation. So they decided instead to use the title of one of the other stories in the collection, “Taj Mahal.”
I was really dazzled by Deborah Eisenberg’s stories some years ago when I heard her read in Iowa City while I was participating in the International Writing Program. Since then I have read and reread her so much, and it was an enormous delight for me to have the opportunity to translate her. On the one hand, because that way readers in Spanish would be able to enjoy the book as much as I had; on the other, because translation allows you to understand a text and really get to know it. And what could be better than to get to know and to break down to their very core the stories of one of your favorite writers?
That said, I feel that the relationships between what one reads and translates and what gets written are always a bit mysterious. After so many years of writing, my enjoyment of reading is still there, intact, but in some ways the way I read has changed: I can’t help but to read with a pencil in my hand, underlining certain passages, marking adjectives that amaze me, paying attention to the phrasing, to how a particular author handles changes in point of view—all those things that perhaps a reader who isn’t interested in writing fiction doesn’t pay so much attention to. For me, there is a facet of reading that became like—to give it a name—an apprenticeship, a way to learn how to write, or to internalize tools and possibilities. And of course that whole procedure is intensified enormously when you’re translating, when the level of attention to words, structures, and the strategies of the original becomes minute and detailed in the extreme. What remains a mystery to me is how all that learning that occurs in reading and translating ends up coming in to play when I write. When I write, I hardly think about the technical aspects. My attention is elsewhere: on the characters, on what happens to them, on how they react. And yet I always end up surprising myself by seeing that, somewhat subconsciously or intuitively, when I face a problem or I don’t know how to continue, a certain fragment of an author, a paragraph, or a word comes to mind, which leads me to reread certain books, reminds me of stories of novels where certain authors faced similar situations, allows me to go back to those texts and see what I had been struck by, what I had underlined, how the author had resolved a similar situation. In that sense, reading and translating are also sort of forming a community of references, of teachers, of colleagues to learn from and to turn to for help when you need it.
JLC: Can you also tell me a little bit about Cuentos María Susana?
FF: Cuentos María Susana is a project I put together with Gonzalo Segura. In Argentina there aren’t that many magazines or places to publish short stories, and many publishers continue to regard short story collections with a certain wariness. A few years ago a number of excellent manuscripts began to come my way, but, for one reason or another, they weren’t able to find a publisher. It was kind of because of that that we had this idea of creating Cuentos María Susana, to make space for those stories, in some cases, by unpublished authors or authors without much visibility. It’s a very small project, with minimal capital, and we publish small volumes, almost like fanzines, each one with a short story and an illustration by a visual artist on the cover. It’s a project that wasn’t designed to be profitable, just to sustain itself and keep publishing new authors. Alongside unknown authors we publish others who have more prestige or visibility. The idea is to encourage from this humble place these intersections between authors, to make it easier for these texts to reach their readers, to try to create a little community. As we usually sell the books at book fairs or by hand or after readings, the pandemic has slowed the evolution of the project substantially, but we’re confident that little by little we’ll be able to resume our previous publication rhythm.
JLC: What is your relationship with nature, and what role do plants, trees, animals, and landscapes (the mountains in particular) play in your literary project? Is it easier or more difficult for you to write about beings that don’t coexist with words, that have different rhythms, that might not need stories like we do?
FF: I grew up in a fairly small town and spent a lot of time in the countryside, with my grandparents. So in my childhood I had lots of very close contact with nature, with country life, observing natural cycles, work—and play—with animals. Later, when I left my town to go to college and began to live in cities, that relationship became more diffuse, but it never dissipated altogether, and whenever I could I tried to visit the mountains or some nearby place to be outdoors a bit. That contact with nature is vital for me. I need, from time to time, to “escape” from the city, isolate myself, spend some time in natural settings, try to align myself with the life cycle of the seasons, changes in light, and temperature. I don’t consider it an idyllic relationship at all. On the contrary, it can be a complex, challenging, uncomfortable one, but in some very basic, almost primitive way, it is something I need, something that became essential for me, and above all, it awakens my senses, and it feeds my desire to write, to name, to put into words.
I don’t know if I’d say it’s easier for me to write about those topics, but rather just that naturally my desire, my pleasure is directed toward those landscapes and their flora and fauna and the people who inhabit them. Nature leads me to a certain state of solitary contemplation, of silent observation that, paradoxically, fuels my desire to put it into words, to share it, to attempt an encounter with the other from the writing of those landscapes.
And although I am still fundamentally a city dweller, I am interested in the lives of those who, whether by choice or not, live in natural environments, somewhat isolated and secluded. They are the characters I have always found fascinating.
JLC: Both the stories in A Perfect Cemetery and your novel The Plains work a lot with desire and the absence of desire, which in English could even be the same word: wanting. How do you see the subject of wanting in your books, and what connection does wanting have with writing or even language itself?
FF: In a very primitive, very deep place, we’re all traversed by wanting, by lack, by that bottomless hole, that longing for something we can’t even quite identify, even though we know it’s there—a kind of paradise lost we were expelled from at some point and to which, at times, with a somewhat stubborn clumsiness, we try to return, even though we know it’s impossible to return. It’s a wound that always reminds us that we are beings in solitude, in isolation, differentiated from others. But that lack also spurs us on and encourages us to continue, generates wanting, desires, longing, connects us with life and connects us with others. And for me writing is also kind of a way to inhabit that want and to want to offset it. To try, with that limited and somewhat imprecise tool set that is language, to put the experience in words and to get in touch with the other, to skip over or crack open the boundaries of your own being and communicate, to attempt to share part of existence itself with someone else who is just as isolated as you are. Writing and reading are both solitary activities. And it seems so beautiful to me that, thanks to words, thanks to writing, we can abolish time and space,. Two people who don’t know each other and perhaps belong to different countries, different eras, can resolve part of their desire and their lack—their wanting—there; can, with pen and paper, get in touch.
JLC: Who are your favorite characters from the novels you’ve read—people who have kept you company for a long while or even just recently? I think so much about Silvi and Víctor and Mabel, I’m always wondering what happened after those stories ended, imagining them in different situations.
FF: One character I like a lot is John Ames, the reverend who narrates and is the protagonist of Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I was so impressed when I read that novel, and he is someone I feel lives on beyond the page, almost like someone I really know. The same thing happens to me with a number of characters from novels by Juan José Saer, especially with Gato Garay, the protagonist of Nobody, Nothing Never. Thanks to Saer’s descriptions and prose, I always felt that, somehow, I spent a whole summer with Gato. Another of my favorite characters is the narrator of “Guiding the Ivy” by Hebe Uhart. The story is quite short but has always seemed to me to be of an incredible delicacy and depth. The author manages to encapsulate in that voice a whole vision of the world and of life. Every time I reread that story it moves me again; it’s a story and a character I think about often. And I know I’m not the only one who has borrowed the phrase at the end, using it whenever necessary: “Giddy up, beautiful life.”
Jennifer Croft won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the International Booker Prize for her translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights.
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