The Line Between Beauty & Violence: An Interview with Alia Trabucco Zerán
Interviews
By Sophie Hughes
With a breathless and brilliant opening chapter, narrated in a stream of consciousness, Alia Trabucco Zerán’s La resta, now published in English as The Remainder (Coffee House Press, US; And Other Stories, UK) sucks you hard and fast into the undertow of history. That undertow is the here and now of Chile, and more specifically of Santiago, where three young people going about their lives—little lives, as they understand them—feel deeply the generational rift between them and their parents, who by all accounts lived big lives, touched directly by Chile’s military dictatorship (1973–1990) and its ultimate downfall. But the children, too, are marked by Pinochet’s violent tyranny, and The Remainder is the account of its insidious and shadowy stain on their lives, and an unlikely road trip that serves, albeit in different ways for each of them, to wash it away.
It is a novel I know intimately, having read it at least a dozen times in the process of translating it into English for the American and British editions. It has withstood those readings, and, as with all the best literature, each sitting leaves me with more questions. A little greedily then, I have used this interview to satisfy my ongoing curiosity about certain details of the novel, to gain even more insight into its author’s working methods and interests. I began our interview by asking Alia where she was writing to me from.
ALIA TRABUCCO ZERÁN: I think I must be somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean, about eleven hours away from Santiago.
SOPHIE HUGHES: You wrote a lot of La resta while living abroad, studying in the States. How did you start writing it? A character in the novel says at one point: “The best of Santiago is outside Santiago” (“Santiago tiene un buen lejos y un mal cerca”). Is this same idea true of Chile as a place to write about Chile? Was there something necessary about being outside Chile, looking back on it, in order to write the book?
ATZ: It’s hard for me to tell what would have happened with this book if I had never left the country. Maybe I would have written it anyways, but then it would have been a totally different novel. I think the distance gave me a freedom that ended up being crucial for submerging myself in such a painful topic. And to do it with humor, and not only with sorrow. What is a bit strange is that even though I wrote most of La resta while I was abroad, my imagination was never really abroad. It was and it still is in Chile, no matter where I am. Perhaps it is a way of never being fully in one place, or a sort of literary displacement where my body might be in a foreign country but my imagination never is. A way of always being home, maybe. And talking about home—what is also a bit odd is that I finished the first draft of La resta when I was still in the US, but I kept working on that manuscript for almost a year after that. The ending of the book was finally written in Santiago, so in a way the novel went abroad and then had to go back to Chile (or was repatriated?), which, given the particular themes of the book, seems weirdly appropriate. Speaking of which—I think I will continue with this interview tomorrow, when I land in Santiago!
SH: How much of your young characters’ struggle with their place in the history of where they are from stems from feelings you had growing up in the eighties and nineties in Santiago?
ATZ: I was born in 1983, so my first childhood memories come from the final years of the dictatorship and the beginning of the post-dictatorial period. I remember only bits and pieces of the 1988 referendum, I remember being confused when hearing the news, I remember not understanding much of what was going on, and singing protest songs that I somehow knew by heart. It was a very politicised childhood, at a very peculiar point in history. So I think for many, not only for me, violence, childhood, imagination, and politics were all mixed up in a singular way. This is something that shapes the characters’ subjectivities and their struggle with their own present, and it probably shapes my generation in ways we still haven’t quite figured out.
SH: Zambra first used the phrase “literatura de los hijos” (“literature of the children”) in Ways of Going Home (Formas de volver a casa). Today it is often employed as a literary term and even a genre. Do you find its use condescending? Do you think it is intended condescendingly? Does such a literature exist to your mind? If so, is The Remainder a “novela de los hijos”?
ATZ: Hmm . . . difficult question! I think there might be some condescension in the way some people invoke that particular concept, but I don’t think Zambra meant it that way. I even wonder if there wasn’t some irony when he introduced the concept. An irony directed to those who, for many years, were trying to write “the great novel,” “the novel of the dictator,” as opposed to fractured, “minor” attempts to write about a historical moment that is too violent, perhaps too great, and that—precisely because of this—demands a novel that is shattered, broken. My problem with this and other categories is that they establish dichotomies, and dichotomies tend to oversimplify complex problems: “minor” literature vs. “major” literature, for example. I guess the tricky question here is: If there is a “novela de los hijos,” where is “la novela de los padres” (“novel of the parents”)? The condescending part is that the real dichotomy is not “hijos” vs. “padres,” but “literatura de los hijos” vs. “literature,” period. Also, I think violence, and particularly state violence, is an experience that goes way beyond Chile and Latin America, and way beyond “padres e hijos.”
SH: Depending on the reader, twenty-something-year-old Felipe can be understood as either hyper perceptive or childish and arrested in his development. His vision of the world reminds me of a quote by Borges: “Everything is play to children: play and pleasurable discovery.”
But in your novel this playfulness persistently assumes a more sinister side. Felipe’s literalism and curiosity cause him to harm animals, for example, in his own journey of “pleasurable discovery.” How do you understand the relationship between play and violence?
ATZ: I think childhood games can be quite cruel and childhood can be a very cruel time. We tend to think it’s all about innocence and joy, but it is usually more mixed, more confusing. And if you are brought up in a context of extreme, almost unnameable violence, that cruelty will have a different connotation because it will be directly connected to what is happening in people’s lives. There’s this very old creepy mythical figure that is called “el viejo del saco” (The Sack Man). Grown-ups have been telling their kids for decades that if they don’t behave, “el viejo del saco” will come for them. For my dad, when he was little, that scary figure was just a scary figure, nothing in particular. But if you hear this story and then hear in the news that people are being disappeared and tortured, believe me, there will be a lot of confusion between play and violence! On a different level, what interested me when I was writing the novel was not only play but a broader connection between beauty and violence. It is a sometimes upsetting line, but one that Felipe (I hope) crosses over and over again throughout the novel. It is something I wish to explore again and again in my writing. It really fascinates me.
SH: Sex is highly present in the novel, and the fact that the sex is homosexual—between both two men and two women—is taken for granted, even though it can be assumed that for at least two of them, these are their first homosexual encounters. Was it very natural for you not to include any sort of “coming out” narrative or crisis of conscience or trepidation on the characters’ part? Or was this a conscious decision you made in response to literature that is defined (or defines itself) as “queer literature”?
ATZ: I really wanted the characters to own their sexuality. To just own it as an important aspect of their lives, something that gives them joy without guilt, without having to explain anything to anyone, including their parents. Sexuality, in some ways, is one of the few elements that gives them a present they can call their own. When I was writing the book, this came very naturally to me. I think sexual orientation is an important aspect in a person’s life, but I think it narrows the complexities of a person’s subjectivity when this is the one and only defining aspect. For me, nothing is or should be the one and only defining aspect of anyone’s identity. It is always more complex, and complexity makes us (as well as fictional characters) richer. For me, the more complex the characters, the harder it is to put them in a box, which is a good thing. You can think of Felipe as funny or disturbing, funny and disturbing, or queer and a bit crazy, or perhaps he is just a grieving young man or an obsessive-compulsive young man or a “niño-perro” (boy-dog), as a friend of mine calls him. I really love the fact that this can happen with a novel and that he and Iquela can be queer without going through a “coming out” rite. Also, I like to think that they can be read as queer beyond the fact that they have same-sex encounters. They might also be queer in the sense that they behave like brother and sister, and actually consider each other brother and sister, without there being any blood relationship whatsoever between them. The concept of family is somehow queered.
SH: I’ve been translating more and more stories of yours (although you’ve never published a collection of stories). You’re also now writing a second novel and have just published a nonfiction book about female disobedience, La homicidas (Literatura Random House), ostensibly a series of case studies of women who kill (forthcoming in English with Coffee House Press and And Other Stories). Do you find that you need to flex these different writing muscles by switching genres from time to time?
ATZ: Maybe it’s a strategy to keep you from getting bored of translating my work, Sophie! I had absolutely no master plan when I decided I wanted to write. My only plan was and still is to just write (and read!), and I enjoy the freedom of exploring different genres. I also think that genres are quite porous and a bit arbitrary, to be perfectly honest. My nonfiction book actually contains a fictional short story! It is an essay, yet there are diary entries in there as well. So, for me, the challenge is not in the genre but in language itself and in the wonderful, intricate ways in which language can explore ideas, images, and feelings.
SH: You are among the most deliberate and careful writers I’ve translated. You’ve said before that by the time you finish writing a work, you can usually recite most of it. Do you share your work with early readers before moving toward publication? Does the carefulness betray an anxiety about what you have written?
ATZ: I always feel anxious when showing someone my writing (including you, of course!). Which leads me back to you saying that you’ve read La resta at least a dozen times! That is simply terrifying, Sophie! Whenever I send someone a piece of writing, I’ll just start refreshing my email like a maniac. I even feel anxious when readers (even if it is a friend) approach me and start a sentence with “I read your book.” You never know what will follow! With La resta I was a bit scared because it is not a complacent, comfortable novel. It is not a homage, and it can make some people a bit upset. And I did get some reactions along those lines in Chile. But before publishing, I usually try to do as much as I can, which means, of course, that I take my time, and it is hard for me to let go. I have a couple of secret readers with whom I always share my work, but I don’t usually show anyone anything until I feel it’s decent. And if I don’t reach that point, I just don’t send it.
SH: Having believed from a young age that you wanted be a lawyer, you started a law degree only to abandon that path for fiction, and yet it seems to me that there is an implicit focus in all your work on both the idea and lived reality of justice, blame, resolution, and disobedience. What does writing allow you to do that law didn’t?
ATZ: I wanted to be a lawyer because, as a child, I thought being a human rights lawyer would allow me to bring justice to people who wanted and desperately needed justice. People I cared about and loved. Then I got into law school, specialised in human rights law, and I felt painfully lost. And I think one of the reasons why I felt that way is because law tried to give precise, univocal answers where all I could see were questions. Law wanted to be exact where I wanted ambiguity; it wanted definitions where I wanted chaos. So for me law started feeling like a prison. And its language, the language of law, was a particularly narrow and ugly cell. I soon realised that what I wanted to have access to was far beyond the realm of law. I wanted access to beauty, access to language. And I don’t mean beauty in a superficial way, or even a representational way, but in that profound way where beauty interacts with language and with time and with what being human might mean. And perhaps it’s the jet lag here, but trying to find that beauty, even if it is violent and difficult to look in the eye, will keep me going for a long time. Or so I hope.
Sophie Hughes has translated Spanish and Latin-American authors such as José Revueltas, Enrique Vila-Matas, Rodrigo Hasbún, Fernanda Melchor, and Laia Jufresa. In 2019 she was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder, for which she was originally awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant.
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