A Language of Nowhere | A Conversation with Juan Pablo Villalobos

By Rosalind Harvey

Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Mexico in 1973 and has lived in Barcelona since 2003. His novels (including Down the Rabbit Hole, Quesadillas, and I’ll Sell You a Dog) combine acerbic wit, political commentary, and hilarious, careful characterization. He has also written a non-fiction title for young adults that looks at so-called illegal immigration from Central America to the United States, based on a series of moving interviews with the young people making those dangerous journeys (The Other Side: Stories of Central American Teen Refugees Who Dream of Crossing the Border.)

Although his earlier books were all set in Mexico, his two most recent titles—I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me and Invasion of the Spirit People—take place partly or wholly in Barcelona, marking a shift that speaks to Villalobos’s changing relationship to the place where he grew up. Invasion of the Spirit People is set in an unnamed city on an unnamed continent, with characters from unnamed countries and regions of the world, and follows the tenderly depicted friendship between two men as they navigate loss, change, and their shifting places in their adopted home. Featuring an unusual narrator that enlists the reader as an active participant in its observation of proceedings, it takes in racism, football, theories of life on other planets, and one man’s very special love for his dog and, I believe, is his most tender, incisive book yet.

I recently met with Juan Pablo via Zoom to talk with him about his latest novel to appear in English, Invasion of the Spirit People (which I translated), not naming as a process, male friendship, aliens, Nazism and the occult, and why he’s reading more poetry than ever before.

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Rosalind Harvey: Invasion of the Spirit People is the second book you’ve written that takes place away from Mexico (the first being I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me, trans. Daniel Hahn). Although the city where the novel is set is never named, it feels a lot like Barcelona, which is where you’ve lived since 2003, if I’m not mistaken. It also speaks about the immigrants that make this city what it is, and who come from many different places around the world, including what you call the “southern cone” and the “old colonies of the peninsula.” Does emigrating make it easier—inevitable, even—to write about where one comes from? Or does it just make it more complicated?

Juan Pablo Villalobos: I don’t know if it makes it easier, but it does make it more interesting. That is, the geographic distance allows you to look at the reality of the place you’ve emigrated from with a different perspective. You might see things you weren’t able to see when you were there. Nonetheless, as time passes—and in my case, I’ve been away from Mexico for almost twenty years—that distance becomes one not just of geography but also time. The life you’ve experienced in the place you come from is gradually left further and further back in time. Then it becomes complicated and risky. The writing becomes an exercise of memory; an exercise that is, in many cases, nostalgic. And this nostalgia is where the risk comes from: the risk of idealization, the risk of exoticization of reality itself, the risk of sentimentalization, too.

For me, in terms of how I understand literature, how I understand writing—the phenomena of nostalgic writing has never interested me. Why? Because I see literature as a way of being in the present, as an exercise of being in the world, and that’s why I stopped writing exclusively about Mexico and began setting my novels in Barcelona as well. That started with I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me, which is a novel I began writing when I’d been away from Mexico for ten years and was experiencing a crisis of realizing that my relationship with the country was becoming really complicated and that the effort of writing involved trying to recapture a language that was being lost, not just a vocabulary. People tend to have an idea about what emigrating means, especially when you change country but not language, such as moving from Mexico to Spain. You could say we speak the same language in these two countries, except it’s not the same. It’s not just about substituting one word for another, small changes in vocabulary—it’s much more profound. The way in which one looks at the world is different, all while using the same language, and you can see that in how verb tenses are used, in the different syntax that’s used in those two countries. And so the effort of trying to recapture a Mexican language was starting to become more and more difficult, and it was also becoming nostalgic in the sense that it wasn’t close to me any more. It wasn’t my present; it was in my past. So I decided to start writing about Barcelona when I wrote I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me, obviously without leaving behind my status as a Mexican, and that then meant taking on the point of view, the perspective, of the immigrant.

That’s my reality: I don’t live in Mexico, I’m a Mexican who doesn’t live in Mexico. I can’t expect to carry on writing as if I were a Mexican writer who lives in Mexico and is concerned with purely Mexican questions.

RH: I’m curious to know whether you always conceived of the novel this way, with the city and countries unnamed. Or did it start off another way, set in a concrete Barcelona?

JPV: It evolved over time. I tend to do a lot of rewriting, mainly because I’m not that clear about where I’m going. None of my novels were written with a clearly defined plot, a pre-determined group of characters, a clear sense of narrative causes and effects, and so on. I like to start with a plan that’s open enough for me to discover things along the way, and that means there’s a lot of rewriting because, of course, things occur to you as you write. But then you’ve got to make them work together, and to do that you have to go back and delete everything and start all over again, and then it’s like a series of discoveries.

But yes, initially the novel was set in a Barcelona that was not only named but also very clearly located. You could tell which neighborhood it took place in, and the settings were sketched out very literally. It took place in the areas around Parc Güell (which in the novel is called “the historic park”), which is my neighborhood, known as el barrio de La Salut in Catalan [after the church Nuestra Señora de la Salud], in the upper part of Gràcia. Everything was named with that impulse to construct a city from the point of view of someone writing about local customs, local manners.

But as I wrote and got more into the book from a political perspective, I began to reflect on the themes coming up in the writing: themes related to xenophobia, racism, the construction of stereotypes. Many of them start operating right at the point when things are named. In this city, when you say “a Chinese convenience store” . . . Well, people actually just say, “the Chinese.” They say, “I’m going to the Chinese,” and “the Chinese” isn’t a restaurant, which it could also be. “The Chinese” is a store. And those words, those phrases push the reader toward a whole series of highly stereotypical concepts, prejudices, which is sort of what the novel is aiming to question.

So I started to conceive of this idea of getting rid of the identities, to make a novel where it’s clear that the reader has to perform the act of naming what isn’t named. As readers, we tend to feel uncomfortable with uncertainty. I’ve come to realize, speaking to readers and even in a few interviews, that people ask you, “But it’s Barcelona, isn’t it?” And I think, “What does it matter, ultimately!” It could actually be any city in Europe, and the reality would be very similar: lots of regional issues, a local language, lots of immigration, a process of gentrification, tourism, etc. All of those things together don’t make up a reality that’s exclusive to Barcelona, and yet what the reader does, almost always, is to say, “Well, but this character, Gastón, he’s Argentine, isn’t he? When you say he’s ‘from the southern cone,’ you mean Argentine!” But what’s interesting to me is, without hoping for the reader to play the game, to accept the game without trying to go back and name things. What’s interesting to me is that, in that attempt to name things, the reader realizes just how conditioned we all are. We need these prejudices, we need to know that this character is Argentine, we need to know that this character is Mexican, that this one’s Chinese, this other one is Ukrainian. In my head, I know where they’re all from: the northeasterners are Russians or Ukrainians. (In this case, in my mind they were Ukrainians; this has nothing to do with what’s happening now [with the war].) The far-easterners are obviously the Chinese, and the near-easterners, Pakistanis. All of this I had defined, of course, in my head, but the idea of not naming it had to do with unsettling the reader a little, and with saying to them: “You do it! I’m not going to do it. You do it—use your prejudices.”

RH: Right. So it’s like the readers need to stick a pin in a map, in this personal map they already have of their own prejudices. Now I want to ask something related to one of the most notable features of Invasion of the Spirit People, which is that the narrator, that voice that breaks the fourth wall, is constantly reminding us that what we are reading is just one version, and that the process of narrating always has its limits. I’m curious to know if you ever write scenes or dialog from the point of view of a different character to the one who ends up protagonizing it? I know some authors do this as a way to have a more complete view of everyone’s motivations in a novel.

JPV: No, I’ve never done that. It might be an interesting exercise, now that I think about it.

In the case of this novel, the narrator, who is a peculiar one, uses the first person plural. They try to make the reader a co-participant in the process of narration. They address the reader; they even dictate to them, as you say, the limits of what can be narrated or not, not just from a narrative point of view, but from a moral point of view.

RH: Or of empathy.

JPV: Yes. So I’m sort of playing around with that. You could say that, for me, writing a book always involves learning something new. In this case, I wanted it to be the first novel I wrote that wasn’t narrated in the first person by a protagonist or a character in the story. My three first novels were narrated by the protagonist, and I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me has four narrators who share the narration. When I started writing this novel, my intention was to learn. The original idea was to write a novel with a third-person narrator. But that changed. It gradually evolved, and it’s not a narrator who takes part in the story. The narrator is not a character and it’s not a conventional narrator, either, like a nineteenth-century narrator who’s telling you what’s happening without you knowing who he is or why he’s doing what he’s doing. It’s something strange that I never really quite figured out myself, to be honest. And I actually think it’s a good thing to not really know what it is.

RH: It’s like the narrator is there, floating, above everything.

JPV: Yes. I ended up explaining it by saying that the narrator was a community voice, the voice of the community in which the story takes place. So it’s an “us,” everyone who’s watching and narrating what’s happening without really knowing what or why. This connects nicely with a whole string of things I was reading at the time which had to do with the esoteric and the paranormal—that’s the most fanciful part of the novel. Invasion of the Spirit People required more background reading than any of my previous novels, although it doesn’t seem that way, but reading about totally random, absurd things like extraterrestrial life, politics and occultism, how the far right uses nostalgia to construct its discourses, how discourses of hatred arise and how they’re constructed based on fear of the other, fear of the foreign, like what’s said at the end of the book about universal fascism—all that informed the book.

Then it was a process of learning as I read because my fascination with these topics comes from my family. In my parents’ house, there were loads of books on that sort of thing; my dad has always been into the occult, the paranormal, life on other planets and all that, and as a child I grew up with books on those topics—not only those books, of course, but they were there. It was just normal, and I hadn’t questioned what was behind all those discourses. I just liked them. I found them interesting, and I’d been wanting for a long time to write a book that pays homage to having read all that stuff. For the first time, I started to organize it all—I began to read some of the classics from occult literature or history books on politics and occultism, and I read about the possibility of life on other planets, not just the fantasy of UFOs, but also from the perspective of biology, astrobiology, astrophysics, etc.

And reading all this over a couple of years led me to a quite terrifying conclusion, which is that all these discourses are fueling the far right. The fascination the Nazis had with the occult was not incidental. All fascist movements have an obsession with a place that’s been lost where there was a great nation, where we were glorious, a golden age we need to return to, and so on. Hence their being reactionary and wanting to go backward. They want to go back to this place we lost. All that intuition, that belief that there’s something we used to know and don’t know any longer, that we’ve somehow debased ourselves and lost a knowledge that once belonged to us—which has always fascinated me—is fascist thought, and discovering this was naturally pretty disturbing. And it also, in an indirect way, had to do with the place I grew up, an area of Mexico that’s very conservative (reactionary, even), Los Altos de Jalisco. This is where some of these far-right movements and political parties came from, and I suppose it’s all connected, but I wasn’t very conscious of that at the time.

RH: Yes. I should say that I was very happy when I saw the epigraph from the X-Files, which I was a big fan of! You’ve spoken about far-right discourses and racism, and my next question is kind of connected to that. There’s a line spoken by a minor character toward the end of the book, Pol’s old teacher: “The really dangerous thing […] is the idea that everything that comes from outside, anything alien, is a threat that must be eradicated.” It seems to me that this phrase could be a sort of key to the book—some might call it “the message” of the book—and I’m interested in the tension between this idea of a message or a key to a book and then the artistic drive that perhaps comes afterward, or whether they’re connected. Do you start with a sense of having a responsibility to write about a certain topic, and how does this then fit in with the drive, the simple artistic drive to create something?

JPV: I think it’s got more to do with what I was speaking about earlier: with seeing literature as a process of learning, of discovery. What happens with me is that I gradually come to understand what the book is about as I write it. If I’m lucky—it doesn’t always happen, but it did with the last two (Invasion of the Spirit People and Peluquería y letras [Barber’s Shop and Letters]), it happens toward the end of the writing process. Literally as I was writing the last few pages. It’s not only that the reader discovers what the book’s about, it’s that I discovered it, and that seems to me to be almost like magic. Because actually, when the reader suddenly says, “Ah, the thing the book’s about has suddenly showed up here” and they ask me, “Hey, did you plan putting that twist in here, right at the end?” and I think, “No, I discovered it there.”

And in those two cases, it has to do with a piece of advice I tend to give participants in my writing workshops when they’re about to finish a book. Quite often, when you’re already wrapped up in the ending and thinking about making everything you’ve written come together, you’re tempted to think there’s something missing, that you’ve still got writing to do, that it needs new ideas that you have to come up with, and you start looking for them. When in fact there’s nothing new to invent because, by that point, the writing of the book is all done. What you’ve got to do instead is properly read what you’ve written, read it really closely and look for the answer in the pages you already have. At that moment, you can’t have another idea that comes from outside the book, because—just to give an exaggerated example—that would be like bringing in a new character on page 99 to tie up the novel for you? We’d all agree that we’d see that as a mistake, like a defect in the novel, or like a kind of deus ex machina, a pretext that allows you to solve everything. And we reject that as readers because we can see that it’s not organic, it’s not natural; we’d see that as a forced solution. In these last two novels it happened, thankfully, that I wasn’t conscious of where the key was. It was only after re-reading and re-reading and re-reading that I figured out where the answer was. And sure enough, it came from within the novel. That’s when you see it as something unexpected but logical at the same time. And the reader doesn’t see it coming but they also say, “Oh, of course! It was right in front of me the whole time.”

RH: It’s like magic, as you say. The impression I get is that writing is asking a question, and then the reading, or the re-reading, of your own work—and what readers do, too—is the act of finding the answer to that question within the question, which is the form of the book.

JPV: Yes, and there was no prior aspiration to defend certain ideas or to understand the writing as a project, almost like a thesis. Like a novel-as-thesis, where you have two or three ideas, or rather prejudices, and you plan on testing them out in the novel. The characters are going to represent these ideas and they’re going to defend certain positions, and then there’ll be a conflict and we’ll see what happens. I’m not saying that I start writing from nothing, either. Especially for this novel, I read a lot, as I said, to research it, but not to research it like you might with a historical novel where you’ve got dates, names, biographical anecdotes, and so on. Rather, to back it up in terms of, say, tone, atmosphere, and certain ideas that are in the novel from the start, and which Pol in particular brings in. This character talks about paranoia, about extraterrestrial life, that whole concept of panspermia: something that is directly counter to that strong nationalist discourse of believing that a piece of land belongs to the group of people who are from there, and who’ve always been there, and so they are the owners and can seize it. Panspermia tells us that, well, for starters, none of us come from here; we’re all extraterrestrials. Pol says this, and it’s a phrase that ultimately comes to define the book.

RH: Let’s talk about humor and language. Humor, irony, sarcasm, the absurd—these are all techniques you use in your novels. It seems to be that Latin American literature has a lot to teach us in the Anglophone world about such techniques, especially now, when, in the last ten to fifteen years or so (I’m thinking of the UK context since that’s where I live, but it could equally apply to the US and elsewhere), political discourse has degenerated so much, and governments and corporations use our language against us in so many specific, damaging ways. I’m thinking, for instance, of how advertising agencies use the language of activism until it loses all meaning, forcing us to use irony because sincerity doesn’t feel like it belongs to us anymore. In your opinion, how is it possible to create art in a world like this? Is the absurd the only response, or are there other solutions?

JPV: Well, the thing is that the idea I have about writing, at least, is that it’s a constant questioning of language. That’s what literature is for me; I don’t think that literature is, shall we say, a confirmation of the state of the world in order to not question language. That’s why I’m so hung up on what we might call very simply costumbrist literature: a kind of “comedy of manners,” or realist literature or whatever, in its naivete of wanting to reflect and represent a period, a series of situations that could be symbolic or representative of what we’re living through, but which doesn’t question it.

I actually think that art in general, not just literature—it happens in the visual arts, too, it happens of course with poetry, and in film it ought to be like this as well—art has to find its own language. That is, there’s a paradox here, because we use the same material we communicate with, but literature is much more than just communication, or it should be. I think that a lot of the literature that I call “costumbrist” might also be called “communicative literature.” That is, it aims solely to communicate and that’s it, and so it doesn’t question the actual use of the language that it’s made up of. It doesn’t question the stuff you’re talking about when you say that we’re forced to use irony because we’ve been robbed of seriousness. I’d say we don’t even have irony anymore because so many of the strategies used in advertising are ironic, so then we’re being ironic about irony. We’re in this totally absurd spiral about how we speak and how we use language. But I think that what writers—and not just poets; I think novelists should do this, too—must stop and rethink language.

That’s what I was trying to do in Invasion of the Spirit People, and not just by not naming the countries, or not naming where people came from. There are other things around how you put together the language of the novel, things that have to do with what we were saying about the first-person plural voice—the appeal to the reader. It’s an apparently neutral language, but it can’t be neutral because it doesn’t exist anywhere. The language used by the narrator isn’t one that’s used in Mexico, or Catalonia, or Spain; it’s a language of nowhere and it won’t ever be used again, actually, because I don’t plan on writing like that again. It exists only in this book. And I think that, for me, this is the work of the writer.

The novel is a really paradoxical genre. It seems as if we’ve reached a point where we’ve accepted that a novel can be anything. If we simply say it’s a novel, accept it’s a novel, then it is. Anything goes. But, at the same time, the fact is that we’re still writing novels as if it were the nineteenth century and they all look the same. They have characters, they have plots, they have a premise, a development, a twist, a denouement. They’ve very conventional in that sense. They’re made up of narrative causes and effects; they seek suspense, narrative tension, all what you might call very tired mechanisms now. Archetype is often used, and I don’t just mean with characters but with the narrative itself. They employ all these incredibly worn-out mechanisms, without any reflection at all. But I think that the writer’s job is to stop, even just for a moment, and think about the how.

RH: I get the sense that that’s what you’re doing with the not-naming of things, right? It’s as if you push that process of reflection on to the reader. Now I want to talk about friendship—the male friendship in Invasion of the Spirit People—and what for me is one the most touching aspects of the novel: the relationship between Max and Gastón. At least in the literature I know, I feel like there’s a huge disparity in the number of books (not to mention films, TV series, etc.) that show sentimental relationships between women and those that show meaningful friendships between men. Are there other examples of depictions of male friendship in literature—whether from Latin America or just in general—that you like, that have made you think? Is this a lack you recognize, too?

JPV: I don’t know. In fact, when I was reading your questions I thought about it for a while, whether I could recall a book or a film or something that might have served as a frame of reference for my novel. But nothing that obvious came to mind. I don’t think I’ve invented anything new here myself, either, of course. I do think that, beyond whether or not male friendship has been depicted before (and I think it has, maybe not often enough, as you say) it seems to me that no one’s really gone into a lot of detail in terms of describing it. Instead, there are a series of stereotypes—which interested me when I began writing the novel—and they come from very everyday anecdotes.

For instance, I started to realize that something was missing around what happens in the closest friendships. What happens is you go home and your partner asks, “So, how was it, how was so-and-so?” And you’re like, “Good!” And she asks you, “So what did you talk about?” She’s wanting to know all the funny stories, what you all talked about, if there was any news, and you really can’t tell her anything significant that you talked about with that person. And sometimes there’s a kind of incomprehension, especially when you’re with a woman who says: “But what on earth did you guys talk about for four hours?” Then I think, “Shit . . . well, football.” I mean, it’s kind of ridiculous, and a total stereotype, but it’s true! Or maybe you talk about literature, about books—ah, we were talking rubbish for three hours, about nothing, about what happened to a friend. And then there’s also the question of whether men ever talk about the important things that are happening to them—and I don’t think that’s true, either—but it is true that there’s a kind of embarrassment, or that we perceive it as an embarrassing situation when we open up, when there’s a moment of sincerity between male friends. I also have a friend who tells people everything, absolutely everything, and it’s highly embarrassing. My response is always to look at him and say, “You can’t tell me that.” I mean, if you’re telling me that you’ve got a problem with your partner, fine, tell me, but don’t give me details, a level of detail that’s unnerving.

So, in the end, something’s missing, I think, because it feels like the dialog among friends tends to be context-based—you talk about the game that morning, or the game yesterday, or the country’s latest political crisis, or work, or whatever shared interests you have, and that’s maybe a defense mechanism so as not to talk about other things, or in order to talk about them without talking about them, perhaps. That is, you demonstrate your way of being in the world by speaking about football. But it really is a bit like that, and that’s what happens with Gastón and Max: their non-verbal communication is more important than the verbal.

RH: Yes, the shared activities and the things one does for the other make the friendship.

JPV: And I think there’s a code I’m still interested in exploring. I think I do it in Peluquería y Letras as well. This code has to do with the fact that what’s not said matters, too. In a novel and in life, yes, you need to have deep and meaningful conversations in which you resolve and discuss things and say, “I love you,” and, “You’re important to me,” etc. But a lot of the time, that’s experienced without saying it: in gestures, in decisions, in actions that sometimes can demonstrate more than what words can. So, to me, Gastón is a character who wants to help his friend but doesn’t know how to, and that not knowing how to starts off with not knowing how to talk about it—not knowing how to communicate. So all the actions and decisions he undertakes end up being refuted by reality. They don’t quite hit the mark because he’s also got an inability to be in reality. He’s a character who’s sort of isolated, sort of separate from the world. He’s out there in his market garden with his dog; he doesn’t want anyone bothering him. He’s had unstable romantic relationships, and he isn’t interested in having someone permanently at his side or building a life together. He’s also isolated himself from his family, and so he seems a touch incapable of dealing with reality.

RH: It’s interesting because, as you say, that difference between male and female friendships is a bit of a stereotype, but it’s also true up to a point. And that ability to create a friendship out of a shared activity is something I admire, because sometimes talking too much about one’s thoughts, about one’s relationships—it can get tiring! We could just play tennis, for instance.

JPV: Yes, and I think that, in the end, that’s the real value of sport, and of football in particular. And I say this because football is important in the novel. It’s an excuse to socialize; it marks a rhythm of socialization. You have the weekend, and then, if your team is good, you have a midweek European game, too. So you have two games a week which give you the chance to sit down with a friend—not to talk, but to be together. And this gives a rhythm to relationships.

In writing this novel, I was really interested in how football creates a rhythm, and the book even talks about it; the narrator mentions it at one point. They say that this friendship is made up of the rhythm marked by the matches twice a week. Gastón always goes to Max’s restaurant to watch the game on TV. In the UK, that’s something very easy to recognize: the pub where you go to watch the game with this group of friends, some of whom come or don’t come, then maybe someone hasn’t turned up because they’re away. It’s also a way of being together because you find out what’s going on without having to talk about it. I think there’s a value in football, a therapeutic value, which goes beyond the competition, beyond whether your team wins or loses, beyond the intensity of celebrating or feeling miserable because your team lost, and that’s the fact of belonging to something. And that something to which you belong is a group of friends, or even the bar where you go to watch the game. And maybe not all of these people are your friends, but you recognize them and you know who they are and there’s a little community.

RH: Yes, it’s something planned. I know that every Saturday, I’ll see these people. I wanted to ask about what you’re reading at the moment.

JPV: Well, I’ve changed how I read quite a lot since the pandemic—not so much what I read, but how I read. I’m reading far fewer novels than I used to. It’s not to do with concentration or focus, as I heard lots of people complaining about, saying they were unable to concentrate during the pandemic and something happened that means they can’t get back to reading a really long book, for instance. For me, that’s not what happened.

Rather, I became really conscious of how these novels sort of stopped making sense because, during the pandemic, a lot of things stopped making sense. You could see how artificial those formulas and mechanisms were, how they weren’t constructed to reflect truth or seek reality. You could see how they were constructed to generate effects, to excite you, to interest you, to pull you in, to grab you, whatever. And then this awareness of this artificiality suddenly started to seem tiresome and dull. I’d start to read a novel and I knew where it was going. It was like, “OK, here we go, the mechanism’s whirring,” and it was so predictable that I got bored.

So I started to read more poetry. I was back in Mexico recently, and I realized that the books I brought back with me were mainly poetry. I think poetry breaks with that idea of narrative causality that is seemingly so necessary in the novel—and so worn-out. Poetry obviously does what I was talking about before about questioning language. There’s a peace I find now when I read poetry or short stories, whereas what I find now when I read novels is exasperation. It’s like I’ve got no patience for them.

So I’m allowing myself to be quite chaotic with what I read, less systematic. I’ve been reading very young poets from Mexico: Yolanda Segura, Iveth Luna, Sara Uribe. I also brought back the complete works of Rosario Castellanos. And while I was traveling this past week, I was reading a Galician poet, in Galician, named Ismael Ramos, who I really enjoyed. I read Portuguese and so I can read in Galician, too. This weekend, I read a little book of poetry by Tamara Kamenszain, this Argentine poet who I love.

I’m also interested in the effect this change in how I read might have on my writing. That is, not reading as many novels, allowing the writing to make use of other means, other ways, other mechanisms, and seeing what happens.

RH: It’s true what you’re saying about poetry—it’s always in a questioning mode. OK, tell me a little bit about your latest novel, Peluquería y Letras, which came out in Spanish in February 2022.

JPV: It’s a novel that’s very much of the present in the sense I was just talking about. It’s got a very simple structure: everything happens over one day. It’s what happens to a character from seven o’clock in the morning, when he wakes up in his house, until nine-thirty at night, when he goes back home to have dinner with his family. It’s apparently very simple in that sense, and it’s connected to Invasion of the Spirit People (although in this book the setting is named: we know it’s Barcelona, we recognize streets, squares, and so on). And it also shares with the previous novel the fact that the protagonist walks a lot. It’s a novel that takes place out in the street and has a lot to do with the encounters that take place there. Not random, fortuitous encounters because they’re not, not when you’re talking about a small neighborhood where the same people are always circulating. There are no big coincidences under those circumstances, only small coincidences. So the novel plays with this notion a lot: with who you run into, with the aim of reflecting on this sense of community, obviously with the questions of immigration and belonging. It’s a very meta novel, as well. The protagonist is named Juan Pablo Villalobos, making a return to auto-fiction as with I’m Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me. This Juan Pablo is a writer who suddenly starts asking himself what he’s going to write and why. He goes out into the street because he doesn’t have anything to write about. He has to go out so that something happens to him, and it’s with what happens to him, with those materials he finds along the way, that he constructs the novel—and it is a novel! In the end, it does have a plot, it has characters, it’s got it all, but it’s not all written in what you might call a conventional way. It’s more like a kind of instruction manual on writing.

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Rosalind Harvey is a writer and translator based in Coventry. She has worked on books by several prominent Spanish-language writers, including Juan Pablo Villalobos’ Down the Rabbit Hole (shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award), and Herralde Prize-winner Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born, out now with Fitzcarraldo Editions. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Arts Foundation Fellow, and a founding member of the Emerging Translators Network, a lively online community for early-career literary translators. She is currently teaching on the MA in Translation at the University of Warwick, as well as mentoring a wide range of early-career translators privately.