Miniature Scale | An Interview with Brenda Lozano
Interviews
By Annie McDermott
The protagonist of Brenda Lozano’s Loop is a modern-day Penelope, waiting in her Mexico City apartment for her boyfriend to return from a long family trip overseas. Instead of weaving and unravelling at her loom, she writes and erases her thoughts in a notebook, while her cat—her Telemachus—sleeps at the other end of the sofa. The result is what the Guardian has called “a glorious tapestry of ideas”: a novel interwoven with reflections on such topics as ancient maps, miniature furniture, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, David Bowie, Proust, bad poetry, political violence, sex, death, and stationery.
As well as Loop, Brenda Lozano has published the novels Todo nada (All or Nothing, 2009) and Brujas (Witches, 2020, forthcoming in English by MacLehose and Catapult), and the short story collection Cómo piensan las piedras (How Stones Think, 2017). In 2015, she was recognized by the Hay Festival and the British Council as one of the leading Mexican authors under 40. In 2017, she was featured on the Bogotá39 list of outstanding new writers from Latin America. Brenda also edits the Chicago-based literary journal Make and sits on the editorial board of Ugly Duckling Presse.
Brenda and I talked over email about writing, activism, Alice in Wonderland, and how capitalism can look like tiny people trying to paint enormous walls.
Annie McDermott: I’m always intrigued by this new life books have when they appear in translation, sometimes several years after they were originally published. Loop, for example, came out in Mexico in 2014. I’m interested to hear what it’s been like for you to return to the book now, seven years later. Are there things that have surprised you, or struck you, or things you see differently now?
Brenda Lozano: I like this question because it’s about returning. If I were to return, not only to the manuscript but also several years into the past, I think I’d ask myself other questions, I’d pay attention to other things, maybe I’d do everything differently. But saying that is a bit unfair, because maybe we see things the way we do in the present precisely because of the past and our decisions and (more commonly in my case) indecisions. And sometimes the past also brings presents, like this conversation with you, or like something really special and gratifying which came about as a result of the English edition: a painting by Julie Mehretu, one of my favourite artists, at her current retrospective at the Whitney in New York. The painting is called Loop, and she painted it after reading the book. So the past can also bring you incredible surprises, like this wonderful one from Julie Mehretu.
AM: Loop plays a lot with the idea of scale, and particularly what it means to exist on “a miniature scale,” like the tiny made-to-measure furniture the narrator sees in a shop window, just right for Snow White’s seven dwarves. There seems to be a quiet sort of defiance to this: standing up for what might be dismissed as small stories, which are often women’s stories, taking place in domestic spaces. What drew you to these questions of scale when you were writing Loop? Did it feel specific to that project, or do you think it’s something that runs through all your writing?
BL: I think the idea of scale is really interesting and covers a great deal. As a girl, when I read the great book about scale that is Alice in Wonderland, I was really struck by how Alice only had to drink a bit of a potion or take a pill in order to change size, and then her whole relationship with the world would change as well. Shrinking and growing both give you a different relationship to the space around you. This is explored, too, by that beautiful Borges story where the map of a city is the same size as the city itself. When it’s visible, scale can reveal a lot, of course, but the problem of scale can also be conceptual and not immediately noticeable. In other words, a 1:1 scale can be seen as the norm and serve as a point of comparison, for example in relation to gender or gender identity. Being a woman, and being Mexican, in a hierarchical, heteropatriarchal, and racist system can shrink you in relation to that system. Because scales are about hierarchies, too. Tom Thumb can’t achieve as much as a giant can in this world. We worship size, the maximum amount of everything: of money, of likes, of power. When I was writing Loop, I thought a lot about the scale of art in a deeply violent political context. How can you write under those conditions? And from where?
AM: Some of the most striking moments in Loop are when events on a scale that seems almost too big to comprehend suddenly erupt into everyday life. When the narrator decides to try a new brand of cereal, for example, and then reads the label over breakfast: it turns out the cereal is being sold by a woman whose son has disappeared, and the proceeds will fund a private investigation into what happened to him. This juxtaposition of breakfast cereals and Mexico’s horrific death toll feels very typical of Loop, and also of the way many of us engage with calamitous world events from the comfort of our homes. Could you talk a bit about your approach to weaving politics into Loop?
BL: The worst thing about the violence in Mexico is that it’s become normalized. Normalized violence rises to the surface in so many forms—as racism, classism, misogyny, the heteropatriarchy—and these combine in so many ways: from ordinary speech to the ten femicides per day and the forced disappearances. I think it’s natural to wonder how what we do relates to our reality. Right now, I’m thinking about the work of Liliana Porter, a great Argentinian artist, whose work problematizes the idea of scale in these times of romanticized capitalism. She’s created a series of works where miniature characters or human figures take on gargantuan tasks, like a miniature doll painting an enormous wall. I think something about her art explains what I’d like to say better than I can myself. Reality is too much for us in our current context, and this leads to all kinds of questions about how to write in other ways, beyond just describing what happens. How to write from the point of view of a female character in a context that does systematic violence to the feminized and the feminized perspective, to give one example.
AM: I also wanted to ask about friendship. Something I enjoyed a lot about translating Loop was gradually realizing that some of the narrator’s friends are in fact real people I could look up (and whose poetry I could read!). They also feel very real—you get a really strong sense of each one’s personality, patterns of speech and sense of humor. What made you decide to give the narrator’s friends such a key role in the book?
BL: Something that connects these two moments—the present and the point in the past when I was writing the book—is that my friendship group is incredibly important to me. To be honest, I don’t know where I’d be without my family, and I don’t know where I’d be without my friends either. Maybe this is very sentimental, but my closest friends make my life better, and that plays a fundamental role in my life and my work.
AM: There is, of course, another set of real people who appear throughout Loop, almost becoming characters in themselves, and that’s the list of writers: Kafka, Fernando Pessoa, Emmanuel Bove, Proust, etc. Reading is a major part of the narrator’s life, and I wanted to ask you about your own reading. When we were emailing back and forth as I was translating Loop, you mentioned that you used to read mostly dead authors, and that now you’re much more interested in writers working today. Why do you think that is, and do you find that reading living authors is a different experience to reading dead ones?
BL: It’s interesting, because this leads us to the question of what we mean by contemporary. Maybe what’s contemporary is everything we see in the present, rather than being about which writers are dead or alive. There can be living writers that we’re not interested in reading, and meanwhile Sappho has so much to say to us today. I don’t come from a bookish family. If things were going well, our reward wasn’t a book but a red or blue slushie on the way out of the supermarket. When I came to reading at university, I couldn’t believe the amazing things I was finding—that studying could be like that. I was fascinated, and yet the academic literary canon when I was a student was overwhelmingly masculinist, and in recent years I’ve been able to fill a lot of the gaps and blind spots I had then. In the process, I’ve tried to read what younger female poets are writing, and what other women are writing in Latin America. That’s what I find most interesting now: other ways of telling stories. Other possible worlds.
AM: Speaking of the various characters in Loop, I can’t pass up the opportunity to mention one of my very favorites: the die-hard Proust fan the narrator meets in a bar, who has a black eye from a drug deal gone wrong and says that reading all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time is “the most hardcore thing [he’s] ever done.” Was his spectacular spiel of pro-Proust slang as much fun to write as it was to read (and translate)?
BL: What a lovely question! And very generous. I’m going to confess something, dear Annie, that perhaps you share. When you look back at things you’ve done and written, maybe you wish you’d done them differently. I find that when I have to read aloud an excerpt of something I wrote a long time ago, I wonder why I wrote it the way I did and not some other way. But the thing is, what I normally enjoy is the process of writing, and for me writing is about the process more than anything else. When I can’t manage to start or carry on with a text, I suffer, I procrastinate, or I suffer because I procrastinate, but not because of the capitalist logic of “I’m not doing anything and I should be producing,” No, it’s not about that. I have a bad time for the simple reason that I have such a good time when I’m writing. That’s why I try to do it, and that’s also why I like to do it. And now that you bring up that point in the book, I remember it was a lot of fun to write and I’m glad you’ve reminded me of it now.
AM: Finally, I wanted to ask about your involvement in feminist projects and actions in Mexico, and your column in El País, where you often write about gender equality and gender violence. Could you talk a bit about this side of what you do, and how it relates to the rest of your work as a writer?
BL: I feel very honored to have a space in the newspaper. Through it I’ve met other journalists whose work I admire, and talking to them about these current issues in Mexico is something I find really interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever said so quite this explicitly, but I’m a feminist and I’ve become involved in various actions in Mexico related to gender equality, and justice, which I’d better only mention vaguely, without naming names, to keep them out of the public eye, which is key to the nature of these anonymous collectives. I really believe in the power that comes from collective action, from questioning the individualism intrinsic to capitalism, from questioning authorship itself. Having one foot in journalism and another in fiction keeps me earthed, a bit like those two-color wires that make electricity possible. I ask myself questions, and there are some I like to explore through fiction and others I like to deal with through essays or journalism. I really enjoy the combination of the two, and everything I do is connected. Including everything I don’t do and would like to be doing. It’s possible we’re also all the things we don’t do and all the things we’re not, don’t you think?
Annie McDermott is a literary translator working from Spanish and Portuguese into English. Her translations include Loop by Brenda Lozano, Empty Words and The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero, Dead Girls and Brickmakers by Selva Almada, and Wars of the Interior by Joseph Zárate. She has previously lived in Mexico City and São Paulo, Brazil, and now lives by the sea in Hastings, UK.
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