Ruminative Textures: A Conversation with Sergio Chejfec

by Heather Cleary

Like many of Chejfec’s novels, The Incompletes resists summary. More accurately, it has a plot that can be summarized, but any attempt at this seems to omit essential elements of the book. For example: I could say that The Incompletes is about Félix, who leaves Buenos Aires as a young man and spends years circling the globe, all the while sending postcards and letters written on hotel stationery to a friend he left behind in Argentina. Félix travels to Barcelona and then to Moscow, where he checks in to a lugubrious hotel run by the proprietor’s daughter, Masha, who goes on her own—internal—journey of discovery when she finds a bundle of an unknown currency in a vacant room.

All this is true, insofar as it’s all there in the pages of the novel. Except that Félix’s story is told by a narrator who delves into the details of his physical and psychological world despite having received no more information from him than what appears in the “invariably brief lines” Félix sends from abroad. And that we often lose sight of Félix for pages at a time and find ourselves immersed instead in the inner life of a woman whose automatic movements through the halls of the Salgado and the streets of Moscow conceal a desperate desire to escape the stifling walls of the hotel.

The enigmatic quality of Chejfec’s novels may arise from the fact that much of his writing questions the meaning of what it recounts. Reflection is, for Chejfec, the constant companion of plot; this indirect approach gives the work its ruminative texture.

HEATHER CLEARY: Does that sound about right? Is there anything you would add to the description?

SERGIO CHEJFEC: That sounds about right.

HC: Let’s start with the title, then. You describe both Félix and Masha as “incomplete,” and it could be said that the narrator is, too, in his way. For those who haven’t read the book yet, tell us a bit more about these characters, and what their “incompleteness” means to you.

SC: They are incomplete because they seem to lack subjectivity. The narrator hasn’t seen his friend (Félix) in decades. They said goodbye when they were young, when his friend got on a ship at the Port of Buenos Aires. Since then, he has been receiving a few lines from Félix on hotel stationery, or postcards with barely any information on them. The narrator doesn’t know much about Félix, but he’s aware of certain details. The strange relationship between him and Masha in Moscow, for example.

The question, then, arises: How is the narrator providing information that, according to the novel, he has no access to? The narrator would like to believe that the question doesn’t matter, because the novel pushes against this kind of administration of information.

Novels, in general, are excellent devices for administering information. The reader doesn’t know everything at the beginning—not everything is familiar to them. The narrative regulates what readers know at the beginning, middle, and end of the story. It also regulates how they know it. In order to achieve this, it must be clear in the story that whoever is narrating has their own specific access to the circumstances. In The Incompletes, the narrator has no way of knowing the things he tells us. And yet he recounts them as if they were real.

For me, this was a way of revealing the mechanisms of fiction, but by following a different route. Not just through “fantasy”—I wanted to propose a fiction that presented itself on the basis of incomplete or apocryphal documents.

HC: In one scene at the end of the novel, we’re taken inside a photography exhibition in an unnamed coastal city in Latin America. The experience of viewing these images is clearly determined by the way they are organized in relation to one another, and to the halls of the old mansion in which they are hung. It reminded me a bit of the process of framing that happens when a writer’s work passes from one language into another—not always in the same order in which it was conceived, and always presented against the backdrop of different walls, so to speak. Coming back to this novel fifteen years after it was first published, how do you see it fitting in with your other work? Did you notice anything new about it this time around?

SC: Since this interview is connected to the novel’s translation, before answering with the idea that gave rise to the book, I should say something about translation in general, and in this particular case.

It is often said that translation is the act of passing a text (or “something” in general) from one language to another (or from one “state” to another). I would rather not mention the complexity hidden behind that simple definition.

But translation can imply a chronological anomaly. The translator works within a unique temporality. For example, right now, The Incompletes is your most recent book (I think), while for me Los incompletos is a book joined to the past.

It returns from that past, thanks to your translation. But, for me, it doesn’t return as an organic text, but rather as evidence of a past that seeks to reassert itself in the present. It feels like a strange anomaly.

It’s hard, then, to recapture the idea that was behind the book when I wrote it. I think what was driving me was an interest in exploring incompletion, or “the incomplete” as an idea around which, in different ways, a story is constructed. Incomplete, and the constellation of terms surrounding it: imperfect, insofar as it is partial; fragmentary, unfinished, broken, inoperative, limited, invisible, and so on. The result would be an “incomplete” story, in various ways. And the narration has to coexist with this. Not in order to complete elements or moments that are not known, but rather to show that incompleteness as a form of truth.

In a certain sense, Argentinean literature (or Latin American literature in general) is a bit Faulknerian. Writers focus on developing unified narrative projects across several books. If I try to see my work like that, in retrospect, I don’t think there’s much unity there. I think that with The Incompletes I really moved away from the idea of a more or less unified novel that consolidates a limited set of meanings, orbits around characters with clear psychological profiles, and adheres to a unified sense of time.

To be honest, I see my books as parts of a puzzle that add up. And within all that, The Incompletes is itself a puzzle: a set of pieces that can be grouped together but do not form a whole.

HC: Félix is a consummate—or, as you say, “chronic”—traveler. You’ve also spent much of your life moving around. What does the experience of getting to know (or not) a new place mean to you in your writing?

SC: Félix is an opaque character who reveals little. The things he chooses not to reveal probably aren’t clear to him, either. In this sense, I identify strongly with him. I think that for him, and for me, as well, the meaning of travel is not tied to direct experience. It has to do instead with observation. Or, not just with observation, but with the momentary closeness to an object (in many cases, the place that is visited or inhabited).

I like those cases where experience is emptied out of content or obvious meaning. Experience as the interaction between subjectivity and what is there in front of you. I like characters who are indifferent, who don’t react to things or who have no spark. I imagine them as being endowed with a supreme wisdom.

So I suppose that in Félix’s case, and probably mine, as well, traveling is not oriented toward subjecting myself to any particular experience, but rather toward observing an “original.” By this I mean the “original” of that part of the world somehow already known through other channels. This is the source of my fascination with postcards and other indications of place: they are talismans that add an ambiguous density to the experience of confronting what is there.

HC: Staying with the topic of travel, the space of the hotel is a very important one in this novel. First, we have the Samich guesthouse, and then the famous Hotel Salgado. What is it about this kind of space that you find compelling, from a narrative perspective?

SC: A hotel, in itself, can be seen as a device that generates stories. The chance encounters, the proximity of the rooms, the fine line between exhibition and privacy that you find there. They are also factories that churn out coincidences. In short, they are highly literary spaces. It’s no accident that the novel has, since its inception as a genre, returned so often to them.

Hotels are practically the only way for travelers to access private space (this novel predates Airbnb and so on). Narratively speaking, the hotel turns the character into a guest. The guest is a traveler who has decided to suspend their wanderings and submit to the illusion of rootedness. But they could pack their bag and leave at any moment.

The hotel, the building itself, is also fundamental. The setting should correspond to what the novel requires. I think that The Incompletes is, in various senses, a negative novel: the characters aren’t characters, really; the spaces seem impenetrable, unclear, and the buildings are bizarre, like living beings in a permanent state of transformation, within which the protagonist, in this case Félix, constantly renews his condition of being a recent arrival.

HC: I remember having an animated discussion with you about the Hotel Salgado, about how its layout didn’t make sense. That ambiguity adds a layer of complexity to the translation process: it’s one thing to write an ambiguous or unclear space; it’s another thing to make sure that the ambiguity matches up across languages—that the lacunae in the two texts end up having more or less the same outline. Anyway. You were talking about the importance of space and about writing this novel . . .

SC: To my memory, The Incompletes came out of a moment of uncertainty. I felt that my earlier writing had reached a limit; in fact, the two books I wrote immediately before this one were volumes of poetry—that’s how unsure I was at the time about tackling a novel.

In a way, this is why The Incompletes is made up of small but sincere tributes to other texts and writers. Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, an Argentinean writer of fiction and essays, was essential to the way I thought about the dynamics of domestic space. In one of his stories, he describes a tenement where his characters live as if the space were literally infinite, segmented and full of tunnels, completely alveolar.

This alveolar structure is important, because it permits a movement away from capillary or rhizomatic logic; it offers a better idea of the kind of spatiality I’m interested in exploring. A kind of spatiality in which something distant is, in fact, contiguous; in which there’s no need to move backward to get from one place to another, but instead always be moving forward.

HC: Keeping with this idea of contiguity, central to the novel are the chance encounters Félix and Masha have with places, objects, and people. And money. At least one person finds a bundle of money under mysterious circumstances in the novel. Why the motif of currency?

SC: In society stories circulate the way money does. Ricardo Piglia said something like this once: money passes from hand to hand the same way the micronarratives of our professional, domestic, and political lives occupy our daily verbal activity. That is, we’re always giving and receiving stories, the same way we hand over and receive money. We offer something in exchange for something else.

There is also the fact that money and books are very common forms for printed paper. If you think about it, there is behind every bill a hidden story, and probably a fairly literary one: the story of its circulation. The same is true of books. The printed book is also currency; it also has a price. It is just a convention that one printed object be more apt than another for making the economy run.

There are certain stories that you can’t really think about without taking into account the role money plays in them. Joseph Roth wrote a beautiful novel, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, in which money needs to reappear in order for the story to keep going. When the money runs out, the story falls apart. And then it springs back to life when the protagonist has money in his wallet again. The Roth novel is a clear example of how money can facilitate a story in such a way that it even seems constitutive of a certain narrative genre: the novel of social ascension, from the nineteenth-century European novel to American noir fiction.

As I said earlier, the idea behind The Incompletes was, in part, to write a story of fragments. Not fragments in the sense of a unified story broken into pieces, but rather fragments in the sense of a narrative that contains different kinds of pieces from different stories. The presence of money is, then, also a negative one. Money as a negativity, as negation, as a pile of paper that has lost its value as a result of devaluation, inflation, or change of currency (all things that are fairly common in certain Latin American countries). In this way, it starts to look a bit like propagandistic books . . . pure paper. Then again, like books, money awakens dreams and sparks fantasies.

HC: Many readers of your work, in Spanish and in English, have pointed to its enigmatic quality—the way the story seems to move in and out of focus. What is behind this approach to storytelling?

SC: The point is that I like to separate the story from any temporal imperative. I don’t want my stories to depend on a chronology of actions. The idea of an “end” or a “beginning” is important to me, but only if these are secondary categories.

My hope is when a reader finishes one of my books, they will feel like they’ve experienced not a story, but rather a moment. A moment of storytelling that can unfold through different situations.

This may sound a bit extravagant, but I say it without vanity: I am more interested in space than in time. Space as a dimension in which to develop narration. And along with space: movement, a manipulation of scale, observation, density, obstacles, and so on.

Heather Cleary’s translations include Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre, which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, César Rendueles’s Sociophobia, Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets and The Dark, and a selection of Oliverio Girondo’s poetry for New Directions.

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