Transcript of class interview with Paz Soldan, February 7th, Vancouver- Madrid, 2008
Copyright SFU/ Paulo Horta/ Members of WL 303 Spring 2008
Molly: Could you discuss the change in motivations for Cardona in the English translation of Turing's Delirium?
EPS: When you write you have notebooks and this entailed going back to my notebooks. My American editor made very thorough, lots of suggestions. He was not convinced by his motivations, which were very idealistic, the revenge for the cousin was too simple a motivation for him. The editor suggested the character was more complex than that. All writers feel they could have done things better. Reading the novel anew after two or three years was a learning experience for me. I don't want to read it again to think I have to start changing it...
Paulo: So in the English translation it is no longer about the cousin.
EPS: Right.
Krisi: Flavia seems to change in age ...
EPS: Flavia was the most difficult part for me, to create a believable female teenager. At first she was too young, then too old, I tried to find the right age.
Emily: How did you feel when Anton made suggestions to change your novel?
EPS: In Latin America there is a different tradition, more respectful of authors. You would not receive a line by line commentary. It is different from the American tradition. It was very shocking at first to see the comments, pertaining to each line. It was good to see someone take the time to read it so carefully. The editors in the States do not necessarily read Spanish. The editor commissions a novel based on the sample chapter that is translated and then has to wait to see the whole thing. It took me a whole summer, two months, to make the changes. It was very positive. Most suggestions I agreed with. I didn't have to include suggestions I didn't like. Most of the changes have been kept for the Alfaguara edition in Argentina. I've tried to have it ordered but the Bolivian remains cheaper!
Paulo: We have the book right here.
EPS: How did you get it?
Paulo: One of my research assistants brought it back for me from Argentina, it is quite beautifully produced.
Paulo: Speaking of changes... what of the scene of Flavia and her father? Lisa Carter has been kind enough to answer our questions via email and she pointed out this scene to us.
EPS: There were actually a couple of passages suggesting Flavia was being molested. Anton felt the issue was so huge that it either had to remain in greater detail or be taken out. Either it should be fully developed or it was not necessary.
Paulo: Echoes are still present...
EPS: and they colour the character.
Emily: Did the translation make the novel mroe North American?
EPS: There are actually things from the Latin American tradition that were incorporated in response to suggestions by Anton. Something is lost in translation--there are differences between the voices of the characters that are most noticeable in Spanish-- still the translation by Lisa Carter is excellent. There is a good tradition of editing in North America. The editor, different readers ask good questions--everything needs to have a clear, practical, concrete explanation. One can't just assume it is magic realism! For example, there is a story which I wrote in which a character is killed with a knife and there was a very poetic way of describing the blood coming out. The editor pointed out that from the point of view of science, that is not how it would happen. I think if I lived in Argentina I would be more frustrated with these suggestions. But I live in the States and I understand.
Ian: Could you discuss the reaction to magic realism represented in the McOndo movement?
EPS: Magic realism is a very important way to narrate Latin American reality. One of the few styles we've exported, we so often import novels. It became political in the 1990s because it became perceived as essentialist. That it would assume an animist view of the world, where strange things would be accepted without much of a problem. Magic realism was not the only way to narrate in the 1960s -- see the realism of Vargas Llosa's writing of this time. But it became global, and Latin American writing was identified with Magic Realism. Our reaction in the 1990s was that we did not want to do what was expected from us. Not that Garcia Marquez was bad or wrong. In the 1980s, when democracy was being restored in Latin America, Neo-liberalism was adopted in a very uncritical way. Afterwards I tried in my novels to take a more critical stance toward the adoption of technology than in the 1990s. The 90s were a time in which everything American was adapted uncritically. We adopted popular media and new technology with a vengeance. My father remarked that computers were magic realist for us!
Megan: Can McOndo regenerate itself, will it become redundant, will there be a new McOndo?
EPS: The Crack or McOndo generation is not new anymore-- I recently attended a conference of the '39 under 39' which was in the fashion of Granta's 'top 40 under 40' British or American writers. McOndo was half serious/ half a joke. The new generation is more likely to just post something on YouTube. We have a good relationship with the new generation. There was a time when McOndo was a bad word and now it is just part of the landscape.
Dulce: Role of technology in your writing?
EPS: The typwriter was originally designed for blind people to write, later it was mass produced. Nietszsche wrote: "Our writing tools are working on our own thoughts." A scholar of Nietzsche has speculated that his own style changed when he adopted the type-writer--this is the time he started writing aphorisms.
There was an impact. I am not sure how. I was blogging SuperTuesday with a friend and when we needed to look a term we googled it and my friend wondered "how did writers do it before google?' Notice the advent of 'kindle' and the Sony Reader. Literature will become very multi-media in the future when e-books are mainstream. Imagine Cortazar's Hopscotch or Borges' stories in the new media. Even in terms of my blog, a friend recommended to me that a blog must use all media at your disposal, so I have started to post videos.
Diany: Are you trying to articulate a position on globalization in your novel?
EPS: Personally, I think that novels can go against what you think, that's how novelists think. I don't start with the premise of criticizing Globalization. I could just write an 'op-ed' page instead. In the process of writing a novel you can nonetheless find the answers you're looking for. I have benefitted from globalizing flows. Bolivia is a small country w/ a literary tradition not very much known outside Bolivia. The novel has many voices, more are critical than positive. I tried to be even, but the result is not even. Globalization has benefitted some social classes in the continent as a whole--the benefits are not spread evenly--led to the triumph of neo-populist governments in the continent: Morales, Chavez. Regardless of whether we like them or not Chavez and Morales express this genuine dissatisfaction. Globalization exacerbated social inequalities that were pre-existing, made them worse. Globalization could work for Latin-America, just not in the way it has do so far.
Could you discuss the relationship of literature to code-writing?
Literature is lke a big code in which you are trying to decipher things.
Chris: What is the balance between research and experience that went into your take on globalization?
EPS: I live a dislocated life. 8 months in the US and 4 in Bolivia. I run a summer program for the university where I take students to small towns, mining towns. The contrast between a rich, powerful country and a very poor country. I am not purely a Bolivian, I feel like a foreigner in Bolivia, and when I return to the US I see it with a different eye, too. This dislocated life is part of the globalization experience. When it came to other things, the theoretical underpinnings, I researched.
Ana Claudia: Was there an image of Bolivia you were trying to project?
EPS: I am a middle class Bolivian, one of the 2 countries in Latin America where Indigenous people are a majority. Sometimes I felt guilty about not being an 'authentic' Bolivian. But the middle class reality helps make up the complexity of what is Bolivia today-- I write from a middle class perspective and this is authentically Bolivian, too. A friend told me that there are more computers in Turing's Delirium than there are in Bolivia. But this presence of computers is true of my experience, my millieu.
Mike: Could you talk about the structure of the book in terms of a stylistic choice?
EPS: In my previous novels I only focused on the main characters, and it was observed that the secondary characters were not fully developed. I tried to get into the voice of each character, in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person.
Graham: In a conversation with Judge Cardona, a pharmacist discussing the protests laments: "It will be a victory with no winners" (pg. 239). This pessimism with the anti-globalization movement is pervasive throughout the novel; the demonstrations never seem to have the potential for productive change. In your mind is this a) a single hypothetical scenario, b) representative of the Latin American situation, or c) indicative of a generally futile fight against the forces of globalization? Put differently, that resistance only
brings greater despair?
EPS: The anti-globalization movement can bring about change, even victorious moments. The more general point is that elites in power do not give up power easily. Morales will have to make concessions. There is a way in which political systems and elites corrupt even the opposition. For example, take the protests over the privatization of water in Cochabamba. the city of Cochabamba still does not have good water, despite the political victory against the privatization of its water. After 8 years, the people's victory did not bear fruits.
Shafin: What was the first thing that got you started in writing Turing's Delirium?
EPS: In 2000 I started writing something very intellectual, in the tradition of Borges, a fight between someone who created codes and someone who deciphered codes. Very abstract. Then when I was in Bolivia there was the fight in Cochabamaba over the privatization of water, because I'm interested in technology, I made it energy. It became distinct from the literary codes that preoccupy Borges in his stories.
