novelists-from-argentina

"... The gardener is usually attended by a friendly robin, and when he turns up the soil the bird will come down close to his feet to pick up the small grubs and worms. Is it not probable that the tameness of the tame young robin so frequently met with is, like that of the robin who keeps company with the gardener or woodman, an acquired habit; that the young bird has made the discovery that when a person is moving about among the plants, picking fruit perhaps, lurking insects are disturbed at the roots and small spiders and s shaken from the leaves? We are to the robin what the cow is to the and the sheep to the —a food finder."

"... it is impossible for us not to love whatever is lovely, and of all living things birds were made most beautiful."

"July 2nd 1902 DEAR GARNETT Thanks for writing—also for " envying " me. I'm in a cloud of by day in the woods, and the result is I smart and burn and tingle and itch all night. Are these the " delights " you would like to have! But I mix myself up in the private affairs of weasels, s, squirrels, s, s, s, s, &c. &c. and I get my pleasures that way and it more than compensates me for the pain. ..."

"... the fruit-growers remind us in each recurring spring that it would be an immense advantage to the country if the village children were given one or two holidays each in March and April, and sent out to hunt and destroy s, every wasp brought in to be paid for by a bun at the public cost. That the wasp, an eater of ripe fruit, is also for six months every year a greedy devourer of caterpillars and flies injurious to plant live, is a fact the fruit-grower ignores."

"One can only hope … that the countryman will say to the townsman, Go on making your laws and systems of education for your own children, who will live as you do indoors; while I shall devise a different one for mine, one which will give them hard muscles and teach them to raise the and pork and cultivate the potatoes and cabbages on which we all feed."

"… A friend once confessed to me that he was always profoundly unhappy at sea during long voyages, and the reason was that his sustaining belief in a superintending Power and in immortality left him when he was on that waste of waters, which have no human associations. The feeling, so intense in his case, is known to most if not all of us; but we feel it faintly as a disquieting element in nature of which we may be but vaguely conscious."

"The has the distinction of being the smallest British bird; it is also one of the most widely distributed, being found throughout the United Kingdom. Furthermore, it is a resident throughout the year, is nowhere scarce, and in many places is very abundant. Yet it is well known only to those who are close observers of bird life. The gold crest is not a familiar figure, owing to its smallness and restlessness, which exceed that of all the other members of this restless family of birds, and make it difficult for the observer to see it well. Again, it is nearly always concealed from sight by the foliage, and in winter it keeps mostly among the evergreens, and at all times haunts by preference pine, fir, and yew trees. In the pale light of a winter day, more especially in cloudy weather, it is hard to see the greenish, restless little creature in his deep green bush or tree. Standing under, or close to, a wide-spreading old yew, half a dozen gold crests flitting incessantly about among the foliage in the gloomy interior of the trees look less like what they are than the small flitting shadows of birds."

"From the distance at intervals came the piercing cries of the ... sounding like bursts of hysterical laughter. ... This bird, which is about as large as a , selects a low thorny bush with stout wide-spreading branches, and in the center of it builds a domed nest of sticks, perfectly spherical and four or five feet deep. The opening is at the side near the top, and leading to it there is a narrow arched gallery resting on a horizontal branch, and about fourteen inches long. So compactly made is this enormous nest that I have found it hard to break one up. I have also stood upright on the dome and stamped on it with my boots without injuring it at all."

"Umberto Pettinicchio Ha visto a Asturias con una reciente combinación de pinturas de factura que le muestran en un alto grado de desarrollo de su expresionismo simbólico, donde revisa la importancia del color no con detonaciones refinadas como en las escuelas expresionistas tradicionales, ni escandalosas, como en las actuales. Aquellos, especialmente los americanos, que, aunque etimológicamente ligados al significado de la denominación, insisten en subrayar -o descomponer- la forma o formas."

"This year our classroom faces the street. The window’s very high, so from our desks we can’t manage to see the people passing by. You might say this is a kind of jail, and we can only guess at the faces of the free people walking around out there. But it’s not true. This isn’t my prison: it’s my freedom. In here, I’m not who I am, but who I want to be, or rather, I’m the most presentable part of myself. I’ve left at home the Jew, the sinner, the girl who replaces the missing fastener on her garter belt with a safety pin, the one who prepares her thermos of café con leche to face the icy mornings, the one who thinks about penises, vaginas, and coituses. To school I bring the nice, lively girl, the one who knows how to make the others split their sides laughing, the one who says she’s Catholic, although nobody believes her, the one who invents lies about her ancestors, but who, on the whole, is acceptable and even envied, because now that the clouds of her earliest years have parted, she understands everything and can even explain it. I’m sixteen years old, seventeen. I’m split in two pieces that are, nonetheless, irreconcilable, and for a long period of my life I’ll go on that way: split in two."

"it was in Buenos Aires, her native city, where Alicia was most at ease, most relaxed. I’ve had the privilege of wandering along the streets of that great city in her company, while Alicia pointed out the churches, cafés, and parks that occupy the pages of her books. There, the allusions that had previously been just verbal icons for me suddenly became sounds, smells, vital experiences. Of course every three or four blocks we had to stop for an espresso, that potent Argentine libation that seemed to fuel her unflagging energy and which she described in The Rainforest as “one of life’s great pleasures.” Alicia never distinguished between the minutia of everyday life – the aroma of coffee, a recipe for pastel de papas, the intimate language of eroticism and the erotic intimacy of language – and her constant preoccupation with the “big,” transcendental questions. Cecilia, for example, the protagonist of The Rainforest, compares the incessant comings and goings of ants with the human condition: “I don’t admire or torture [ants] anymore, as I did when I was a kid, but sometimes, since I have nothing else to do with my time, I get the urge. To pick up an ant and place it way back at the end of the line, ever so carefully. How would I feel if an enormous hand were to lift me up and deposit me at the end of the line at the bank or the post office?” That enormous hand belongs, of course, to the Deity in whom Alicia sometimes believed and sometimes didn’t. It’s the elusive figure whose presence, called for or not, can be felt behind all her existential speculation, linguistic games, frank humor, and anguished, hopeful characters. It’s the stentorian voice that addresses the protagonist of Call Me Magdalena, asking: “Would you like to see my enormous Countenance outlined in the sky?” and to which she candidly replies, “I’d be scared shitless, immense God.” Moments later, when, despite Magdalena’s fears, the image of the Divine Face appears before her, they engage in a pleasant dialogue about the destiny of the Jews in the Hereafter, concluding that, although it’s “not mandatory” for Jews to go to Heaven, if they choose to go they’ll find no anti-Semitism there. In fact, adds the Lord reassuringly, “We’ve all learned a little Yiddish.” This perfect confluence of irreverence and seriousness is what I believe best synthesizes the essence of Alicia Steimberg’s work and characterizes the irrepressible ebullience of the woman."

"She was a teacher to her marrow, as evinced by two recent publications of which she was very proud, Aprender a escribir (Learning to Write), Volumes I and II."

"Like most great souls, Alicia didn’t take herself too seriously."

"Steimberg was the first woman writer in Argentina to write with subversion and tenderness about the immigrant condition in Buenos Aires. Like Margo Glantz's Genealogías, Steimberg's is a fundamental autobiography in the Latin American canon."

"they’ve forgotten me, just as you forget a fly that you’ve just shooed away a few seconds before."

"My mind is full of holes where knowledge ought to be."

"I learned to distrust the smiles that abounded at those social events. As soon as Grandma returned home from the party and put on her housecoat, her true colors emerged. Her face reflected an existence full of suffering, yoked to the side of a silent husband and daughters who fought like wild beasts, feeding on their insatiable bitterness."

"Alicia Steimberg...recovers the almost hidden magic of objects that appear and that are transformed in her stories of life as occurs in "Viennese Waltz" or "Segismundo's Better World.""

"She would laugh until she choked, never noticing if anyone else shared her mirth."

"I grew up in a shadowy world where death was all around, but it was secret — disappearances have all the direct cruelty of sadism, as well as a particular aura of the sinister unknown."

"One issue is that we’re used to reading in translation and other countries aren’t. We know more about your history than you know about ours. There’s two ways to deal with that. Get angry at the inequality. Or try to explain what’s going on."

"It’s very difficult to write about Argentina using only realism. In the 50s and 60s there was a strong tradition of fantastical fiction here: Borges, Silvina Ocampo, Julio Cortázar. Then the whole region became politicised with the dictatorship [1976-1983], the consequences of the Cuban revolution and the intervention of America."

"to a large extent, this is the fear that I summon and depict, a feeling of simultaneous imminence and abandonment that is difficult to describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced it."

"I think what happened to people like me who grew up in the 80s and 90s is that slasher movies, Stephen King and Twin Peaks all got mixed with our reality, which was already full of the language of horror: the disappeared, the children of the dead, children of the lost generation…"

"I understand the [notion of] respect but I don’t want to be complicit in any kind of silence; to be timid about horrifying things is dangerous too. Maybe I turn up the volume to 11 because of the genre I like to work in, but the genre puts a light on the real horror that gets lost in [a phrase like] “political violence”."

"I am a writer who works in her country, who never lived anywhere else, who maybe will one day, but whose life has transpired in a large American metropolis with all its intensity, its often joyful — and other times desperate — people, its power outages, its bodies in the streets, its beauty and its horror."

"I think no one really chooses their tastes or their modes of expression: One day a language appears, and finding a language is a lot like finding a home. When I discovered horror cinema and literature, I found my language — the one that allowed me to talk about the terrors I have known. My language was formed by Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights”; the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Stephen King; “Frankenstein”; “The Exorcist”; “Jaws” and “E.T.”; and later by “Twin Peaks”; rock and punk music; David Cronenberg; Clive Barker and fanzines."

"When I’m asked who I am, I say, “I am a Latin American.” The experience of being born and living in my country shaped me as a person — often a problematic one — and as a writer. I am a Latin American woman, which also implies a number of challenges: growing up without laws that allowed us to make decisions about our bodies (those laws exist now, but I am 50 years old) and fighting in a labor market that, in addition to being sexist, is scant and limited. Not only are jobs given to men because they are men, but because there is a lot of unemployment in general, and the chain breaks at its weakest link."

"(Do you think hard times fuel creativity?) Let me separate this question in two. No, I don’t think that hard times necessarily fuel creativity. Often it silences you. Freud knew that very well. I had this ongoing discussion with Joseph Brodsky at the New York Institute for the Humanities; he used to affirm that censorship is good for literature but bad for the writer. But at home it could be seriously bad not only for the writer (who finally takes responsibility for his or her words) but also for everyone around us, even innocent people who appeared in our phone books. And, on the other hand, I did write a lot during those terrible times. But I was one of the very few, and it all started before the military takeover."

"(Which other Argentine and Latin American writers do you appreciate? Or writers from farther afield?) Oh, the list is vast, a movable feast if we may say so. Cortázar is the one who is closest to my way of understanding the act of writing. And nearer to my heart. I admire Carlos Fuentes on the opposite extreme of the equation. That is why I wrote a book on both of them, Entrecruzamientos: Cortázar/Fuentes (Crossings: Cortázar/Fuentes). It is astonishing to discover how much they connect in their so different personalities. But if you ask me for a list, it can go from Clarice Lispector to Haruki Murakami, with innumerable names on the way."

"(How does Argentine feminism differ in its objectives and its methods to its American counterpart?) Well, feminism in the States was overpowering during the eighties, while it was quite isolated here. But now the scale has flipped, and it is important to point out that finally, here in Argentina, women’s struggles are intense and out in the open and that force is taking over the streets in a very courageous and powerful way, as you might have well experienced. What is absolutely fantastic here is the power of the women’s movement—the fight is very intense at this point. But we do have a history of courageous and combative women; think of the mothers and the abuelas of Plaza de Mayo. And now the young people are really joining in the demands; it is moving and very heartwarming."

"(What changes have you witnessed in Argentina in your lifetime?) Far too many. This is a roller coaster country, with good moments and very upsetting times like the current one, though the civic-military dictatorship was worse. But we have an incredible, almost miraculous capacity for recovery, which I hope will at some point still save us."

"I suppose El Mañana is my ars poetica."

"Here’s a very short list of Latin women novelists I think should have been considered part of the Boom…Mexico: Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos. Costa Rica: Carmen Naranjo. Brazil: Clarice Lispector. Uruguay: Armonía Somers. Chile: María Luisa Bombal. Argentina: Silvina Ocampo, Nora Lange, Elvira Orphée, and (why not?) my mother Luisa Mercedes Levinson who was a very original writer. If we can stretch it a little I would add Sara Gallardo."

"Writing cannot be taught, no, but stimulated, yes."

"In these times there is no bigger liar than hegemonic journalism! So good fiction does a great job of teaching us how to read between the lines and explore the complexities and contradictions of language which are often manipulated."

"he took me in his arms without saying a word, not even holding me too tight but letting all the emotions of our new encounter overflow, telling me so much by merely holding me in his arms and kissing me slowly. I think he never had much faith in words, and there he was, as silent as ever, sending me messages in the form of caresses."

"My only real possession was a dream and they can't deprive me of my dreams just like that."

"Those worlds erroneously called primitive have such rich cosmologies."

"(Do you regret anything you've published?) A: There are so many writers who have burned or disclaimed their first books. Borges, for example. What a nuisance. I am very irreverent; I know no shame in that sense. It would mean some kind of censorship, wouldn't it? Of course, there are some books I like better than others-some books still surprise me now, as if someone else had written them. On the other hand, I often regret what I haven't written because I was too lazy or too cowardly. Writing takes real courage and commitment."

"(Having lived for many years outside of Argentina, what is your conception of home?) VALENZUELA: I lived for over three years in France, one in Normandy and then in Paris. Practically a year in Barcelona. And ten glorious years in New York, from where I moved back and forth to Mexico and, at least once a year, with trepidation, home to Buenos Aires. I don't miss anything anymore, neither people nor places. Many writers say that language is their real home. I am all for that notion. During the last military dictatorship it was said that the writers who had left the country would progressively distance themselves from their roots until one day they would no longer be Argentine writers. It was a way of dismissing those voices, the only ones capable of being critical and objective about the regime. I, for one, don't need my roots deep in the ground; I carry them with me-like the aerial roots of our local clavel del aire. Anyhow, you can never really return home. Buenos Aires has changed so much that is no longer my city. It is a good place to clam-in and write, and the mother tongue is crucial. One thing I discovered in coming back is the importance of your own intonations as background noise. I left New York when I started dreaming in English, talking to myself in English, thinking in English. The Argentine language is a home I don't want to lose."

"For Luisa Valenzuela, it is erroneous to associate Latin American fiction with the French surrealist movement and with oneiric representations of reality. According to her, Latin American surrealist literature does not exist. "...although this fiction we are here concerned with is described as surrealistic or surrealist as usually happens with non-Latin American readers, it is absolutely realistic literature as you well know, but from another point of view, which could be semantic; for is this thing called reality always scoping explicable limitations or could it be philosophical or metaphysical even pataphysical? In the supplementary reality to the one we were taught to perceive, there is a cosmoginy, a world vision shared with native Americans; nothing must escape your notice but you must also learn to look again with your eyes at the very edge of what is visible. You must learn to look at the world twice." (Note in book: "From an unpublished text by Luisa Valenzuela")"

"I believe fiction is a search shared with the reader."

"I always am quite disturbed when American reviewers call my fiction surrealist. I consider it realist in excess. Latin American writers think of reality as having a wider span, that's all-we explore the shadow side of it. But the real difference has to do mostly with the origins of language. Spanish grammar is different from English grammar. This means that we have a different approach not only to the world, but to the word. At times it is something very subtle, a more daring immersion into the unknown. "Un día sorprendente," to give a very specific example, doesn't mean exactly the same as "un sorprendente dia." In English, you cannot even turn around a phrase or leave a dangling participle. Joyce needed to explode the English language to allow its occult meaning to emerge; Cortázar just plays around with Spanish words and grammar for the same purpose. Ours is a much more elastic grammar. English is onomatopoeic, beautifully strict, clear cut. Spanish, on the other hand, is more baroque and allows for ambiguity and metaphor. Does it have to do with the speaker's character, or is character, as we may surmise, a construction of language?"

"(How would you compare contemporary literary life in Argentina to literary life back then?) VALENZUELA: Literary life then was passionate. Literature was really alive; it was something to be taken into account, both in the media and the public sphere. Now we run with the times. Individualism is rampant among the writers, and the media pays much more attention to politicians, starlets and comedians-one and the same-than to intellectuals"

"When I was recently on a panel with Louisa Valenezuela in Seattle, she said something very wise: "Everything you write has its own time of day and its own appropriate length.""

"You cannot make a writer-it is an innate way of seeing the world, and a love of language, and a lifetime commitment."

"There are so many impediments and temptations to avoid writing. But self-censorship is never one of them."

"Fiction requires a vertical gaze-delving deeper into the non-facts, the unconscious, the realm of the imaginary. These are two very different ways of seeing the world. Fiction, for me at least, is the best way to say things. I can be much more clear-minded if I allow my imagination to take the lead-never loosing the reins, of course, but at full gallop. I also believe that, if you are fortunate, you can access the unconscious through fiction; in my case, elaborate ideas emerge in a very organized manner."

"Borges has this wonderful phrase in a short story: "La falta de imaginación los movió a ser crueles" (the lack of imagination moved them to cruelty). Though cruelty with imagination can be the worst of all-just think of certain torturers in our respective countries. As a tool, imagination should only be used by writers, in their writing."