Marie Arana and Writing Between Reality and Imagination
The Peruvian American writer Marie Arana has authored a wide range of books: “American Chica,” a memoir about straddling cultures; “Lima Nights,” a novel about an extramarital affair; “Bolívar,” a biography of the soldier and statesman Simón Bolívar; and “LatinoLand,” her celebrated study of Hispanic America. Her latest project, a novel, represents a return to fiction after writing three hefty works of nonfiction. Although it’s based in part on reality, the book is also, of course, an invention. Not long ago, she talked to us about a few of the works she has turned to while in the process of stitching reality into fiction. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.
The Time of the Hero
by Mario Vargas Llosa
When I got to Chapter 4 of my new book, I put my pen down and started to think about what I’m doing—what the actual, white-hot center of it is. For inspiration, I went back to Mario Vargas Llosa. Up until he died, last year, he was a very good friend of mine—we went to the opera together, we went to movies together, we had dinner together. I got to interview him on several stages. So one thing I went back to read was his Nobel Prize speech, where he talks about the idea of a daydream that eventually germinates into a book.
Then I went back and reread his first novel. It’s funny—in English, it’s called “The Time of the Hero,” but in Spanish it’s called “La Ciudad y Los Perros,” or “The City and the Dogs,” which is so much more vivid, and has nothing to do with the English title. To collapse the story line a little bit, the novel is about a character who, like Vargas Llosa himself, grows up thinking that his father has died. But when he gets a little older, he learns that his father is actually alive—his mother lied because divorce was such a horrible thing in Peru. Then his mother and father decide to reunite. After this, the boy and his mother move to Lima, where the father sends him to a military academy, in an attempt to beat the wimpy artist out of him. It’s a vicious place of violence and bullying and sexual abuse, where young men learn to be autocratic. One character’s escape is ghostwriting love letters and pornographic stories to entertain his classmates. It’s been such an inspiration to me, to see the way that the writer suspends himself between those two worlds, and how writing becomes his salvation.
Seven Empty Houses
by Samanta Schweblin
This is a book that really confuses the place where reality and imagination meet. I am crazy about Schweblin. She’s an Argentinean living in Berlin, and she creates these incredible, ferocious, twisted stories about unstable minds, or minds that are quickly becoming unstable. There’s this kind of weird, perverse energy that she puts into her writing that I love.
She’s written so much—her most famous work is probably “Fever Dream,” which is a novel. But I really think of her as a master of the short story. She’s written a bunch of collections: “Mouthful of Birds,” “Good and Evil.” But this is the one I love best.
These are creepy stories, but for me, when I finish each one, I’m totally agog, because I realize that the creepiness is in my mind, as a reader. She does this to you. It’s kind of a magical thing. I reread these stories to get the flavor of her ability to manipulate a reader’s mind.
Now I Surrender
by Álvaro Enrigue
Enrigue, who is Mexican, is another favorite writer of mine. His writing is just so original and funny. For example, a previous book of his, “You Dreamed of Empires,” is about the conquest of Mexico, told from the point of view of Moctezuma while he is high on mushrooms. You’re careering down the halls of the city of Tenochtitlan, and you’re encountering the horrible smell of these conquistadores—it’s just absolutely hilarious. But at the same time it’s dead serious—so many of his books are about the culture shock of conquest, and what is in many ways the end of culture.
“Now I Surrender” was actually published in Spanish in 2018, but it only just came out in English. It’s about a group of Mexican military guys who try to rescue a woman who has been kidnapped by the Apache. At the time in which the book is set, Geronimo was the head of the Apache, so he’s a big figure in the book. But Enrigue also interweaves a contemporary story line about a cross-country road trip that he takes with his wife and kids, during which he’s trying to chase down the story of the Apache, and also fighting with his wife.
Some reviewers have called the book hallucinatory, but I think of it more as liminal, with Enrigue living between worlds—the worlds of the past and the present, but also of the real and the imagined. He’s trying to capture a real story from history, while his marriage is falling apart on the road. And, all the way through, he has no problem going back and forth between fiction and reality. ♦