La Jornada: “In each of my works there is a failed novel”

The writer Valeria Luiselli (Mexico City, 1983) identifies in almost all of her stories the existence of “a failed novel, which I wanted to write and failed to do.” In his most recent book, Beginning, middle, finthe second story is about a daughter who “wants to write to her mother because she fears she is losing her memory and wants to keep her busy.”

In the presentation of the work, edited by Feltrinelli, the narrator noted that the protagonist decided that her mother would translate what she was writing, even though she was “very busy doing other things in her eco-radical groups.”

The talk at the Casa Universitaria del Libro brought together about 150 people and the venue was insufficient to accommodate all the interested parties who arrived at the place to listen to Luiselli. Minutes before starting, more people were prevented from entering.

In conversation with her colleague Gabriela Jáuregui, the narrator said that in this case the failed novel is “that the writer, a little stuck or writing things that do not completely convince her, thanks to the fact that her mother translates at high speed what she is sending her, a little like Scheherazade, the daughter has to produce more quickly, thinking that she is helping her mother, but in reality it is the other way around.”

The author compared this text with her novel The weightless, in which he wanted the Mexican poet’s loss of sight “to be translated into an increasingly blurred, thin form of writing. I couldn’t do it. That was the failed novel within the novel that was written.”

“We are all in the middle”

Luiselli declared that we are all in the middle, although “the beginnings and ends are dizzying, exciting, hard moments for us.”

Beginning, middle, endthe novelist added, “wants to be a vindication of being in the middle. Not only of life, in the chronological sense of how long it lasts, but of being far from the shore where we start something and too far, also, from the other shore.”

She noted that the narrator of her book “is in her 40s, watching a daughter enter adolescence, that is, a young woman who begins to articulate difficult questions, have complex ideas, form more multilateral memories and, at the same time, sees a mother lose her memory.

“Our mentors, grandparents, mothers and fathers, those people who sustained the world, in a material sense and with words, begin to fade or blur. It is a terrifying process.”

He emphasized that the text is about “how to stand in that place, seeing life in all its power, begin to imagine and let go of the reins of history.”

In Beginning, middle, end, The characters are going to return a mosaic made of pebbles and each one has its story. “The girl begins to investigate their origin. All the yellow stones that make up the mosaics of the Roman villas were extracted from the mountains of Tunisia and taken by sea to Sicily in the 4th century. The blue stones came from Egypt. The glass ones came from the enormous workshops in the Levantine region, in what is now Syria and Palestine,” explained the essayist.

The piece “portrays my favorite god in the Greco-Roman field, not known or popular, who is Proteus. He is an oracular god because he sees the future, the past and the present with extreme clarity.”

The divinity “hates giving oracles to human beings and when he is captured he metamorphoses to distract his captor: he becomes rain, a lion, a mountain, a fire, a river, and almost all of his captors are incapable of understanding the metamorphoses, following them and reaching the end.”

Luiselli reflected that “this attempt to hunt down Proteus is similar to the exercise of writing in the sense that if we are not attentive to the internal metamorphoses of a text and we want to freeze it in a rigid idea of ​​how it should be, writing does not happen. It is more urgent and important to be good observers of the transformation and to be able to go with it.”

The novelist said that the etymological origin of the word fiction refers to “working with clay, molding it, giving a shape to something that was already there.” In the logic of his writing practice, full of questions, he questioned “whether the activity of fiction is more like giving shape to something that already existed or the process of accelerating particles to distance them and then freezing them in time to have a narrated moment.”