This year, the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) will be featuring two writers whose best-selling novels, one originally written in Catalan and the other in Spanish, have recently been translated into English. Freedom and Solitude: Eva Baltasar & Fernanda Trías can be enjoyed online on October 22nd at 4pm [you can find information about this free event and purchase the authors’ books here. As a way of introducing Canadian readers and giving them a taste of the newly-translated novellas by these two very talented writers, Lattin Magazine and I joined forces to explore more of the interests and concerns of both Catalonian poet-turned-novelist Eva Baltasar, and the Uruguayan novelist and short-story writer Fernanda Trías.
My two-part interview continues here with Fernanda Trías, a Uruguayan writer who has lived in Provence, London, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York where she pursued an MFA in creative writing at NYU. She has published three novels and two short story collections, and is the winner, among several other distinctions, of the Uruguayan National Literature Award. La azotea was written in 2001 and has recently been published as The Rooftop by Charco Press in Edinburgh, in an excellent translation by Annie McDermott. Fernanda currently lives in Bogotá, Colombia, where she has taught in the Universidad Nacional’s Creative Writing MFA program. She was later selected for the Writer-in-Residence program at the Universidad de los Andes where she currently lives and writes.
Fernanda Trías is very well-known and respected throughout Latin America, so I began our interview feeling somewhat trepidatious about meeting her. But she immediately made me feel at ease. Her frank smile and utter lack of pretention opened the door for me to ask her everything I wanted to know about this book, both as a reader and as a writer myself. Here follows my translation of our interview.
I really like the way the novel is structured, starting at the end and working its way backwards. Suspense is built from the first page, when Clara, the protagonist, says “For me, real life began with Julia’s death, went on for four years and came to an end today.” Clara goes on to say, “I don’t think there was ever a beginning, just one long ending that devoured us bit by bit.” This captures the reader’s attention and curiosity. How did you come up with this structure, and the point of view/ moment in time from which the story is told? What was your inspiration to write this book?
Novella as a genre has a long tradition in Latin America. I like this genre very much because it condenses two elements that interest me: on the one hand, the intensity of short story and its compactness in terms of tension, and on the other, the time that the novel takes in order to inhabit a particular atmosphere and space. The short novel or novella has the best of both worlds. And as Deleuze and Guattari state, the “nouvelle” answers a different question from other genres: the nouvelle asks itself “what has happened?”, “how is it possible that this ever happened?” It was the exploration of this question that interested me: how can it be that something this terrible happened. That’s why I started with the fait accompli because Clara reflects about the workings of memory and attempts a reconstruction of events at the same time as she tries to discover the breaking points that precipitated the situation. Novellas work around an “inaccessible secret,” something that is inaccessible to the protagonist him/herself, and inaccessible even to the author. That’s why I’m emphasizing this “trying to understand.”
Something that interests me a lot is the violence that stems from good intentions, within family itself. I think that vulnerability saves us and this obsession of our society with us “being strong” is the cause of many calamities.
Clara, as a girl, trampled on flowers that she actually liked. She says “I don’t know why it was so tempting to tread on them. I always felt guilty afterwards and imagined them growing back, stronger and more beautiful than before.” Why do you think people sometimes destroy that which they like or love? Do you believe we grow back stronger after we’ve been hurt?
This is precisely what I wanted to explore: why do we destroy the things that we love? Human beings are capable of doing the most atrocious things in the name of love. Everything is in continuous transformation, yet, when it comes to human relationships, we don’t want anything to change, we want everything to remain always the same. This is humanity’s tragedy: wishing that nothing ever dies, something which is impossible due to the nature of existence itself.
Something that interests me a lot is the violence that stems from good intentions, within family itself. I think that vulnerability saves us and this obsession of our society with us “being strong” is the cause of many calamities.
There is a very peculiar relationship between Clara and her father. When Julia, his father’s wife, was still alive, Clara used to live on her own, renting an apartment, going to the market, living what must have been a normal life. But after Julia’s accident, she moved in with her father and let go “of everything that tied [her] to a previous life.” She starts a new life in her father’s apartment. But I don’t want to give away the plot of the novel. How does she go from living a normal life to the paralyzing fear that makes her stay permanently indoors?
There are decisions that transform us, from which we can never go back —they are a dead end. And in general, our life is the product of a series of wrong decisions. In this novel I felt that the relationship that started to develop between the protagonist and her father was akin to that of a jailer and prisoner. But it reaches a point where we don’t know who is the jailer and who is the prisoner anymore, because the jailer is trapped, too. The fear of losing something or someone can be paralyzing. I wanted to explore that limit. Push Clara from paralysis to action and watch what happened.
There are some very powerful images and moments in the novel. What happens to the fish and the canary, for instance, or to the relationship that Clara has with Julia’s memory and her belongings. I think that the reader is in for a very intense journey when they dive into your novel. I’d like to know what inspired the character of Carmen, because she goes from being a supportive neighbour and midwife to a “termite,” someone whom the protagonist distrusts. Do you think that her being a foreigner, or an outsider, helps reinforce her “otherness” with respect to Clara (and her fears)?
Yes, the fear of the other is an essential part of this novel. And no one synthetizes that sensation of the other as strange, unknown, and incomprehensible, than a foreigner. There is a mystery in otherness — and human beings are always overwhelmed by mystery, it terrifies them. The character of Carmen stems from an anecdote told to me by my dad, about a neighbour that he once had, who was an immigrant, who had escaped a war in Europe, and who one day had a panic attack on the street in Montevideo when a military plane was flying very low. That sound triggered buried traumas. It was from that image that I built the character of Carmen, who later on embodies the symbol of everything that is strange and foreign.
The pandemic accelerated a process of rejection of the other that was already underway around the world.
In Clara’s world, everything becomes menacing: sounds and silence alike, and people seem to be a plague she fights so hard to keep at bay and even dreams to exterminate. “I would have liked to burn her like that, like a termite” she says about Carmen. When she goes to court, the judge’s eyes are “like silent trees, filled with all the evil of forests.” At night, the wind “plants something nasty in your soul, a kind of malignant disquiet”. Now that we are going through a pandemic, the idea of the plague (of us fighting a plague, or we ourselves being a plague that the earth wants to be rid of) is more present than ever. Do you think that now your book will have an even greater impact than before, precisely because we’ve suddenly discovered that the outdoors do indeed pose real threats to our well-being?
The pandemic accelerated a process of rejection of the other that was already underway around the world. The renewed immigrant crisis in the United States, the crisis around the wall and the border, and in Europe, the migrants who cross the Mediterranean, had already intensified this rejection of the other, but the pandemic gave the final blow in the name of xenophobia with the “Chinese virus.” Besides, anyone could be the “invisible carrier” of the virus, a threat of sickness and death. This finished the job of separating us, each one entrenched in their own place and in their own ideas about vaccines.
I think that what is interesting about literature is that, with the passing of time, it allows for new and renewed readings. Reality shifts and the point of view from which we read is renewed. That’s the wonder of it. The Rooftop can be read as a metaphor of our fear and our necessity. Of course, as we can see, the consequences can be disastrous.
Rather than spending time at the beach, Clara played at an abandoned house when she was a child and went on vacation. Then, she ends up living with her father and daughter in an apartment that, like her own father, disintegrates slowly without her doing anything to stop it, not because she doesn’t want to, but because she is mentally and physically not able to do anything about it. When you first wrote this novel, people didn’t speak openly about mental health challenges. Now we are opening up to talk about it and find ways to help people who suffer from mental health issues. How do you think the readers’ perception of Clara nowadays be in comparison to how she was perceived twenty years before in this regard?
Clara is a dark, difficult character who can be very cruel. But I think she generates empathy in part because of her own suffering and because we can all identify with the desire to save that which we love the most while, inadvertently, hurting it. We have all been in similar situations, even if less extreme. Mothers never want to hurt their children, lovers never want to hurt their partners, but it still happens, and there is no way to walk out unscathed. I wanted to explore paranoia and Clara’s paranoid thinking. Everything belonging to the outside world is a threat for her. But madness is pain, not wickedness. That’s why Clara has a hugely tender side, and hopefully that will help the reader reflect about otherness.
Your books are being reprinted and translated into several languages. What advice or words of comfort could you offer to Latin-American writers everywhere who are trying to build a successful career? What does it mean for you to be such a successful Uruguayan female writer in today’s international literary scene?
My advice is to be patient and trust the fact that a book’s path is long and winding. The Roof was first published in 2001, and it is only now that it started being translated, even though all of these years it continued being read and published in several Latin American countries and in Spain, where its five editions were sold out. There are authors who have a very swift ascent, but sometimes it’s due to marketing phenomena that don’t withstand the test of time. That’s why I prefer a slow and certain path. There are several authors, especially women, who have gone through a similar process. For example, Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza whose present recognition is long overdue. This is the case, too, of another wonderful Uruguayan writer, Cristina Peri Rossi, and Uruguayan poet Ida Vitale, who won the Cervantes Prize and is finally being read now at 96 years old (and who, by the way, is also published by Charco Press). In Latin America we are living through a very fair and overdue reparation process for amazing female authors who were unjustly rendered invisible by the prevailing machismo. I am grateful that this has happened to me at 40 years old and not at 96, hahaha.
If you had to summarize your novel in one or two sentences, how would you describe it?
A novel about love, madness, and fear of freedom.
What would you like to say to Canadian readers (and English-speaking readers) about The Rooftop? What does it mean to you to have this book available in English for them to enjoy?
I would say “thank you,” and I would ask them to read more Latin American literature, because it’s intense but, at the same time, it’s very poetic.
Is there a Canadian author that you admire? [Besides Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, who are the two most famous ones.]
I have been reading both authors since before they were famous in the rest of the world. I started reading Margaret Atwood in the 90s thanks to an English Literature teacher. I am also a huge fan of Leonard Cohen’s, I have read all of his books.
Trías, Fernanda. The Rooftop. Translated by Annie McDermott. Edinburgh: Charco Press, 2021.
