Andrew Gallix

The Novel Without Qualities

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An Interview with Luis Chitarroni by Andrew Gallix.

Luis Chitarroni is a prominent Argentine critic, editor, and novelist, whose staggering erudition is only matched by his warmth, humour, and kindness. Over several months—as I edited the following interview—he patiently responded to all my queries. Here is an extract from a message he sent me yesterday, which gives a good idea of the number of references he can cram, quite naturally, into a short paragraph:

The Distant Star is an allusion, almost a reference, to Roberto Bolaño’s title (Estrella distante). The man from Madrid is Javier Marías (an autor [sic] who declared ‘War’ to Jorge Herralde, his previous editor and publisher). The final sentence pretends to enhance Giordano Bruno’s observation on explosions and shakespeare title’s play [sic].

In the end, I cut some passages that remained too obscure to me. There are other instances when I chose to leave in some rather cryptic sentences, due to their hypnotic rhythm or sheer beauty. After all, as Roland Barthes declared, ‘For writing to be manifest in its truth (and not in its instrumentality) it must be illegible.’ Tidying up Chitarroni’s answers felt, at times, like translating from English into English, which is slightly disquieting, but also ironic. Indeed, Susana Medina—a London-based Spanish novelist—had kindly translated my convoluted questions into her mother tongue, as I wanted Chitarroni to be able to express himself as freely as possible. When the answers came in, however, they were in English. So the questions were in Spanish, the answers in English, and the interview is the gap between the two. Whenever Chitarroni opens his mouth or puts pen to paper, it is the entire history of Western literature that seems to speak, and yet the voice is always unmistakably his. Whatever the language.

At Home in the Unheimlich

DeborahLevy

Deborah Levy interviewed by Andrew Gallix.

Andrew Gallix: I wonder if the discovery of your ‘own voice’ isn’t also due to the adoption of a less theatrical style. Were you more influenced, in the early days, by your playwriting? Many people who discovered you when Swimming Home was shortlisted for the Man Booker, in 2012, had no idea that you had been a successful playwright for many years: did this give you the feeling that you were starting over again as a fiction writer?

Deborah Levy: Yes, I trained as a playwright. Oddly, my two favourite plays written in the 1990s, The B File (an erotic interrogation of five female personas that has been performed all over the world) and Honey Baby: 13 Studies in Exile (performed at La Mama Theatre in Melbourne) are not theatrical at all. Read those plays (Deborah Levy: Plays 1, Methuen) and you will see I’m starting to slip into prose. I can’t begin to convey how hard it was to be a female playwright in the mid-1980s, writing in the way that I did — yes, the whole gender thing — but mostly because I wasn’t writing social realism which was very much in vogue, nor was I writing didactic feminist theatre which was also having a moment at that time. I was much more influenced by Pina Bausch and Heiner Müller than anyone else, though Pinter and Beckett were influences too. Writing for the theatre taught me to embody ideas.