WAYS OF EXPLORING THE WORLD

an interview with Jorge Volpi
conducted and translated by Okla Elliott

 

 

The following interview took place in Spanish via email between April and June 2010.


Jorge Luis Volpi Escalante was born in the tumultuous year of 1968, in Mexico City. He studied law and literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and received a PhD in Spanish philology from The University of Salamanca in Spain. He has won many awards both in his native Mexico and in Europe. To date, two of his novels have been translated into English—In Search of Klingsor, which was an international bestseller, and Season of Ash, which appeared in 2009 to much acclaim. Volpi is equally well regarded as a nonfiction writer. He has written an as yet untranslated book on the events surrounding the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, as well as and many widely read essays, which have appeared in both Spanish and English. Three of his books have been released in German and four in French, all to excellent reviews in the major newspapers and literary journals of Europe, such as Die Zeit and Le Monde.

Volpi’s work is characterized by a unique sort of cultural maximalism which fluently incorporates science, politics, history, and pop culture as easily as economics, philosophy, and linguistics. His scholarly and legal background informs his fiction and nonfiction, lending his work a political, intellectual, and cultural weight few authors can manage. What’s more, he achieves this gravity without overtaking the dramatic and aesthetic joys of a good narrative and beautiful prose.

Volpi is associated with The Crack Movement in Mexican literature, along with Ignacio Padilla and Pedro Ángel Palous (among others), and is generally considered the most talented novelist of his generation. At the age of forty-two, Volpi is writing at the height of his powers, and his future seems boundless. In a review-essay I wrote on his novel Season of Ash, I singled him out as Mexico’s, and perhaps all of Latin America’s, strongest contender for a Nobel Prize before his career is over (despite my usual boredom with such speculation), and I still believe he is.

Okla Elliott: Alluding to the title of your book Imagination and Power, what is the relationship between art (or the creative imagination) and power? Or maybe I should ask, what is the relationship between power (or politics) and your work?

Jorge Volpi: The answer is complicated. Perhaps because I studied law, an obsession of mine since I was a teenager, power has been one of the central themes of my books. How to practice and how to resist, whether in terms of public authority or the power that exists between individuals. In Mexico, for a long time, there was a very perverse relationship between the government and intellectuals, which has not completely ended, but it has been diluted in this democratic era. But this mutual fascination had many effects, which can still be felt. I think that in general terms, imagination must resist power, but from time to time to collaborate with it, but not submit.

OE: And it seems to me that you are interested in science as well. Your books In Search of Klingsor and Season of Ash concern scientific issues (among others). You have said that “the novel is a way of exploring the world.” Please, could you discuss the issues in these books (politics, history, science, et cetera) and how (and why) you explore them?

JV: For me the novel has that old Renaissance notion of approaching a total knowledge. Unlike other disciplines that require hyper-specialization, narrative fiction can incorporate speeches, themes and characters, and explore different worlds through imagination. That is why I want to incorporate history, politics, science, and music, for example, in my novels. And through specific characters, offer a look at these disciplines. Some are uncomfortable that there is, therefore, a broadly essayistic aspect to my books, but that’s just the poetics that interests me.

OE: Which writers have influenced your thinking?

JV: The primary one is, of course, Nietzsche, then Freud, and, thirdly, several writers—especially Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Mann, and later, Mexicans such as Paz or Fuentes also turned out to be definitive for me.

OE: Which Mexican (or Latin American) writers do you read now? Who are the most important today?

JV: I have often said that for my generation, Bolaño was fundamental, long before the global success he enjoys today. In the generation previous to mine, Fernando Vallejo, Juan Villoro, Martin Caparros, Ricardo Piglia, or Horacio Castellanos seem exceptional to me. From my own generation, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Rodrigo Strawberry, Santiago Gamboa, Ignacio Padilla, Edmundo Paz Soldan, Alberto Fuguet, Cristina Rivera Garza, or Wendy Guerra.

OE: What is your favorite book? Which of the characters from these books is your favorite?

JV: My favorite book is Doktor Faustus, by Thomas Mann, and my favorite character is Natasha in War and Peace.

OE: We speak often of the death of literature. What should we do to maintain the health of literature?

JV: I do not think we’re on the brink of death of literature. I think we are, rather, in an era in which the main danger to literature is its trivialization, its limited importance as an art form as opposed to simple entertainment. It has never been read so much as now, but this banality is the main threat facing readers.

OE: What are you currently writing?

JV: I’m currently writing a novel and an essay. The first with an American theme, of course, and the second, a Mexican one.

 

 

Check out Season of Ash at Amazon.

Return to table of contents here.