Exchange: Bellatín vs. Paz Soldán
Throughout October and November of 2012, Mario Bellatín and Edmundo Paz Soldán exchanged messages on Facebook. They talked, among other things, of literary respectability and their relationship with drugs. This is their correspondence.
Mario Bellatín
October 8th, 23:12
Just yesterday I was with Valeria Luiselli, who read a fragment from a text she published in Granta, part of her new novel…A daughter talks about the madness of her 70s parents…could this be the creation of a new subgenre? I wonder…now I’m really worried because I just cancelled my trip to the Montevideo Book Fair… I really wanted to go back to that city that I first got to know guided by Fogwill, but I had the misfortune to consent to allow a local editor publish some of my texts…you can’t imagine, Edmundo, the hassles, the shady maneuverings, that half-joking, half-serious language that we know so well…demands one after the other until I finally said enough…Right now I need to deal with my refusal, they’re asking me to reconsider, I don’t know what to do, I’m only getting involved in these problems so that I can pursue my rapturous wish to see that enigmatic city again...right this very minute, I should look into how I might solve this…And then how to explain my decision, since it was dozens of small issues that piled up and piled up until the pot boiled over…
Edmundo Paz Soldán
October 8th, 23:43
Oddly, I met Fogwill in Montevideo, shortly before his death. He told me that his lungs were in very bad shape and then he left the restaurant to have a smoke out on the sidewalk. That evening I went to his talk at the Eñe festival and I saw him perform a cover of Fogwill. He doled out compliments and insults to the audience, and some people left, scandalized. I thought, how exhausting to be one’s self…I think that we should create a new subgenre, about 70s parents who speak of the madness of their children who write novels about 70s parents. But better I don’t say anything, because I also wrote a book like that, some ten years ago. Now I’d like to write about my visions. About six months ago I went to the Bolivian Amazon and had a hallucinogenic experience from which I still haven’t fully recovered. When I’m just about to fall asleep and the lights are off, I begin to dream and then I discover that my eyes are still open. I feel like in that story about that axolotl, like the axolotl, I see beings on the other side of a barrier and they look at me as though asking me to free them. And I’m seized by anxiety, because I’m afraid that it might happen and they’ll come after me.
Mario Bellatín
October 15th, 08:14
No, Edmundo, not ayahuasca. You are going to be the main character in the new subgenre. Like sorts of autobiographies cloaked as tales that try to relate to our parents. But did you have 70s parents? I’m not talking about chronology but rather about lifestyle. Did they have an open marriage, were they constantly smoking marijuana? Were you, by chance, one of those kids who would get up in the morning and discover that, instead of two parents, they had four? I think it would be better to speak of each of us from our own perspectives. It seems to me that if we make the personal the central point, we’ll come across more surprises. To escape from the mold in a more interesting and profound way. I don’t know what you think. Let’s take as an example your experience with natural hallucinogens. It’s one thing for you to describe it—which you would do in a unique way—and another for one of your children to describe it—which would turn it into just another anecdote in the construction of a character. I just got back from Montevideo, and I can’t bear the nostalgia. It’s like a kind of nostalgia for something I never experienced, because I was only there once before and only for a few days. I wish some story existed that would link me to that city. To have a pretext for going back. I even have an award from a ceremony to which, to make matters worse, I arrived late. Everything was all in order for them to award it to me and I feel asleep. Strange, isn’t it? I was ready to go to the awards ceremony and I started going over some texts while I waited for it to be time to go. Suddenly the phone woke me up, and they informed me that the ceremony was all set to begin, the officials and the audience were waiting, and there I was, lying down, fast asleep. It was all put together just like a nightmare. As if I told you that last night I dreamed that they were going to give me an award and all of the attendees were bewildered to learn that the recipient was, at that very moment, asleep…
Edmundo Paz Soldán
October 22nd, 19:22
I can’t tell what sounds stranger, Mario, them giving you an award or your sleeping through them giving it to you. It’s a bit odd, this literary respectability, don’t you think? For many years I lived in Cochabamba on a street called Diómedes de Pereyra. Only at the end of those years did I learn that said Diómedes was a nineteenth-century writer. History has already forgotten him, but his street remains, and Mexico is surely filled with streets and squares named for forgotten writers. But there was a moment when it was judged that the good Diómedes needed a street named after him. Or perhaps he also had time to accept an award. I should read Diómedes, surely his books are in the Cornell library. And they should read you more carefully in Uruguay. Because if they’d done so back then, they never would have given you that award. And if they do so now, they might write to you to ask you to return it. My latest novel is about a serial killer and at the book launch in Cochabamba many of my mother’s friends bought it, all excited. And they made their book clubs read it. One day I spoke with my mother and she was furious with me. About how was it possible for me to have written such morbid things. Her friends who’d taken the book to their clubs, mortified. You must ask for forgiveness, said my mother, citing a review that had just come out in the papers, written by a critic annoyed by my descent into the morass. And I thought that someone had been living very deceived. Maybe everyone. And I asked myself how many people had come to that launch for the wrong reasons. For the respectability of literature. They’d bought my book for the wrong reasons. I admit that I was happy to see so many people there, but I’m not so much any more. Maybe I should have stayed asleep while they were presenting my novel.
Mario Bellatín
October 23rd, 19:18
Good God, I’ve so much to say that I’m speechless…I’ll start tonight…Now I must run, Lolo, run…How are you?
Edmundo Paz Soldán
October 23rd, 19:30
Great, finishing a new novel. It’s called Iris and it converses with science fiction. It’s a war novel, about the adventures of empires post-September 11th. A dystopia. It’s also about our relationship with drugs. If I can’t explain it better it’s because I’m still writing it. Though maybe it’s best not to explain it. And you? How did it go with the musical?
Mario Bellatin
Novermber 21st, 20:12
I think, my dear Edmundo, that our relationship with drugs will vary until the point that it ceases to exist. When we stop calling drugs drugs they’ll stop being present in the same way that they are today. I’ve noted that there’s nothing in the Ten Commandments about them. Maybe that’s why so many dealers carry on their business at home, in front of their families…That’s not the crime in any way…Besides, I find drugs boring despite being illegal, imagine if we took away that aura, I’m certain it would be the most effective way to stop people from taking them. What’s happening—and it’s infuriating—is that they don’t take you anywhere. They are not a constructive space. They always fall within their own dead-end, and I’ve already rid my life of anything that doesn’t serve to build something. Almost everything should tell something beyond what it’s telling, and drugs tend to be what they are. No more, no less. In fact the first sentence of the book I’m writing right now is that Berlin is the most interesting city in which to take LSD. I remember a certain moonlit night, how I watched the clouds passing by and how, through that spectacle, I went about narrating a biography for my fellow trippers. A biography of a character whose life sparkled when the moon was out, and who suffered extreme tragedies when it was blocked out by the mist. On another occasion we discovered how interesting a fish tank can look during an ecstatic trip that lasted for several hours in a row. Each of the fish had a specific name, and each of them played the starring role in a series of stories that only we were capable of constructing…Are you still in Bolivia? It’s dangerous to stay for a long time in such a country, because it comes with a series a mechanisms designed to make you believe that you’re from there, and you forget about the rest of the world…
Edmundo Paz Soldán
November 24th, 21:00
There’s a novel by Edward St. Aubyn in which the narrator says something very similar to what you’ve just said about drugs. That he went looking for epiphanies through acid and then discovered that acid didn’t look for any epiphanies beyond its own. I’m not paraphrasing, I’m making up the sentence right now, but that’s the idea, more or less. Despite everything, I think that our relationship with drugs is really complicated. And yes, in the long run, those trips can be boring and it may be that they don’t construct much, but they have served me by destroying certain things that were very entrenched for me. The reality principle, for example. Reason, which ended up in a pocket and goes around half scared and doesn’t want to come out. Sometimes it pokes its head out, but when evening falls and I see the trees in the garden, I feel that any minute those trees could split apart. I already left Bolivia but I’m going back this December. My friends say that I start practicing my Cochabamban accent on the airplane, and that once I’m there I’m just one more Cochabambino, with everything that that implies.
Other exchanges:
[Patricio Pron vs. Rafael Gumucio]
[Lina Meruane vs. Cristina Rivera Garza]
Translated by Jessica Powell
Mario Bellatín
October 8th, 23:12
Just yesterday I was with Valeria Luiselli, who read a fragment from a text she published in Granta, part of her new novel…A daughter talks about the madness of her 70s parents…could this be the creation of a new subgenre? I wonder…now I’m really worried because I just cancelled my trip to the Montevideo Book Fair… I really wanted to go back to that city that I first got to know guided by Fogwill, but I had the misfortune to consent to allow a local editor publish some of my texts…you can’t imagine, Edmundo, the hassles, the shady maneuverings, that half-joking, half-serious language that we know so well…demands one after the other until I finally said enough…Right now I need to deal with my refusal, they’re asking me to reconsider, I don’t know what to do, I’m only getting involved in these problems so that I can pursue my rapturous wish to see that enigmatic city again...right this very minute, I should look into how I might solve this…And then how to explain my decision, since it was dozens of small issues that piled up and piled up until the pot boiled over…
Edmundo Paz Soldán
October 8th, 23:43
Oddly, I met Fogwill in Montevideo, shortly before his death. He told me that his lungs were in very bad shape and then he left the restaurant to have a smoke out on the sidewalk. That evening I went to his talk at the Eñe festival and I saw him perform a cover of Fogwill. He doled out compliments and insults to the audience, and some people left, scandalized. I thought, how exhausting to be one’s self…I think that we should create a new subgenre, about 70s parents who speak of the madness of their children who write novels about 70s parents. But better I don’t say anything, because I also wrote a book like that, some ten years ago. Now I’d like to write about my visions. About six months ago I went to the Bolivian Amazon and had a hallucinogenic experience from which I still haven’t fully recovered. When I’m just about to fall asleep and the lights are off, I begin to dream and then I discover that my eyes are still open. I feel like in that story about that axolotl, like the axolotl, I see beings on the other side of a barrier and they look at me as though asking me to free them. And I’m seized by anxiety, because I’m afraid that it might happen and they’ll come after me.
Mario Bellatín
October 15th, 08:14
No, Edmundo, not ayahuasca. You are going to be the main character in the new subgenre. Like sorts of autobiographies cloaked as tales that try to relate to our parents. But did you have 70s parents? I’m not talking about chronology but rather about lifestyle. Did they have an open marriage, were they constantly smoking marijuana? Were you, by chance, one of those kids who would get up in the morning and discover that, instead of two parents, they had four? I think it would be better to speak of each of us from our own perspectives. It seems to me that if we make the personal the central point, we’ll come across more surprises. To escape from the mold in a more interesting and profound way. I don’t know what you think. Let’s take as an example your experience with natural hallucinogens. It’s one thing for you to describe it—which you would do in a unique way—and another for one of your children to describe it—which would turn it into just another anecdote in the construction of a character. I just got back from Montevideo, and I can’t bear the nostalgia. It’s like a kind of nostalgia for something I never experienced, because I was only there once before and only for a few days. I wish some story existed that would link me to that city. To have a pretext for going back. I even have an award from a ceremony to which, to make matters worse, I arrived late. Everything was all in order for them to award it to me and I feel asleep. Strange, isn’t it? I was ready to go to the awards ceremony and I started going over some texts while I waited for it to be time to go. Suddenly the phone woke me up, and they informed me that the ceremony was all set to begin, the officials and the audience were waiting, and there I was, lying down, fast asleep. It was all put together just like a nightmare. As if I told you that last night I dreamed that they were going to give me an award and all of the attendees were bewildered to learn that the recipient was, at that very moment, asleep…
Edmundo Paz Soldán
October 22nd, 19:22
I can’t tell what sounds stranger, Mario, them giving you an award or your sleeping through them giving it to you. It’s a bit odd, this literary respectability, don’t you think? For many years I lived in Cochabamba on a street called Diómedes de Pereyra. Only at the end of those years did I learn that said Diómedes was a nineteenth-century writer. History has already forgotten him, but his street remains, and Mexico is surely filled with streets and squares named for forgotten writers. But there was a moment when it was judged that the good Diómedes needed a street named after him. Or perhaps he also had time to accept an award. I should read Diómedes, surely his books are in the Cornell library. And they should read you more carefully in Uruguay. Because if they’d done so back then, they never would have given you that award. And if they do so now, they might write to you to ask you to return it. My latest novel is about a serial killer and at the book launch in Cochabamba many of my mother’s friends bought it, all excited. And they made their book clubs read it. One day I spoke with my mother and she was furious with me. About how was it possible for me to have written such morbid things. Her friends who’d taken the book to their clubs, mortified. You must ask for forgiveness, said my mother, citing a review that had just come out in the papers, written by a critic annoyed by my descent into the morass. And I thought that someone had been living very deceived. Maybe everyone. And I asked myself how many people had come to that launch for the wrong reasons. For the respectability of literature. They’d bought my book for the wrong reasons. I admit that I was happy to see so many people there, but I’m not so much any more. Maybe I should have stayed asleep while they were presenting my novel.
Mario Bellatín
October 23rd, 19:18
Good God, I’ve so much to say that I’m speechless…I’ll start tonight…Now I must run, Lolo, run…How are you?
Edmundo Paz Soldán
October 23rd, 19:30
Great, finishing a new novel. It’s called Iris and it converses with science fiction. It’s a war novel, about the adventures of empires post-September 11th. A dystopia. It’s also about our relationship with drugs. If I can’t explain it better it’s because I’m still writing it. Though maybe it’s best not to explain it. And you? How did it go with the musical?
Mario Bellatin
Novermber 21st, 20:12
I think, my dear Edmundo, that our relationship with drugs will vary until the point that it ceases to exist. When we stop calling drugs drugs they’ll stop being present in the same way that they are today. I’ve noted that there’s nothing in the Ten Commandments about them. Maybe that’s why so many dealers carry on their business at home, in front of their families…That’s not the crime in any way…Besides, I find drugs boring despite being illegal, imagine if we took away that aura, I’m certain it would be the most effective way to stop people from taking them. What’s happening—and it’s infuriating—is that they don’t take you anywhere. They are not a constructive space. They always fall within their own dead-end, and I’ve already rid my life of anything that doesn’t serve to build something. Almost everything should tell something beyond what it’s telling, and drugs tend to be what they are. No more, no less. In fact the first sentence of the book I’m writing right now is that Berlin is the most interesting city in which to take LSD. I remember a certain moonlit night, how I watched the clouds passing by and how, through that spectacle, I went about narrating a biography for my fellow trippers. A biography of a character whose life sparkled when the moon was out, and who suffered extreme tragedies when it was blocked out by the mist. On another occasion we discovered how interesting a fish tank can look during an ecstatic trip that lasted for several hours in a row. Each of the fish had a specific name, and each of them played the starring role in a series of stories that only we were capable of constructing…Are you still in Bolivia? It’s dangerous to stay for a long time in such a country, because it comes with a series a mechanisms designed to make you believe that you’re from there, and you forget about the rest of the world…
Edmundo Paz Soldán
November 24th, 21:00
There’s a novel by Edward St. Aubyn in which the narrator says something very similar to what you’ve just said about drugs. That he went looking for epiphanies through acid and then discovered that acid didn’t look for any epiphanies beyond its own. I’m not paraphrasing, I’m making up the sentence right now, but that’s the idea, more or less. Despite everything, I think that our relationship with drugs is really complicated. And yes, in the long run, those trips can be boring and it may be that they don’t construct much, but they have served me by destroying certain things that were very entrenched for me. The reality principle, for example. Reason, which ended up in a pocket and goes around half scared and doesn’t want to come out. Sometimes it pokes its head out, but when evening falls and I see the trees in the garden, I feel that any minute those trees could split apart. I already left Bolivia but I’m going back this December. My friends say that I start practicing my Cochabamban accent on the airplane, and that once I’m there I’m just one more Cochabambino, with everything that that implies.
Other exchanges:
[Patricio Pron vs. Rafael Gumucio]
[Lina Meruane vs. Cristina Rivera Garza]
