Fiction as Exception

I have always mistrusted writers who talk about their own works. Thus, I would like to begin with a warning: I ask you to mistrust me, because I will be talking to you about my own books. It is true that I will use them as an excuse to introduce the subjects that, as a writer today, most concern me. But I also fear the backlash of this approach. So the warning is basically intended to save my books from me, from what I will be saying to you. This lecture has more to do with my assessment of my own books than with the books themselves. And since my own self-assessment cannot help but be biased, I am afraid it may cause more harm than good to the books themselves, making them appear to be the offspring of a conscious project, previously conceived, which they are not. So I would ask you to be kind enough to read them - if you ever had this in mind - even after listening to me.

You should be asking by now why I insist on talking about my books as excuses for the subjects that I am most concerned with as a writer since it can only cause them harm. The answer is simple: it began as an obsession that started when I realized a few years ago how little the general reader was attracted to literary fiction - and mostly to the kind of fiction I'm interested in. And, as with any obsession, from then on, I could not stop thinking about it. I am a little embarrassed to confess that it was only a few years ago that I realized, as if I had been blind all along, that the general reader was not really interested in the kind of fiction which some now call "experimental" in order to disavow it, but which has always interested me deeply. Just to avoid any major misunderstanding, let me make clear that I would include in this category very diverse writers, some of which have seldom been considered experimental, such as Melville, Kafka, Bulgakov, Borges, Beckett, Thomas Bernhard and the Brazilian Guimarães Rosa. At that time (it was ten years ago), and probably because of my naiveté, I was surprised to finally find out that the major publishers of the world survive basically on non-fiction books and the best-selling so called "non-serious fiction" - this despite the fact that what gives them their literary prestige is still what we call "serious fiction." I was surprised to find out that the international book market would survive mainly on non-fiction. If you had been paying attention to any book review from a major American newspaper ten years ago, you would have seen that the non-fiction section outstripped the fiction one by a great deal. This was no different elsewhere, and I presume it is still the case. Most important to me was to find out that even the literary reader was driven mostly to fiction that was either based on true stories or which, as an immediate effect of multiculturalism, would be perceived as the direct expression (or representation) of the author's racial, social or gender background or reality.

When I began to think more systematically about this issue, I had just finished what I, retrospectively, ended up seeing as a trilogy. They were short novels that abided by the same kind of narrative structure. They were novels divided in two parts, the second one contradicting or denying the first. As in a mirrored structure, one part was the inversion of the other. It may sound very cerebral and contrived, but in fact they were melodramas in the closet. They were not based on true stories, neither were they the direct expression of the author's racial, social or gender background - even if it is impossible not to be so, with any book, at least indirectly. One way or the other, they were the books I was interested not only in writing but also in reading myself. These were the books that, at that time, would make me happy...