Published by Periférica (Cáceres, Spain). 272 pages.
The process by which some books make it into English and others don’t has always struck me as a bit of a mystery. I’ve read a lot of great novels in Spanish over the last year and I’m reluctant to choose favourites but if you allowed me to choose one text that I think really ought to be translated into English, then La desaparición del paisaje by Maximiliano Barrientos would be my selection.
I spoke to Maximiliano about his work, and also about translation and writing in general. The interview is followed by a synopsis of the novel and a brief sample translation. A longer sample is available on request.
TG: La desaparición del paisaje is one of those books that seems fairly straightforward: the story of a 32-year-old man who returns to Bolivia after 12 years in the United States. But whenever I try to describe it to friends and colleagues, I get tongue-tied. I realize that – although it’s fairly short (270 pages) and doesn’t have a particularly complicated plot – it touches on a lot of different issues. Could you sum it up in a few words?
MB: Perhaps the clearest theme is return: what it means to go back to the site where one’s formative experiences occurred, the place from which the character has escaped – and this escape forms the starting point for the novel, even though it is not actually recounted. Returning is always problematic, because the person who has left comes back to a physical location but cannot return to the mental and emotional space where these events took place. You can return to a place but you can’t return to the past (and it is this past that haunts the entire novel). So the past is another of my novel’s key themes. The third major theme, in my view, is the family and, in particular, the relationship between fathers and sons, and the struggle that sons embark upon when they are threatened by their fathers’ demons. This struggle is one of the sites where masculinity is constructed: or rather, a particular type of masculinity, one that processes loss through a prism of rage and violence.
TG: One of the things I love when I sit down to translate a text – which, in this case, is just a short sample so far – is that I am forced to read much more closely. I have to admit that I’m not a particularly attentive reader by nature (to be blunt, I’m lazy!), but when I translate I suddenly notice everything: the punctuation, the ambiguity, little silences, the rhythm of the dialogues. It’s as if I’d been magically transformed into some kind of super-reader. When I translated the first 15 pages of La desaparición del paisaje, I realized that your style – which at first impression might strike the reader as quite plain – is actually full of idiosyncrasies. Can you tell me about your style, what characterizes it?
MB: You’re right. The way that translating a text forces you to become a more attentive reader is interesting. I’ve experienced this even as an amateur, translating short stories by authors such as Peter Orner, Aimee Bender, Mary Gaitskill and Rick Bass for a series of creative writing workshops that I’ve been running for a number of years. I wanted to discuss some structural aspects of several short stories, but they hadn’t been translated into Spanish, so I gave participants the original text along with my own translation.
I don’t think style is something you choose. I’d agree with the great Flannery O’Connor who described it as a gift, something innate, something you eventually discover after countless failures, after countless readings in which you intuit the existence of places that you don’t wish to explore as a narrator. To be honest, it’s more helpful to identify what it is you loathe about some writers than to identify things that you love. A literary education is a battlefield, one where you have to choose sides, where there’s no such thing as neutrality.
Style is something you discover, but if you never learn your craft then your style remains baggy and shapeless. You strengthen it as you practise. I guess you can think of it as an apprenticeship that writers need to serve. I’m interested in how language can produce the illusion of experience, so that the reader feels they have actually lived it, and to achieve this the language has to become invisible, to convert itself into a cadence, a rhythm, a breath which is at the service of certain key images. For me, the image is what comes first, what’s most important: language seeks to translate it.
TG: As far as I know, before I read La desaparición del paisaje I’d only ever read one Bolivian novel in my life: Los afectos, by Rodrigo Hasbún (translated into English with the title Affections, by Sophie Hughes, and published by Pushkin Press). Would you place yourself within a Bolivian literary tradition or within something wider: Latin American literature, for example, or simply literature written in Spanish? Are there any individual writers who’ve influenced you heavily as an author?
MB: I don’t think we can really talk of a Bolivian tradition – or even a Latin American one, in fact, because that’s a label which is applied to writers who really have nothing in common, whose style and poetics are very different, diametrically opposed even. I owe a debt to certain writers, whether they are Bolivian, Latin American, North American or European. If I had to identify with a particular tradition, it would be with poets such as Jaime Saenz, Viel Temperley and Zbigniew Herbert. Novelists like William Faulkner, J.G. Ballard, Vladimir Sorokin, Cormac McCarthy and Juan José Saer. Short story writers such as Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson and Mariana Enríquez.
You can’t map a strictly literary tradition geographically; instead, such traditions are based on affinities around imagery and sensibilities, so we’re not talking about solid structures but ones that are in constant flux. Because a writer doesn’t belong to a single lineage: over time, the line breaks.
And if we look at it in geographical terms, then tradition really operates more like a lobby. If a Mexican writer or an Argentine writer publishes a novel, it will be a thousand times easier for them than it would be for an Ecuadorian or a Bolivian writer, because of the production system and the infrastructure. Does a novel written by a Paraguayan arouse the same expectations as one written by a Colombian? It would be ridiculous to think that was the case. The whole system is constructed to favour strong traditions.
Synopsis
La desaparición del paisaje (The Disappearance of the Landscape) is set in the city of Santa Cruz, and is narrated by Vitor Flanagan, recently returned to Bolivia at the age of 32, having left his homeland when he was 20. Vitor’s mother died when he was still a child, and as he grew older Vitor gradually realized that leaving was the only way to avoid turning into his father, a violent alcoholic who was overwhelmed by his wife’s death.
However, by the time Vitor returns to Bolivia, after 12 erratic years in the United States, he has lost contact with everyone who loved him: María, his father’s widow, a kind of substitute mother, and a silent witness to the family’s gradual disintegration; Fabia, Vitor’s sister, who harbours a profound resentment towards her brother for disappearing from her life, for having forgotten about the rest of them; Laura, his former girlfriend, who is married to another man; and Alberto, his best friend at school.
Upon returning to Bolivia, Vitor seeks to undo the effects of the past: taking justice into his own hands and exacting vengeance on a rapist whose attack he failed to prevent many years earlier; reviving an old affair only to be abandoned, in turn, by his former lover; and trying to care for the ageing alcoholic uncle who was in love with Vitor’s mother. But the past can never simply be forgotten or undone, emotions cannot simply be overcome, wounds may heal but the scars remain.
Author data
Maximiliano Barrientos was born in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, in 1979. His short story collection, Diario (2009), received the Santa Cruz National Literature Prize. His first two books – Los daños and Hoteles – were subsequently edited, revised and transformed into the short story collection Fotos tuyas cuando empiezas a envejecer and the novel Hoteles. Both titles were published by Periférica in 2011.
In 2015 he published La desaparición del paisaje, also with Periférica, as well as the collection of short stories titled Una casa en llamas, published by El Cuervo in Bolivia and by Eterna Cadencia in the rest of Latin America and in Spain. His most recent novel is En el cuerpo una voz, a dystopic fable set in a post-civil war Bolivia that has collapsed into chaos and violence. He lives in Santa Cruz. Maximiliano Barrientos is represented by Indent Literary Agency.
Sample translation
I hugged María and looked at the armchairs and I realized that it was in one of these that she had found my father dead one morning in 2003.
Your room’s just the same, take your things through and then come and we’ll have something to eat, she said.
I don’t want you to tell Fabia I’m back.
Leave your things and come through here, I’ll cook you up some jerky with rice, you can’t have had majao for years.
I’ll go and see my sister, I said, just not right now.
There’s no hurry, get yourself settled in and then we’ll have some lunch. You must be starving.
I took my bags and went through to the room that had been mine as a kid. The house was in good condition, there were no damp stains on the walls, no peeling paint falling off at the slightest touch, no termites in the timber. Lying on the single bed I listened to María coughing and moving things about, getting the plates out and cooking, doing what she always did, as if this day was no different from any other. I closed my eyes and wished for sleep to come, to blot out everything for a few hours.
The first afternoon following my return to Santa Cruz, when María was out doing the weekly shopping, I let myself into her room and looked through my father’s things. She had kept his clothes on the wardrobe shelves, she hadn’t given them away. There were also bottles with dregs of whisky in his old hiding places. I opened them and sniffed. They smelled of my father. He died of a heart attack. María called me in Chicago to give me the news, I hadn’t spoken to him for two years because of a stupid argument. She said she’d found him dead one morning in the living room. She said my father looked like he was asleep but when she saw him she knew he was dead. I was twenty-one and I’d arrived in the Windy City fifteen months earlier. I didn’t go to the funeral. Instead, I stayed in the States and didn’t talk about his death to anyone. I didn’t speak to María again until a week before I returned, almost ten years after I’d heard the news of my father’s demise.
I lay on the bed and stayed there for a few hours until María found me asleep. She was carrying bags from the supermarket. She said my name. I stood up and apologized.
It doesn’t matter, she said.
I saw his clothes, you didn’t give them away.
I don’t have to, it doesn’t bother me.
And the bottles.
It doesn’t matter, she repeated.
Did he carry on drinking so much, right to the end?
He drank but he didn’t fight anymore. He was old.
When I didn’t reply she said:
Why don’t you try on the clothes? I’m sure they’ll fit, you’re the same size.
His clothes and his bottles were still there. The shoes he wore, his wallets, his cigarette lighters, his old razor. Things that could be piled up, collected, put away in a chest. The same thing happened when my mother died in 1989, when I was nine and Fabia was six.
Please contact me if you would like to see an extended sample of this translation.
If you’re interested in reading about how I approached the challenge of trying to reflect Barrientos’ distinctive style in my English translation, please take a look at my blogpost – This is not a beauty contest: some thoughts on the challenge of translating style.