The author of eight novels, including the Herralde Prize–winning I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me, translated by Daniel Hahn, was born in Guadalajara in 1973 and has lived in Barcelona for the past two decades. He returns to his native city as part of the Catalan capital’s delegation at this year’s Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL).
Do you feel like a representative of Barcelona as you travel to FIL this year?
I’ve lived in Barcelona for 20 years, which is longer than I lived in Guadalajara. I spent my childhood and adolescence in Mexico, so my sentimental education is Mexican, but now there is a process of maturity, the onset of aging if you like, taking place in Barcelona.
There is recognition here of my life and work, and not just because some of my books are set here—I run a literary workshop here through which around 150 people have passed, the majority of them Latin Americans, and I give classes in the university, and I have a lot of writer friends here. So my public life as a writer has always been in Barcelona.
Has Barcelona inspired your writing and contributed to your success?
It’s been a combination. Barcelona is a city of routine—it’s very stable—and a routine facilitates the writing of a novel. But that can be interrupted, as there are so many cultural offerings here—it’s a big, cosmopolitan city. So you can stay in and write, but also go out and live.
Barcelona is a city through which many people pass from all over the world, including other Latin American authors. Many of them come here to present their books, for example, and I’m able to hang out with them, and it’s very stimulating to always have interesting people here.
In Mexico, there’s a problem of book distribution, and you develop as a reader despite that. You may go out and look for a book and not find it, but you buy something else, and you develop as a reader through what falls into your hands. But in Barcelona, my whims as a reader were satisfied for the first time, as I could find everything. Barcelona’s many libraries and bookstores allow you to read whatever you want, which is paradise for a writer.
The need to write about Barcelona emerged because I was writing about Mexico but it felt far away, both geographically and in time, and my way of speaking and writing was changing. I think a writer needs to write in the present, and the way to solve that conflict was to bring my stories to my day-to-day reality.
I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me was the first novel I wrote that is set in Barcelona, and about being out of place, of searching
for a place to look at and narrate the world. It was also part of a personal crisis, to not just be a Mexican writer writing about Mexico.
Your writing is characterized by humor. Has that been fed by having moved away from Mexico?
It also has to do with not taking yourself seriously, and in particular the prestige that the activity of writing supposedly has. Living in another country, with another language, other cultures, for me felt very productive, to be away from Mexico. Now I’m in another era, and I’m writing about Mexico again.
I feel like I’ve found a way of not feeling far away, without that conflict of illegitimacy, of writing about something far away and from which I was detached. There is also a long history of Mexican literature written from outside Mexico—Mariano Azuela, Martín Luis Guzmán, Carlos Fuentes, Sergio Pitol—and writing about Mexico from abroad interests me.
When I go back to Guadalajara, I offer workshops and courses, and I get to know young, aspiring writers, and how the new generations are viewing and expressing reality with new vocabulary, a new syntax. They’re very enthused, and that’s very important for me—it’s a privilege to meet all those young people bubbling with ideas. It’s very moving to feel a part of that.
And knowing Guadalajara, I don’t deceive myself about the city, with all its problems and defects, but for 10 days during the FIL Guadalajara allows itself the fantasy to feel like a literary city, and that is no joke. It’s incredible.
