BOOK REVIEW : Probing the Soul of Latin America

Interviews With Latin American Writers by Marie-Lise Gazarian Gautier (The Dalkey Archive Press: $19.95; 370 pp.

As interview subjects, Latin American writers have appeared in the print and electronic media since the literary “boom” of the ‘60s.

Heirs to an intellectual tradition that associates the act of writing with political and social responsibility, poets and novelists such as Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and Ariel Dorfman are also recognized as journalists and commentators. Their voices and views, as well as those of other Latin American writers, have never been limited to their fictional and poetic work.

Instead, because of their participation in politics, public opinion and even films, they form part of a larger narrative--the recording and documentation of our historical time and place.

Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa is a candidate for president of Peru, poet Ernesto Cardenal is a cabinet member of the Sandinista government of Nicaragua; novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a founder of a Latin American film institute in Havana. Ripe interview material indeed, for the intrigues and events experienced by these writers in the world beyond the mythical Ivory Tower at times surpass their imagined fictions.

While only two of the above-mentioned writers are interviewed in this new collection (Fuentes and Vargas Llosa), that sense of commitment toward social responsibility is not only stated, but clarified within the personal circumstances of each writer.

Among the 15 interviews--which include Isabel Allende, Guillermo Cabrera Infante Jose Donoso, Rosario Ferre, Isaac Goldenberg, Juan Carlos Onetti, Nicanor Parra, Elena Poniatowska, Ernesto Sabato, Luis Rafael Sanchez, Severo Sarduy, Luisa Valenzuela, as well as those mentioned above--that commitment goes far beyond a creative or intellectual game. Devoid of patriotic or rhetorical adornment, it becomes instead a deadly objective particularly well expressed by Allende and Cabrera Infante, who were forced to leave their respective countries because of reprisal, repression and censorship.

While this issue is probably the most important in all, Marie-Lise Gazarian Gautier, a professor of Spanish and Latin American literature, also includes topics as far-ranging as the role of the woman writer in a male-dominant society, the relationships perceived by each author between Anglo America (the United States) and Latin America, the effect of exile and self-exile on writing and the question of Latin American identity on the eve of the 400th commemoration of Columbus’ voyage. Each interview closes with a call for self-definition: “Who are you?”

Of these, however, the issue of exile beyond the points already raised and its diverse implications on the act of writing are particularly intriguing. How does distance from the source affect the world of the work? How does a writer continue to find a linguistic and semantic link between the space where he or she is today and the place of origin? What meaning does that have in terms of the constant reworking of a language and of its process? How is the reading of the work affected? Is the work circulated in the homeland?

Yet the responses of the writers chosen for this collection only partially answer these questions or others that arise during the reading of this book. The problem lies in the structure of the work itself, in the tone that the interviewer conveys, and, to a lesser degree, in the omission of writers of the stature of Paz and Garcia Marquez.

In her introduction, Gazarian Gautier refers to the interview as a “revealing and authentic approach to literature” in that it “allows the reader to penetrate the creative mind and find out first-hand . . . the components of the craft of writing and the workings of the author.”

To a degree, that is accomplished. This book is an excellent introduction to the personalities and personae behind the works and the device of using the same or similar questions for each writer permits the reader to compare and contrast the writers’ responses.

On the other hand, this format also cuts off the flow of thought emanating from the writer and instead focuses the interview on the prepared question. By attempting to extract information or commentary that Gazarian Gautier thinks important, she loses the essence of continuity that allows for dialogue. What we have before us finally is a question-and-answer format. What is absent is the interplay between voice and silence based on listening and communication.

In her interview with Elena Poniatowska, Gazarian Gautier recalls that Poniatowska, an insightful interviewer in her own right, has been called an “inquisitor, a confessor, a psychiatrist, a torturer and an adviser to the lovelorn, all at the same time.” In response, Poniatowska avoids the question, referring instead to the friendships that she had developed through the course of conducting her interviews.

It is a point worth noting, for the great interview has always forged a link between two voices: We need only recall those of Luigi Barzini, Oriana Falacci and Poniatowska. And that is what is lacking here, the intimacy and confidence born of a mutual conversation, the ebb and flow of ideas between two minds, the essence, after all, of dialogue and dialectic.