Fantastic Metropolis

Gabriel Mesa: Writers in the English-speaking world complain that being labeled fantasy or science fiction writers makes it difficult for them to be taken seriously whether by critics or by regular readers. Do you think the same thing happens in Spanish-speaking countries or is there less discrimination of this sort? I remember growing up in South America and it being forbidden in my family that I read science fiction books, which of course only made them more attractive!

Angélica Gorodischer: Of course! Critics and academics are very prejudiced and closed minded. When a friend would see me with an SF book they would put on a face of disgust and ask, “You read that trash?” Those people don’t know what they’re missing. A work is good or bad or mediocre, and that’s all. Neither the theme of the work nor the genre in which it’s written tell you anything. There are a lot of horrible SF stories and novels, those where the little green men with antennas appear and so, which are in fact trash. And then there are marvels like Ursula Le Guin, Philip K. Dick and others.

Gabriel Mesa: If after Kalpa you had to choose another of your novels to be translated into English, which would it be?

Angélica Gorodischer: Prodigios, always Prodigios which I believe is the best thing I have ever written in my life. Of course no one would read it because it is a difficult text. In which case it would be Menta (Mint) or Como Triunfar en la Vida.

Gabriel Mesa: One of your books that I most like is precisely Como Triunfar en la Vida, a collection of crime stories that aren’t necessarily mysteries. They are contes cruels to some extent, and remind me of the stories of the American writer Patricia Highsmith. How did you come to write this collection?

Angélica Gorodischer: Thanks for the comparison, I hope to some day have the quality and force of a writer like Highsmith! I wrote this book at the request of Jorge Lafforgue, Argentine critic, editor and writer from Buenos Aires. He called me on the phone and said, “I am preparing an anthology of crime stories and I know that you have some. Could you send me one?” I told him, “Yes, of course, give me a couple of days to look for one to send you that I like.” It was all a lie. I had some crime stories but they were old and I didn’t like them. I started to write one and it didn’t really satisfy me. So I wrote another one I did like. It was “El Beguén” (“beguén” means capricious love in Lunfardo, the slang of Buenos Aires). I sent it to him and he liked it too and included it in the anthology. But then I discovered that it had been a long time since I had written anything in the genre, a long time since I had killed, strangled, poisoned, knifed or swindled anybody or stolen anything or investigated a crime. And that’s when I started to write those stories, until I’d finished the book.

Gabriel Mesa: Speaking of Prodigios, I think that it is a beautiful book but one that stylistically is very different from your other novels, there is a certain density of word and description that surprised me. Was this change intentional or was it a natural evolution within your work?

Angélica Gorodischer: It was intentional. A colleague and I were discussing the job of writing. I said that when you dominate it you can write against the grain, even to the extent of becoming a traitor to your own temperament, style, themes, whatever. She said that no, that that wasn’t possible, that one always wrote the same in the same way even if one’s later books appeared to be different. She had a little bit of truth on her side, but I had all of it on mine. And from a fortuitous, trivial detail that happened to me on the street I decided to write a book that would go contrary to my natural inclinations, style, and so on. That book was Prodigios, and like I said before, I think it is the best thing I’ve written in my life.