I have
followed the work on David Unger for nearly two decades. His new book is out in
early November. Called Sleeping with the Light I will review it at a later
date. Carlos Velez Aguilera beautifully illustrates the book. As a prelude to
publication, I interviewed David about his work and a bit about the new book.
1.Tell me how
you began to write. What drew you to writing?
There is no
simple answer to this. When we left Guatemala, I was four, and my parents
insisted we speak English, a totally new language to me when we arrived in an
Anglo culture that was completely foreign. I learned early to develop
counter-narratives to the realities all around me. When I read A.E. Houseman
and Dylan Thomas in high school, on my own, I realized I could use language as a
vehicle for expressing what I was feeling and visualizing. That is when I gave
up wanting to become an engineer. I dedicated 30 years to writing poetry and
translating before I published my first novel in 2002.
2 Would it be
fair to say that Garcia Marquez influenced your work? What do you make
of “ Magical Realism”? Do you believe Latin American authors are
still influenced by it?
I loved
reading No One Writes to the Colonel and One Hundred Years of Solitude, two of
the most important novels in the contemporary Latin American literary canon. I
met Gabo briefly on various occasions and even published a long essay about our
strange encounters. When I was in high school, I read almost every novel John
Steinbeck ever wrote and soon thereafter, read many Graham Greene and Ian
Fleming novels, oddly enough. I loved the Magical Realist moments in Gabo’s
work, but I was not so enamoured by the efforts of notable followers like
Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie and even Toni Morrison. There followed many
writers who thought that the stranger the imagery, the more imaginative the
writing. I guess I prefer novels with strong characters that have the
historical grounding to those novels of literary fancy, flight or invention.
3.Marquez
would mostly consult with historians when writing do you see this as a good or
bad thing? Do you use historians or their work when planning a new
project?
Most of my
novels are set in a recognizable social, political and historical context: Life
in the Damn Tropics depicts a middle-class Jewish family in Guatemala of the
80s during the darkest period of the armed conflict; The Price of Escape takes
place in Puerto Barrios (an awful port city) in the late 30s and confronts the
monstrosity of the United Fruit Company and World War II; The Mastermind is my
riff on Guatemala City in 2009 when lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg accused President
Colum, in a pre-recorded tape, of killing him when, in fact, he orchestrated
his own death. I read a lot of history to establish the right context for the
stories I tell, but in the end, I am more interested in how my characters
mostly muddle their way through challenging times. I am mostly interested in
transformation, shitty characters being redeemed.
4 There
appears to be a good crop of new writers from Latin America, including some new
Guatemalan writers like Eduardo Halfon. I liked his book Mourning which is an
attempt by a new generation of young writers to deal with or understand
Guatemala’s bloody history. What do you make of them?
You have
picked a talented writer in Halfon. His short stories and short novels are
intertwined with his own biography and thus his childhood in Guatemala and his
Jewish ancestry are constant themes. There are other writers such as Denise
Phe-Funchal and Javier Mosquera Saravia, both of whom I have translated, who
explore Guatemalan realities in a highly personal, but no less authoritative
point of view. And then there are masters like Rodrigo Rey Rosa and Augusto
Monterroso who have achieved international acclaim. Most writers, excepting
Mosquera and Phe-Finchal, have written their best work outside of Guatemala,
which is not a very hospitable country. The daily murders and corruption are
huge obstacles for writers seeking tranquillity and distance to write
effectively.
5 Tell me a
little about your new book. Where did you get the idea from? Tell me a little
about the writing process, i.e. how do you work as an author.
Sleeping With
the Light On is based on a short story entitled “La Casita,” that appeared in
my 2009 book Ni chicha, ni limonada (F y G Editores). I took this sweet
autobiographical tale and enlarged it into a chapter book. The major themes of
the book deal with family conflicts, war and loss, but since it is for children
6-9, these themes are introduced and dealt with gently. As to your second
question: I am not a career writer, so I only write when I have something to
say—I published my first novel at age 52. When an idea or a character gets a
hold of me that’s when I begin to write. It hasn’t happened in five years because
I have nothing to say. This awful covid pandemic, I would say, has almost
rendered me mute.
6 Could you
tell me any future writing projects? If this is a bit hush-hush ignore this
question.
Nothing
hush-hush about my new project. I am doing a retranslation of Guatemala
Nobelist Miguel Angel Asturias novel El señor presidente. It was written almost
one hundred years ago, over a ten-year period when MAA was living in Europe,
and is a powerful portrait of a corrupt dictator and how he tramples lives to
maintain his power. It gave rise to other dictator novel’s including Garcia
Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch; Roa Bastos’s I, The Supreme and Vargas
Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat. It first appeared in 1965 translated by Francis
Partridge, full of Anglicism’s and lacking the texture of Guatemala and
Guatemalan life and history. Penguin Classics will be publishing my
translation, with a preface by Mario Vargas Llosa, in 2022. This translation (I
have translated 16 books), I hope, will be the apex of my literary life—I am
grateful to be bringing this exceptional novel to new audiences and hopefully,
it will spurn a reassessment of the work of Guatemala’s only Nobel Prize in
Literature.
David Unger
was born in Guatemala City in 1950 and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is
the author of The Price of Escape (Akashic Books, 2011), Para mi, eres divina
(Random House Mondadori, Mexico, 2011), Ni chicha, ni limonada (F & G
Editores, Guatemala, 2009; Recorded Books, 2010) and Life in the Damn Tropics
(Wisconsin University Press, Plaza y Janes (Mexico, 2004), Locus Press (Taiwan,
2007). He has translated sixteen books into English, including works by Nicanor
Parra, Silvia Molina, Elena Garro, Barbara Jacobs, Mario Benedetti and
Rigoberta Menchu. He is considered one of Guatemala's major living writers even
though he writes exclusively in English.
