Speaker 1: This is Latino USA, the Radio Journal of News and
Speaker 1: Culture's Latino USC latins Latino USA.
Speaker 2: I'm Maria Nojosa. We bring you stories that are underreported
Speaker 2: but that mattered to you, overlooked by the wrestler media,
Speaker 2: and while the country is struggling to deal with these.
Speaker 1: We listen to the stories of Black and Latino Studios United,
Speaker 1: Latino Front, a cultural renaissance organizing at the forefront of
Speaker 1: the movement.
Speaker 2: I'm Maria Inojosa, nose Bayan.
Speaker 3: Writer is always a kind of foreigner, wherever he's moving
Speaker 3: and wherever he's writing about.
Speaker 1: From Fudura Media and PRX, It's Latino USA. I'm Maria
Speaker 1: nor Hoosa Today the strangeness of everyday life in the
Speaker 1: writings of Argentinian author Samantha Schweblin. Writer Samantha Schweblin was
Speaker 1: born in Argentina in nineteen seventy eight, a couple of
Speaker 1: years after the start of a violent dictatorship in her country.
Speaker 3: I was a baby when the military coup was happening.
Speaker 3: Of course I couldn't understand what was going on, but
Speaker 3: I have a very vivid memory of denture darkness.
Speaker 1: More than forty years have passed, but some things have
Speaker 1: stayed with Samantha.
Speaker 3: I remember once being in the car with my dad
Speaker 3: and my mom and just the look of a woman
Speaker 3: who was at the back of another car. Something very
Speaker 3: weird was happening with this woman. There were two men driving,
Speaker 3: she was alone at the back. She was crying.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's like.
Speaker 3: I was so I don't know, maybe five or six
Speaker 3: years old, and I still remember that phase.
Speaker 1: In her writing, Samantha considers the sense of eeriness that
Speaker 1: I come eat her childhood. Her work has been compared
Speaker 1: to the surrealistic movies of David Lynch or to the
Speaker 1: absurd tales of Franz Kafka. The unexplainable events in her
Speaker 1: stories don't quite cross into the area of fantasy or horror. Instead,
Speaker 1: they reveal the uncanny of the every day. Samantha's books
Speaker 1: have been translated into twenty five different languages, and the
Speaker 1: English translation of her short story collection A Mouthful of Birds,
Speaker 1: as well as her novel Fever Dream, were both long
Speaker 1: listed for the International Booker Prize. In this episode, first
Speaker 1: Samantha shares how she started writing, and later she talks
Speaker 1: about where her fascination came from. To focus on those
Speaker 1: blurry lines, the ones between what we believe is normal
Speaker 1: and what we find strange. Here's samanta' Shuvlin in her
Speaker 1: own words.
Speaker 4: I'm Samantha Schevlin.
Speaker 3: I'm a short story mostly a short story writer. I
Speaker 3: also write the novels. I grow up in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Speaker 3: In the last ten years I have been living in Berlin.
Speaker 3: I'm particularly interested in what we call literatua alextrania, mieno,
Speaker 3: or like the uncanni. I wouldn't say in literature, I
Speaker 3: would say in life, what is jancannie? What is the
Speaker 3: strange things that.
Speaker 4: We have in life?
Speaker 3: When people talk about my work, they usually say, oh,
Speaker 3: these stories are so full of monsters, But where are
Speaker 3: the monsters? Because this is not a horror story. It's
Speaker 3: just the feeling of this is a horror story. There's
Speaker 3: no monsters, but they are there. Where are these monsters?
Speaker 3: Are they in the reader's mind or where are they?
Speaker 3: And I I think something very deep happened in that
Speaker 3: childhood that was those were the monsters. I grew up
Speaker 3: in the suburbs. We belonged to a middle class family
Speaker 3: and I was living with my parents. They have been
Speaker 3: a great influence for me because they were artists, both
Speaker 3: of them, and my grandfather in particular from my mom's side.
Speaker 3: He was a painter, but not only that, he was
Speaker 3: a teacher of a whole generation of artists in all
Speaker 3: Latin America, so people from abroad came to study with
Speaker 3: my grandfather. He has a huge attillier in the middle
Speaker 3: of the city in Buenos Aires.
Speaker 4: In San Telmo.
Speaker 3: He was not so close to the family by then,
Speaker 3: but he called my mom and said, okay, I want
Speaker 3: to meet Samantha every week, and.
Speaker 4: My mom said, okay, let's do this.
Speaker 3: So I met him for the first time when I
Speaker 3: was I don't remember, like five or six years old,
Speaker 3: and he told me when we were alone, okay, we
Speaker 3: are going to tell to you a mom, that this
Speaker 3: is about going to the carousel, it in ice cream,
Speaker 3: and all those things that kids are supposed to do,
Speaker 3: but this is going to be the training of the artist.
Speaker 4: I was six years old. An artist.
Speaker 3: We need to train you for this because life is
Speaker 3: going to be very hard.
Speaker 4: For example, he.
Speaker 3: Taught me to travel without paying the tickets of the
Speaker 3: train or the bus, because he said that an artist
Speaker 3: should be capable to live without westing money. He taught
Speaker 3: me how to steal books from bookshops. Of course, we
Speaker 3: also went to the museums, went to the theater, so
Speaker 3: everything was exciting and amazing and unbelievable. And I started
Speaker 3: to write with him because all these things that we
Speaker 3: were doing, the main goal was to record all the
Speaker 3: activities in a diary. So we have to write down
Speaker 3: what had happened during the day.
Speaker 4: But there were some rules.
Speaker 3: He said that doesn't have any sense to say I
Speaker 3: had a good day or I'm very happy doing this,
Speaker 3: or that things should be accurate enough and well described
Speaker 3: enough to be capable to move some feelings from the
Speaker 3: one who is writing to the one.
Speaker 4: Who is reading.
Speaker 3: So this amazing exercise was for me the beginning of
Speaker 3: the writing. I remember I went to a particular workshop
Speaker 3: where they were reading Raymond Garvet and Flanneling O'Connor, all
Speaker 3: this North American traditions. By then I had read a
Speaker 3: Kafka or for example who sat the more European author,
Speaker 3: But mostly my author were the author of the boom,
Speaker 3: you know, like Abria Garcia, Marges Bargahosa, because these were
Speaker 3: the books that my family had in the bookshelf. And
Speaker 3: I remember when I discovered for the first time these
Speaker 3: authors and North American authors. It was so shocking for me.
Speaker 3: I loved them, and I wouldn't say that it was
Speaker 3: the stories that really trapped me. In fact, I remember
Speaker 3: the first time that I read the Raymond Gary was like.
Speaker 4: What is this about?
Speaker 3: Just drunk people smoking, getting divorced. Nothing is happening here.
Speaker 4: I was a little bit like, where is this.
Speaker 3: It took me time to understand how his mind is
Speaker 3: working and how their machineries are working.
Speaker 4: But what I love is the way they were doing it.
Speaker 3: I think I learned to write reading them.
Speaker 4: Very careful.
Speaker 3: People who don't read usually short stories. They have this
Speaker 3: idea about short stories like being a different kind of genre.
Speaker 3: I don't understand that.
Speaker 4: For me.
Speaker 3: The only difference in my mind between a short story
Speaker 3: and a novel is that one story last ten twenty
Speaker 3: pages and the other two hundred. The kind of tools
Speaker 3: that you used to write are the same, The relationship
Speaker 3: that you build with the reader are the same. The
Speaker 3: kind of deepness that you can go through with some
Speaker 3: moments in life of the characters themselves are the same.
Speaker 3: I mean, whenever I have an idea, my first instinct
Speaker 3: is go to the short story length and then sometimes
Speaker 3: doesn't work.
Speaker 4: It's a kind of failure.
Speaker 3: I can't manage to be super effective and strong enough
Speaker 3: to tell the story in twenty pages. Then I need
Speaker 3: two hundred more, and I have a novel. When I
Speaker 3: started to grow up, we started by little to do
Speaker 3: different trips with my grandfather, first and the outside of
Speaker 3: Buenos Aires. Then we traveled to La Plata. Then we
Speaker 3: traveled to other provinces in Buenos Aires. When I was sixteen,
Speaker 3: we came to New York. It was an amazing trip.
Speaker 3: You can imagine. With him, he was always inventing things,
Speaker 3: inventing stories that were not true about things. I remember
Speaker 3: he brought me to the Saint Patrick Church and he said,
Speaker 3: this is the church of the immigrants, and this is
Speaker 3: the saying of the immigrants. Whenever you want something, you
Speaker 3: have to come here and ask for whatever you.
Speaker 4: Want to Sant Patrick.
Speaker 3: Patrick is not the god of the immigrants at all,
Speaker 3: but he was like inventing these things.
Speaker 4: And then I told him.
Speaker 3: We were in the Brooklyn Bridge and we were crossing it,
Speaker 3: and I said to my grandfather the moment that I
Speaker 3: will be capable to support myself and had the money,
Speaker 3: I will came to New York and he said no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: your place is Berlin.
Speaker 4: He knew. And of course I didn't move to Berlin
Speaker 4: because of that, but it's very curious that I'm there.
Speaker 3: Moving to Berlin from the beginning was a great exercise
Speaker 3: of estrangement because I was a foreigner, and I will
Speaker 3: be a foreigner even if I stayed there my whole life.
Speaker 3: It's so clear the difference between a Latin American citizen
Speaker 3: and a German citizen.
Speaker 2: But I like that.
Speaker 3: Writer is always a kind of foreigner, wherever his moving
Speaker 3: and wherever he's writing about. His main exercise it's to
Speaker 3: behave as a foreign earth because in the moment that
Speaker 3: you are convinced that you are not completely understanding what
Speaker 3: is going on, then you have a more.
Speaker 4: Objective perspective of what is going on.
Speaker 3: I'm very amazed and surprised about how the concept of
Speaker 3: normality works in our everyday life, because I just don't
Speaker 3: believe in normality. It's so crazy, so it doesn't have
Speaker 3: any sense, and it's so important for us. I'm so particular,
Speaker 3: so unique, and you are so particular and so unique,
Speaker 3: and the normality rule says that there is a point
Speaker 3: in between you and me, just in the middle. That's normality,
Speaker 3: and we keep the whole life trying to go there.
Speaker 4: But there's nothing there. It's absolutely empty.
Speaker 3: It's a complete fiction the area of normality. For example,
Speaker 3: there's a story where there is a teenager who is
Speaker 3: eating a bird as a food, and of course there
Speaker 3: is a big mess in the family around this. But
Speaker 3: we eat birds every.
Speaker 4: Day, sometimes twice a day.
Speaker 3: So what is the problem is because it's a bird
Speaker 3: and it's not a chicken. Chicken is bigger than a bird.
Speaker 3: It would be more logical to eat a bird and
Speaker 3: to e a chicken.
Speaker 4: You know what is the problem here?
Speaker 5: Really?
Speaker 3: You could say, oh, but the bird is alive. Chinese
Speaker 3: people eat food that is alive.
Speaker 4: I have been there. I mean food can be moving
Speaker 4: on the plate and.
Speaker 3: They eat it. So what is really the problem. It's
Speaker 3: a social agreement, nothing else than that. It's just a
Speaker 3: social agreement. But we took this as an absolute truth
Speaker 3: and it's not. And the moment that you disassemble it,
Speaker 3: then reality doesn't have any sense. I have heard here
Speaker 3: and there things like, for example, or women's are writing
Speaker 3: so much better than men these days. This is not
Speaker 3: only something that is happening in Latin America. I'm saying
Speaker 3: because I thought it was only in Latin America, But
Speaker 3: then when you start to travel around festivals, in international
Speaker 3: festival around the world, this is a topic that is
Speaker 3: floating around. Suddenly women's are publishing the same or even.
Speaker 4: More than the men.
Speaker 3: And this is very interesting because some people call this
Speaker 3: a boom, and this is not a boom. This is
Speaker 3: what the half of the other half of the humanity
Speaker 3: have been writing. It's just that now they are publishing them.
Speaker 3: So I feel like grateful maybe or exciting about the
Speaker 3: idea of sharing this moment with these authors.
Speaker 4: We are so different.
Speaker 3: You have someone like Gabriela Cavison, who is playing in
Speaker 3: such a brave way with language, or Claudia Pineiro, who
Speaker 3: goes through a completely different perspective, or Margaritaria Robaso, who
Speaker 3: has this super subtle and intimate realism about women. Or
Speaker 3: you have Gabrillabinar, who doesn't have anything to do with
Speaker 3: the three that I have just named. So it's very
Speaker 3: hard to classify us as a movement. What is true
Speaker 3: is that women in literature have been a minority up
Speaker 3: to very short time ago, and as a minority, you
Speaker 3: always came to the canon with a lot of new news.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: It's like, we have this to say, and that's to say,
Speaker 3: and we have this story about this weekend, with our
Speaker 3: own stories, with our own paints, even I would say,
Speaker 3: with our own tradition.
Speaker 4: So it's not better, it's just new.
Speaker 3: We have so many things to say.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced by Victoria Estrada and Martin Martinez.
Speaker 1: It was edited by Sarah White Scottochak. It was mixed
Speaker 1: by Julia Caruso. The Latino USA team also includes Renaldo
Speaker 1: Leanos Junior, Andrea Lopez Cruzado, Flodi mar Marquez, Mike Sargent,
Speaker 1: Neur Saudi, and Nancy Trujillo. Penilei Ramidez is our co
Speaker 1: executive producer. Our director of engineering is Stephanie Lebau. Our
Speaker 1: marketing manager is Res Luna. Our theme music was composed
Speaker 1: by Ze Ruinos. I'm your host and executive producer Mariao Josa.
Speaker 1: Join us again on our next episode. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: remember look for us on social media. I will see
Speaker 1: you there and as always and forever bye.
Speaker 5: Latino USA is made possible in part by New York
Speaker 5: Women's Foundation. The New York Women's Foundation, funding women leaders
Speaker 5: that build solutions in their communities, and celebrating thirty years
Speaker 5: of radical generosity, the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur
Speaker 5: Foundation and the Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the
Speaker 5: front lines of social change worldwide.
Speaker 3: L Cafe, Caffe Caffe, Combintias Unco