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Book Sense One-on-One: Susan Avery Talks to Francisco Goldman
Printer-friendly versionFrom its beginnings, the Book Sense program has underscored the singular relationships between independent booksellers and authors. BTW is pleased to occasionally feature "Book Sense One-on-One," in which the bookseller who has nominated a title as a Book Sense Pick interviews that title's author.
This week, Susan Avery of Ariel Booksellers, New Paltz, New York, interviews author Francisco Goldman. In nominating Goldman's The Divine Husband: A Novel (Atlantic Monthly), Avery wrote, "Francisco Goldman has dipped his pen into the well of imagination and produced the most finely formed novel in recent memory -- a tale of 19th century Central America with lots of juicy characters flowing through geographical, racial, political, and spiritual borders. The magic of this book took my breath away."
Avery: Your main character, Maria de las Nieves Moran, is a fascinating and unforgettable woman, yet she always remains slightly elusive. Tell us something about her conception and growth during the writing process.
Goldman: She wasn't originally going to be the main character. When I first started thinking about the book -- such a long time ago! -- I imagined that another Maria, Maria Garcia Granados, the "Nina de Guatemala" of Jose Marti's famous love poem, was going to be the main character. Marti, as a young man exiled from Cuba, spent over a year in Guatemala, and the evidence suggests that there he fell in love with Garcia Granados. He stifled that love though, out of a sense of duty to the Cuban woman he was engaged to. Fifteen years later, when he was living in New York, Marti wrote a poem full of remorse for the girl "who died of love," and referred to their "burning goodbye kiss." But history will never know what really happened between them.
Marti, of course, died a hero's death in Cuba, leading the revolution against Spanish rule, and, after he died, he was transformed into a kind of secular saint. Even people close to him tended to suppress, in their recollections, anything that might contradict that image. Maybe I'd originally thought: I'm going to write a novel in which I imagine what really happened between Marti and Maria Garcia Granados, and about some of the other women we know Marti was involved with. But, eventually -- and somehow this happened intuitively and as the novel developed -- I understood that a Marti without those mysteries would be an untruthful Marti. Those secrets are too essential an aspect of who he is now. It would be cheesy, I thought, to write something like: Yes, Marti definitely had sex with La Nina de Guatemala. It's the mystery, the not ever really being able to know, that's so haunting and beautiful.
Thus, Maria de las Nieves: a young female who would have the kind of relationship that Marti had with women. A parallel, fictional "Nina de G." I was never more surprised than when, at the end of the book, you suddenly see Maria de las Nieves keeping her secrets about Marti, too. When you see her coming up with these maybe ridiculous stories to hide what really went on -- so that readers get to decipher and decide for themselves.
One day in a 19th century newspaper I found an article about an English-speaking wild girl found living in the forests, abandoned with a black servant from Belize after her Irish father dies -- that was the first inspiration. María de las Nieves grew from there. You always hear writers talking about characters taking on a life of their own but for me this was really the first time that had happened to such a degree.
Avery: What would you like readers to take away from the novel concerning the history and identity of Guatemala?
Goldman: Not any one thing. I wanted to remind myself and the reader that this is a fiction; so, I don't name Guatemala in the book, though anyone familiar with the country recognizes the same city and street names and historical figures and so on. I wanted to evoke "the Americas," rather than just one country, at a time of great change. That place, that lost world of 19th century Central America, had to be imagined via research: trolling through sources for the details I often didn't realize I was searching for until I found them. I'd come across something that spoke both to my sense of the past -- its inherent strangeness, that sense of its being lost (the old trade of producing red dye from cochineal bugs, for example) -- and I felt that you could actually retrieve it, recreate it, through words. It was an almost archeological rescue for which words and imagination were actually better than any other medium.
Avery: There are many colorful and somewhat comical characters throughout the book. Would you single one of them out and tell us about him or her?
Goldman: I'm especially gratified that you recognize the book's comic intentions! I had great fun with Mack Chinchilla, and his friend Salomon Nahon. Mack just sort of exploded off the page, and I'll tell you one reason why: The story had to begin the way it does, in the convent, and with the story of Maria de las Nieves and Paquita. "Little Women in the Tropics" is what it felt like while I was writing it, and it took a long time. So, by the time Mack enters, I felt so ready to switch to a male character, and it probably shows.
Avery: You live both in the U.S. and in Mexico, and you're fluent in both English and Spanish. Which culture and which language influences your work more?
Goldman: Both. I inhabit an imaginary country in which Guatemala City and my hometown in Massachusetts are somehow separate sides of the same place; where New York City and Mexico City are somehow on the same subway line. That's my fictional world, but in many ways my real one. I hear my Latin American characters in Spanish, but search for an English that somehow approximates their Spanish.
Avery: The Cuban poet Jose Marti is a central figure in the novel. Is he one of your favorites? What writers do you most admire?
Goldman: Stendhal was a presence throughout the writing of that book. Tolstoy, Conrad, the Woolfs (Virginia and Leonard), Kafka, Dineson, Borges, Sebald, a turn-of-the-century Venezuelan writer, Teresa de la Parra, those are writers I kept nearby while writing Divine Husband -- writers I'd maybe just dip into sometimes to get me going. I also became addicted to religious writings, the lives of saints, theological treatises, The Golden Legend, nuns' convent writings, Jewish and Mayan mystical writings, and so on. I love Dostoevsky, of course. Also Flaubert, Faulkner, Bellow, Grass, García Márquez, Onetti, Bellow, Murakami, Proulx, Rushdie, Ishiguro, Roberto Bolaño -- also good friends such as Colm Toibin, Junot Diaz, José Manuel Prieto, Susan Choi, Bex Brian, fiction writers I not only admire but also the writers I talk writing with… and my fiancée, Aura Estrada, a young Mexican short-story writer and essayist who is on her way, and who is just smarter than me about everything.
I'd like to say, too, thanks very much for your generous and lovely support for my book, Susan. And thanks also to all the independent booksellers, the heroic defenders of the welcoming and indispensable neighborhood bookstore.