Jorge Consiglio’s novel Fate (Charco Press, 2021) charts a tangle of crossroads, both literal and figurative. A taxidermist, an oboist, and a meteorologist do their best to direct their destinies against the background of Buenos Aires’s frenetic streets. Their worlds tilt and collide, and the sum of their experiences poses an eternal question about whether our everyday lives—and the incidents that jolt us out of them—are the work of fate or chance. Here, Asymptote Assistant Blog Editor Allison Braden talks with Consiglio about how a befuddled immigrant, a surfeit of street names, and a relentless colony of ants propel the plot, and why English—and Charco Press—was the perfect home away from home for the Argentinian author’s fifth award-winning novel. This interview, translated from Spanish, has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Allison Braden (AB): You begin Fate with an author’s note that explains your central question: “fate or chance?” What was it about this novel that inspired you to include the preface? How do you think the note shapes readers’ experience of the story?
Jorge Consiglio (JC): I included the preface at the suggestion of Charco Press. The introduction is part of the collection’s design, and I was delighted at the suggestion. In Argentina, there used to be excellent publisher called Centro Editor de América Latina which had a collection that used the same idea. I remember I used to buy the CEAL books and always enjoyed reading the author’s reflections. They were useful for situating myself within the context in which the work had been produced, and it offered a window into the author’s aesthetics and point of view. It felt like I was allowed to attend the rehearsals before seeing a play. I think in this case, in addition to that, Charco Press takes care to allow the authors to introduce themselves in their own words in countries where readers probably have never heard of them. That’s a big plus.
AB: Philosophers have grappled with the question of fate versus chance for millennia, and they’ve proposed various approaches for dealing with the vicissitudes of an unpredictable life. (The Stoics’ recommendation to face everyday frustrations and furies with grace and patience certainly would have benefited a couple of the short-tempered characters in Fate.) How did philosophy shape your approach to the novel’s central theme?
JC: When I was struck with the idea to write Fate, I didn’t think about philosophy or anything like it. What came to me first was a scene in which two characters whose destinies had been tapping on each other missed the chance to exchange a glance of recognition only by a few seconds. That was the trigger for the text, but as I made progress in the writing, I suspect because of the evolution of the plot, I was presented with the question of fate versus chance. I’m not the first to arrive at this question, of course. There were—and are—many writers who create their fiction out of this counterpoint. I guess it’s inevitable that, by dint of our ephemeral nature, we’ll stumble into these existential issues at some point. It’s true that philosophy seeks to reflect on the vicissitudes of the unpredictable. Religion and magical thinking, too. The characters in Fate aren’t thinking about these questions. They act without much reflection, but the plot development, like a poor imitation of life, embodies these questions that will never be resolved.
AB: Street names and specific locations appear in almost every chapter of Fate, which reminded me in some ways of Dublin’s role in Ulysses. Why is it important to root your work in the geography of Buenos Aires? How do you think those references change the tenor of the novel for readers of your work in translation compared to readers in Argentina?
JC: I think the system of such profuse references is a method of getting at the heart of reality through an overabundance of realism. The strategy is to adjust the focus to eventually achieve a distortion. If you look at the quotidian under a microscope, the most common things become unrecognizable. To me, this exasperating reference system—a kind of hyperrealism—ends up “puzzling” the narration: zooming in dislocates the sequence. As far as rooting the text in Buenos Aires, it seemed the most natural thing in the world: I am porteño and, for better or worse, this city is the foundation for everything I sense and feel. I suppose for me Buenos Aires functions as an emotional catalyst.
I have no idea how this device would be received in other countries. I suspect from my reading experience—but it’s only a hypothesis with little foundation—that the reader diagrams unfamiliar scenes through sound. That happens to me with Russian fiction, for example. I’d read the names of the avenues that cross St. Petersburg (a place I’ve never visited in my life) and, by virtue of the sounds, I can imagine what the places are like.
AB: Immigrants appear in both Southerly and Fate. How do immigrant viewpoints help tell stories of Buenos Aires? In what ways do their perspectives allow you to reimagine your native city?
JC: In one sense, the foreign character [Karl in Fate] serves the narrative structure because he offers a skewed perspective on the city, which ends up advancing the plot. A powerful confusion persists in him, which comes from living in a city he wasn’t born in. I also think that his inept navigation of Buenos Aires is useful for the story. There’s something of a primitive clumsiness in Karl that links back to his origins: he’s a German accustomed to a country that takes care of everything for him, and he’s trying to survive in a Latin American city where chaos is common currency. That bewilderment and ignorance of local codes, I think, becomes a key driver of certain essential plot points.
AB: In other ways, the natural world features heavily in Fate—bees, clouds, ants, hens. How does the unpredictability of nature fit into your central argument? In your view, does our relationship with nature make a case for chance or fate?
JC: The question of fate or chance is strictly human. I think all the natural frenzy in the text works as a counterpoint. On one hand, nature is pure unpredictability, life as the mere present, the blind will that advances by the inherent impulse of existence. And on the other, there’s the individual, determined to organize and catalogue the universe. Marina Kezelman’s struggle to keep the ants in her kitchen at bay is an example of what I’m talking about. The characters try to impose order on a rebellious reality. Or, rather, the universe is disobedient and its centripetal force sweeps up the characters who do all they can to keep their balance.
AB: I’m curious about your decision to refer to Marina Kezelman—the only main character who’s a woman—by her full name or last name throughout the text, which has the effect of distancing her from the reader. Did you feel a certain distance from her as you were writing the novel?
JC: No, just the opposite: she was one of the characters I felt the most empathy for. I used her first and last name only because of how they sound together. It seemed like the first name Marina and last name Kezelman comprised a unit, and that unit defined the character. When I say “define,” I mean that those two words, through an acoustic effect, chart an integral map of her, physical as well as psychological. I think the combination also serves as a detailed description and has the advantage of synthesis. It reveals, in this case, the principle of economy that governs literature: to say as much as possible in the least number of words. It’s nothing more than a metonymic distillation.
On another note, it’s true that naming the meteorologist this way provokes a sense of distancing, but this effect doesn’t apply just to the character but also to the narrated action. It’s always fascinating to discover that the elements of a text harbor a multitude of functions.
AB: Like the geographic references, brand names and corporations also appear throughout the story: McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, WhatsApp, Disney. I appreciated your decision to set a momentous breakup scene in a Starbucks, a place that tries to guarantee freedom from surprise. Do you believe capitalism and corporate homogeneity have insulated us from chance? Do they—like Karl’s Xanax—muffle our reality and stifle our depth of emotion?
JC: I think extreme capitalism, as it manifests today, tends toward homogenization in all domains. It even makes emotions predictable. It embeds itself in, and directs, our system of joy: the things or situations that bring us pleasure aren’t chosen by the individual but rather by the superstructure they are part of. This standardization of capitalism undoubtedly infiltrates our psychic cores and constitutes them, defines them even; that is, it concocts a view of reality that ends up replacing reality itself. My impression is that we all tend to see the world as a large inventory, so we must make a serious effort to challenge that perception: not to take for granted everything we see, everything we consume, everything we desire; in sum, we must try to preserve in some way our private forms of happiness. In this respect, art plays a fundamental role. The Russian formalists wrote extensively on this topic.
Returning to the question, of course the brands in the text can be read as symbols of corporate uniformity. And the characters’ behaviors draw a zigzag between those two conflicting zones. Since the books I write incorporate elements of realism, there’s an obvious similarity between the characters and people in real life. The same thing happens to them that happens to us in our everyday lives: the old theme of literature as a representation of the real.
AB: English is frequently a handmaiden to that corporate sameness. In general, what’s been your experience of the translation process? You mention in the author’s note that Carolina Orloff and Fionn Petch’s translation captured every nuance of the original, but on a philosophical level, does the English translation in any way undermine—or advance—the central project of the novel?
JC: No, it doesn’t undermine the central project of the novel at all. English is an economical language, and the text tends toward extreme economy, to synthesis. In a beautiful essay called “Three Proposals for the Next Millennium (and Five Difficulties),” Ricardo Piglia analyzes the fiction of another great Argentinian writer, Rodolfo Walsh, and concludes that one of the factors that makes Walsh’s prose so powerful is precisely its distillation. I think this occurs both in the length of sentences and the scenes the narrator elects to tell the story. In that sense, English is a perfect language: austere, but with astonishing lyrical margins.
Moreover, Carolina Orloff is ideal to lead the text’s translation. Not only is she perfectly bilingual, but because she’s an Argentinian who’s lived in the UK for over twenty years, she serves as a magnificent cultural link for the translation of languages. The amount of work required to produce the sound of the text, the rhythms, the underlying meanings is just bewildering. Many of Carolina’s and Fionn’s comments (about the syntax, but also at the thematic level) also helped me reconsider certain parts of the Spanish original.
Jorge Consiglio was born in Buenos Aires in 1962. He has published five novels: El bien (The Good, 2003; Award for Emerging Writers, Opera Prima, Spain), Gramática de la sombra (Grammar of the Shadows, 2007; Third Municipal Prize for Novels), Pequeñas intenciones (Small Intentions, 2011; Second National Prize for Novels, First Municipal Prize for Novels, re-published in 2019), Hospital Posadas (2015), and Tres Monedas (2018), published by Charco Press as Fate (2020). They have all been awarded prizes in Argentina and in Spain. He has also published three collections of short stories, including Villa del Parque (2016), published by Charco Press as Southerly (2018), five books of poems, and a book of essays. He is currently writing his sixth novel to be published in 2020, an excerpt of which was published by Granta.
Allison Braden is an assistant blog editor for Asymptote and a contributing editor for Charlotte magazine. Her journalism and translation have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Columbia Journalism Review, Outside, and The Daily Beast, among others. She’s seeking publication for her translation of Arelis Uribe’s award-winning collection of short stories, Quiltras.
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