Daniel Saldaña París’s novel, The Dance and the Fire, recently published in Christina MacSweeney’s translation, is a sophisticated tour-de-force centering the ungovernable forces that nourish, propel, and destroy us. In it, three estranged childhood friends are reunited as wildfires close in on the city of Cuernavaca. Besieged by inexorable change and irretrievable intimacies, the trio narrates a carnivalesque Armageddon woven from dance plagues, religious fanaticism, and natural disaster. París’s cerebral, compassionate prose encompasses a vast range of lived experiences, including the domestic, the uncanny, and the beautifully flawed.
The Dance and the Fire is a journey through the past and the present, heading into the unspeakable core of being human. As a fan of both his earlier essay collection, Planes Flying Over a Monster (also translated by MacSweeney), and this most recent work, I was thrilled to be able to speak with Saldaña París about his writing, its major themes, and inspirations in this interview.
Sofija Popovska (SP): In Planes Flying Over a Monster, you weave personal memories together with an eclectic mix of historical anecdotes. Natalia, the first narrator in The Dance and the Fire, seems to share your archival bent, and so does the father of the third narrator, Conejo. It looks like they process how they feel about where they are at the moment by engaging with stories from the past. What does this “historian’s compulsion” mean to you?
Daniel Saldaña Paris (DSP): It’s the way I experience places. I’m in New York City right now, for example, and when I walk these streets, I always remember that the first non-native inhabitant of Manhattan was a Black man from Santo Domingo who spoke Spanish and arrived with Dutch merchants. That detail reminds me how deeply my language is interwoven with this city, and it changes how I see the place. Archives are not dead tools; they’re the original augmented reality glasses.
SP: I was wondering about how The Dance and the Fire started—did the idea of writing a novel around a dance plague precede your research on the phenomenon, or the other way around? What about Mary Wigman, her work, and the fascinating people she knew? What drew you to these figures and events?
DSP: It’s hard to say exactly how it began. I wrote a few pages of the first section even before starting Ramifications (2020), but I had to set them aside for a couple of years because I didn’t yet know who these people were. I’d been carrying around the history of medieval dance plagues for a long time, since I first read about it in an article by a friend, but I didn’t know how it connected to Natalia’s voice until much later. Then, in 2019, I went back to Cuernavaca, and the city was surrounded by wildfires. That’s when the fire element took hold, and everything began to come together.
SP: Bakhtin, whose theory of the carnivalesque is mentioned in The Dance and the Fire, believed that there is a strong revolutionary component in carnival—both in terms of a medieval festival and a mode of writing where social hierarchies are turned upside-down, grotesque imagery and body humor are abound, and the constraints of daily life are lifted. In your novel, however, Conejo describes the (very carnivalesque) dance plague as “the revolution that went nowhere.” What do you think—was there anything revolutionary about it after all?
DSP: There’s an early essay by Walter Benjamin where he says it’s necessary to capture the forces of drunkenness for the cause of the revolution, and for many years I abided by that idea. But there’s also something uncontainable in the carnivalesque that makes it impossible to channel into a political movement. In fact, organized religion has probably been the only institution to consistently profit from carnival’s cyclical subversions—which makes me distrustful of Benjamin’s optimism. In the novel, the carnivalesque is a form that everyone tries to exploit for their own benefit, but its ultimate meaning is impossible to pin down. If there is subversive potential, for me it lies in that irreducibility.
SP: Without giving too much away, I’ll say that I really enjoyed Natalia’s darkly prophetic statement that “only through disillusion, through the certainty of failure and an absolute absence of hope, am I going to learn to burn as brightly as I’m determined to.” Can you tell me more about what failure means in the novel, and in writing and art in general? What does truly embracing failure in that context look like, and what kinds of revelations does it yield?
DSP: I’m tired of how contemporary culture pushes the idea of success onto everyone. Failure, I think, is the only real way to learn—especially in art, but also in relationships. Each of the three narrators has a different interpretation of failure. For Natalia, failure is what allows her to move forward and keep creating. For Erre, the second narrator, failure paralyzes him, and that’s what ultimately destroys him.
SP: I noticed that you worked on the text shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic. Considering that The Dance and the Fire depicts a species of plague, crazed religious fervor, and the dissolution into chaos of everyday life, how did witnessing the correspondences between your (at the time) work in progress and the state of the world feel?
DSP: It was a strange experience. I was in London, doing research at the British Library thanks to the Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writers Award, when COVID first hit. I’d been reading about dance and laughter epidemics, and suddenly a very different kind of epidemic was unfolding around me. Later, back in Mexico, still working on the book, I realized what I missed most during lockdowns was physical connection—dancing, sweating with other people. I want an end of the world with more movement and fewer screens.
SP: In an interview with Publishers Weekly, you say that “cities are structured like texts.” Is The Dance and the Fire a textual counterpart of Cuernavaca—and if so, where is it set?
DSP: The novel is set in a version of Cuernavaca that isn’t exactly the real one. In that sense, it borrows something from Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, which is set in “Quauhnahuac,” the pre-Hispanic name for the city. My feeling is that fictional cities end up having real effects on actual ones. Literature does change reality.
SP: The Dance and the Fire is filled with thematic genealogies: women who move “in some mysterious way,” held together by dance, the women Natalia’s lover has dated, the dogs she had as a kid, the flowers she keeps. This is also the case for Planes Flying over a Monster, where we find genealogies comprising maps of a city in flux, secret writers, etc. Can you talk more about the significance of thematic, rather than biological, genealogies—in the novel and in general?
DSP: I think of those elements as themes in the musical sense: things that recur and create a rhythm within the book. I like novels with repetition, where there’s a balance between what returns and what moves forward. A novel that is all plot, to me, doesn’t have a soul. Through repetition, something is expressed that comes from a deeper, subconscious layer. I can’t fully explain a thematic genealogy—it persists and recurs because it speaks in images, not ideas. And those images are a fundamental part of who I am.
SP: I really enjoyed finding moments of overlap between Planes Flying Over a Monster and The Dance and the Fire. In Planes Flying Over a Monster, you talk about your “sporadic suspicion that the world is, as Baudelaire believed, a forest of symbols.” Similarly, on page two, Natalia says: “the world seems like a system of allusions and signs. . .” At the same time, chance is a major force in the novel; can you talk a bit about the interplay between signification and chance in how you see the world, and its place in The Dance and the Fire?
DSP: Well, I grew up in a cult. My father belonged to a new-age group for a while, and he sent me to summer camps where I was supposed to talk to the fire. We’d spend two days blindfolded doing exercises in the woods, then sleep in a grave we had dug ourselves. There was a lot of discourse around finding meaning in nature and the world. Sometimes that meaning felt like a magical discovery, other times like an artificial imposition. I think I still oscillate between those two poles, and the novel reflects that. At times I’m utterly cynical, and at other times, I want to believe in some kind of moral order. In the end, what I took from writing the book is: if there is meaning and order, it’s not individually accessible—it can only be found in love and friendship.
SP: There’s a lot of walking in The Dance and the Fire, especially in the flashbacks. Does it have a unique significance that differentiates it from other forms of movement that figure in the novel? What does it mean in the book, and to you?
DSP: Walking has always been my favorite aesthetic practice. In that cult I grew up in, I was taught ritual walking, and I’ve kept using it as a creative tool since I was eleven. Most of my writing comes out of personal pilgrimages—returning to places I’ve known or discovering new ones, whether in nature or in cities. In college, I joined a neo-situationist group; we had a magazine and weekly meetings to discuss Guy Debord and others. The idea of the dérive captured my imagination and became a primary tool for how I write about cities, from Cuernavaca’s smoldering heat to Montréal’s minus-forty winters.
SP: Dance is a key theme as a central element here, but the novel also has an alchemical effect on the concept itself; the dance plague and Erre’s description of his joint pain as a kind of dance broaden and modify its meaning. What is the broader definition of dance? What are the forces that nourish and govern it? What drew you to dance and to writing about it?
DSP: I’ve always danced. As a teenager, my friend Lilián—who later became a choreographer—dragged me to ballet, contemporary, flamenco, and salsa classes. Dancing became a way for me to find individuality, since neither of my parents ever liked it. Over time, I’ve come to see dance as simply encompassing all the ways our bodies move. Writing in a notebook creates its own choreography—posture, rhythm. When you’re in pain, the choreography of daily life shifts to compensate. I’m also fascinated by the tension between dance and control; discipline seeks to master the body with precision, yet in dancing you also surrender, letting something larger move through you.
SP: In the novel, Erre claims that his love for Natalia was a catalyst for his romantic exploits with Conejo, which did not continue after she left the trio. Her presence seems to be a kind of heterosexual safeguard, allowing him to explore queer desire without risking becoming fully untethered from heteronormativity—or, alternatively, her inner freedom could be seen as pushing Erre towards embracing his queerness. Does their love triangle gesture towards a species of love that is only possible beyond the possibilities of monogamy?
DSP: I don’t quite know how to respond, because your question captures something I’ve felt but never articulated. Being bisexual in Cuernavaca in the 1990s was profoundly alienating, and it took me a long time to understand what that meant for me. The triangulation of desire was a way—for me and for the characters—to explore queerness in a way that felt safe and possible. I also believe that sex with friends can be one of the most positive experiences you can have. In itself, it’s a challenge to both monogamy and the consumerist model of modern dating.
SP: Did you anticipate that The Dance and the Fire would be translated into English while you were writing it?
DSP: I suppose I always assumed the book would eventually be translated into English and other languages, but that didn’t affect how I wrote it. I trust my translators to capture the complexity of the prose, and I refuse to give in to the “international style” that flattens literature into mere storytelling. Language has an opacity I need to savor, not erase.
SP: Are you currently working on anything new? And is there a subject you would like to write about someday but haven’t made plans for yet?
DSP: I have a new novel coming out in Spanish next month, Los nombres de mi padre. It’s set in both Mexico City and New York City and has a detective element, though I don’t want to say much more. I’ve also been working on short stories and personal essays. And one day, I’d love to write about marriage, but I’m still doing field research.
Daniel Saldaña París is a Mexican writer based in New York and Mexico City. He is the author of the essay collection Aviones sobrevolando un monstruo (Planes Flying Over a Monster; Catapult, 2024) and the novels En medio de extrañas víctimas (Among Strange Victims; Coffee House Press, 2015) and El nervio principal (Ramifications; Charco Press, 2020). In 2017 he was named in the Bogota39 list of best Latin American writers under forty. His latest novel is El baile y el incendio (The Dance and the Fire; Catapult, July 2025), translated by Christina MacSweeney.
Sofija Popovska is a writer, translator, and Editor-at-Large at Asymptote Journal. Her other work can be found in Circumference Magazine, mercuryfirs, Farewell Transmission, and in the upcoming Issue 12 of FU Review Berlin, among others.
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Read more on the Asymptote blog:
- The Poetics of Fatherhood: A Conversation with Robin Myers on Translating Andrés Neuman’s A Father Is Born
- The Dust of Her Bones: An Interview with Inés Bellina, Alejandra C. Quintana Arocho, and Anne Freeland on Gabriela Mistral’s Queerness
- Scratched knees, pickled vegetables, and (un)belonging: A Conversation with Elina Katrin