A Latin American epic spanning countries and decades, Vivir Abajo (Les lieux souterrains) by Gustavo Faverón Patriau has recently been published in France in a translation by Robert Amutio. The novel is presented as an investigation into the life of experimental film-maker and possible serial-killer George Walker Bennet, following traces that lead from the north-eastern USA through Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia and Peru, via the underground spaces, murky chambers and secret prisons that map out the continent’s history of torture and repression.
A rich, knotty and dizzying exploration of evil, exploitation, and the burden of accursed inheritance, Vivir Abajo is also woven through with playful (if melancholy) insights into literature, cinema and music. Throughout, Patriau nudges us to question whether—and how—such practices might offer respite, escape and perhaps salvation, while hinting that even our purest impulses for creation are no less implicated in depravity, domination, and the horrors of the twentieth century than the most brutal acts of murder.
Having been rapturously received in France, a true coup de cœur of this year’s rentrée litteraire, Gustavo Faverón Patriau kindly agreed to answer some questions on the novel’s conception, the nature of evil, his influences and the place of literature in the context of contemporary nightmares via email.
Translated by Yanina Spizzirri.
available in Spanish here.
Vivir Abajo is a complex, recursive and elusive novel, with endless doubles, mirrors and dupes. It evokes the Moebius Strip and embodies the same. How did it come into being? How did its composition unfold?
I was writing a lengthy novel for a long time, a novel whose title was going to be Los Nueves Monstruous or El Mal en Occidente. It was a series of parallel stories that took place in late twentieth-century Peru. I abandoned that project but I kept some of its ideas and I later wrote a couple of short stories that partially came from that previous project. One of them was about a young American of Hispanic heritage who travelled to Lima to commit a crime; the other one was the story of an American ex-torturer who had spent part of the 60’s and 70’s collaborating with right-wing dictatorships in South America.
A filmmaker friend of mine became interested in these stories so I turned them into a single one: the American ex-torturer from the 70’s ended up becoming the father of the boy who later commits a crime in Peru in the 90’s. The novel began to appear then, as an attempt to explore the figure of a man whose life is marked by the fact that he is the son of a terrible criminal.
From that point on, it gradually became apparent that it wouldn’t just be the story of these two individuals, but a look at the matter of parent-child relationships marked by different forms of violence, and on the political level, about the relationship between the United States and Latin America in the twentieth century.
As for the formal structure: I never attempt to have a preliminary design for my novels. Their form emerges as the narrative is constructed. I wouldn’t refer to it as a Möbius strip. I believe, instead, that the various fragments of the novel emerge above the surface like the tips of icebergs: we know there is more underneath but, deep down, we have no clue if the tips belong to the same iceberg or different icebergs. I believe that an important idea regarding the form of that novel is that each character has its own distinct narrative, in the same way that every person in this world has a distinct narrative, and the fact that a person can appear to be a part of another person’s narrative (of somebody else’s life) is almost a magical occurrence. The fact that I, in this very moment, am a part of the narrative that is your life is incalculably improbable, yet, in the very instant in which we’re communicating, it somehow seems real: you seem to be in my world and I in yours. The haphazard and improbable way in which we seem to live fleetingly in the lives of others is what I try to reflect in the structure of novels like this one.
From where, for you, does the voice of literature emerge? (Given that repeatedly throughout the novel literary production seems “maudit”, whereas music and film appear to offer creative and spiritual satisfaction more reliably.)
I don’t think music and cinema come from a different place than literature, at least not in “auteur” cinema or music, which maintain an intimate relationship with the person who originates them (I suppose it’s a relationship that weakens, declines, and becomes very tenuous the more commercialized and mass-oriented the film or music is).
As for me, my own novels don’t come from a singular place but from several. One of them is fear, the fear that comes with life experience, the fear that grows with every new trap the world sets for us, and the fears my own imagination generates from that experience. I mean fear as dread, above all a sense of dread in relation to tragedy. I tend to write about things I dread, things I want to understand in some way, mostly so I can neutralize them. There are also collective fears and dreads—social, political, historical: there is the fear about the circularity of history, fear about the return of the demons of the political past, the fear that they never truly left, and the fear about the paranoias of the contemporary world being more plausible than we think. Now, I do believe that these same fears mobilize a great part of music, cinema, and the rest of the arts, at least in the manifestations that interest me the most. And I think that my novels show that.
In Vivir Abajo in particular, cinema and music are strongly connected to violence and horror. In fact, music is used as an element of torture in this novel, and cinema, to a certain degree, is a medium for the representation of the subconscious and the repressed, as is the case with George’s films.
To what extent do you consider Vivir Abajo a horror novel?
I never use that phrase to refer to Vivir Abajo, only because I don’t want to cause confusion with the terror genre (as we say in Spanish) or the horror genre (as we say in English). The fundamental difference, I would say, is in the way in which my own novels and horror stories relate themselves to the matter of horror. Horror stories have the intention to cause horror, to generate it. Horror is the goal.
A novel like Vivir Abajo doesn’t have the primary intention to cause horror, instead its intention is to make ourselves question what horror is, where it come from, how it reaches us, how we’re part of it, why it affects us, how is it that historical changes produce changes in our idea of horror, how horror relates to our world, our politics, our culture, our past, etc.
An example suddenly comes to mind: The Shining, the novel by Stephen King. That’s a horror novel. Its objective is to make your hairs stand on end and give you goosebumps. Now, think about The Shining, the film by Stanley Kubrick: that’s a film about horror. Of course it’s going to make your hairs stand on end, but the fear it causes doesn’t come from the incidental fright of a particular moment in the story, but rather, it’s a medium produced along the path of that exploration. I believe Vivir Abajo is more closely related to Kubrick than to Stephen King. I don’t discriminate between them (I live in Maine, close to King’s home, and he appears as a character in one of my novels, Minimosca), but I think I have a greater affinity with those that consider horror as a theme and not as an objective.
Do you believe there is such a thing as evil? If so, what, for you, stands in opposition to it (being that Vivie Abajo seems to lack explicit reference to faith or a unified, consolidated sense of “good”)?
I believe that evil can only exist as a concept, as an idea. If that’s the case, it only takes thinking about it for it to exist. The problem is that if we don’t think about it, it will continue to exist, because the nature of evil is to persist and because there will always be a someone who will think of it. The evil that actually exists is not an entity that predates us, it’s not anti-God, it’s not a superior force; it is only a product of history.
The problem, in that other aspect, is that evil seems to be one of the most persistent and resistant products of history, one that has never ceased to exist since it showed his face on this earth for the very first time, and that probably can only refine itself to become more sophisticated every time, at least in its technical and material aspect (for example, I’m thinking about the sophistication of crimes perpetuated at a mass scale in the last two centuries).
Besides, the existence of evil, sadly, does not guarantee the existence of goodness. I believe that our own belief that if evil exists, good must exist, is a subproduct of our religions, of some religions: if God exists then the devil must also exist, religions tell us. Perhaps it’s not a complete mistake, but there’s at least a conceptual problem with that: evil and good do not have the same density.
Evil, every time it manifests, is crushing, dense and evident, and it reverberates in all directions.
Good, when it manifests, exists as a subtle corrective stream, its intention is to moderate evil.
Perhaps, this is because the human tendency towards it is natural and the tendency towards good is artificial, a product of our own necessity to survive socially. Crime, for example, or violence, seem natural; whereas law is artificial. That means that evil and crime always have an advantage.
Over the course of the book, the reader can sense a kind of constellated evil, with its markers in Nazi Germany, Yugoslavia, the North Eastern US, and throughout South America. If one were to join the dots of this constellation, what image would appear?
I think the whole planet would appear. I don’t think there is any nation that can be excused. The difference would be the directions of those borders in cases of internationally-perpetrated evil, that is, the clear unidirectionality of evil in certain historical situations, such as colonial relations, slavery, interventionalism, classism, and racism.
Undoubtedly, in the historical moments represented in the novel, those directions where clear: the growth of totalitarianism in 1940’s Europe; the antiliberal and conservative movement coming from the United States in the America of the 60’s and 70’s, curiously born out of those who helped stop the European totalitarianism of previous decades.
But I don’t think that any human society can stand outside of that circuit; it’s just that, in each historical moment, that evil, historical evil, is articulated in a different manner.
The anglophone literary world can tend to flatten Latin-American literature, making it a kind of regional genre. What are the features of a specifically Peruvian literature?
I don’t know if I can answer that question. I believe that Peru is sufficiently multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual to make it very difficult to talk about a character that defines what is Peruvian, not only as different from other Latin American literatures, but even internally. In my own case, I see my own literature as the daughter of certain Peruvian authors (Vargas Llosa, Vallejo, Arguedas, for example) but also as a daughter of other Latin American literatures (Borges, Lispector, Armonía Somers), but, of course, I also see it as a descendant of many other European literatures and of other parts of the world (Conrad, Melville, Dostoevsky, Burton, Cervantes, Austen, Zayas).
I think I never try to think of myself as someone who writes within the limits of a national literature, although I also don’t feel uncomfortable establishing connections between my work and that of earlier generations of Peruvian writers. Perhaps, and precisely so, the one thing that defines Peruvian literature is that centripetal tendency, pointed outwards, to seek out influences outside of Peru, a movement running parallel to the centripetal motion towards a continued exploration of national traditions.
The other thing you mention is true: In the English-speaking world all Latin American literature is often reduced to a single tradition and, many times, to a single branch of said tradition, as if all Latin America was a magical-realist or real-marvellous Caribbean place. Clearly, this is immensely more complex.
On the other hand, taking in Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Peru, to what extent does Vivir Abajo seek to elucidate a common Latin American experience?
Like many other regions of the world, Latin America is at the same time real and imaginary. For example, as a Latin American, I’ve never understood what my Latin American identity should be. What defines me? I’m not too clear on this. I believe that many of us, as Latin Americans, somehow accept our affiliation to that collective with a level of sportsmanship, without even questioning it.
In fact, the “Latin American” identity did not exist as such until the mid-19th century (the concept of Latin America was created in France, curiously, with a colonial intention). However, this does not mean that the region doesn’t share a common history. It does have it. But I think it’s not a history constructed upon moments of unitary affirmation, as the wars of independence might have been, but upon negative moments, moments of oppression.
Clearly, the colonial period and Spanish rule is the first instance of negative construction of present-day Latin America: the Spanish viceroyalties imposed over the indigenous communities, over indigenous reigns and their empires.
Another period of negative construction of what is considered Latin American is the political interventions of the United States in Central and South America and the interventions of the United States’ rivals during the Cold War: the proliferation of right-wing dictatorships promoted by the United States, from Trujillo to Pinochet, and the proliferation of left-wing dictatorships promoted by the enemies of the United States, from Castro to Chávez. So, there is a common experience, but it’s almost always due to violence inflicted by others over Latin America or, at least, by their alliance with internal violence.
Your kinship with Roberto Bolaño is clear throughout Vivir Abajo—and I know you’ve published academic writing on him. When did you first encounter his work and what’s your experience of his influence on your fiction?
I’ve only written one article about Bolaño, but, in collaboration with a friend of mine, Edmundo Paz-Soldán, I did edit a book about him, with the collaboration of Vila-Matas, Fresán, Boullosa, and several other writers close to Bolaño (who I never met).
I read Bolaño for the first time at the end of the 90’s. It was his book Nazi Literature in the Americas, which I didn’t really like. At that time, I had a weekly review column in a newspaper and I wrote somewhat of a negative review. After that I read The Savage Detectives, which I thought was a good novel but not a dazzling one. In fact, I thought it was stylistically sloppy, and I found some long sections of the novel to be slightly derivative.
This personal impression changed radically after the death of Bolaño, when I read Distant Star, By Night in Chile and 2666, which I consider to be three masterpieces. But I think the moment I understood my affinity for Bolaño went beyond the admiration I had for him as a reader, was when I realized that we had both grown up admiring the same authors: Borges, Wilcock, Melville, Hawthorne, Vargas Llosa, Vallejo, and discovering the true source of the novel in poetry.
I think my greatest affinity with him is in our shared common tendency to contradict some of the most typical conventions of the 21st-century novel, like its obsession with the “I,” and its synthetic tendency; I think we’re both very political, very expansive and very obsessed with revisiting the great questions of classical literature. However, Bolaño rebels—in a very Borgesian way— against the totalizing impulse of the realist, naturalist, and modernist novel, the impulse towards the total novel, which can be noticed in his own novels, which are fragmentary, broken, unfinished, always seeming like they’ve been abandoned midway, even when they weren’t, even when the effort was culminated as in The Savage Detectives.
I too have the same rebellion against the total novel, but I’m slightly more interest in finding out what the next step is: how do we synthesize the old total novels—whose mad ambition, I believe, deserves to be reclaimed—and the fragmentary tendency of our time, as we no longer really believe in the very notion of totality. My attempt in doing so is present in Vivir Abajo and in the projects that I’ve worked on after, Minimosca and the first two novels of my series Más opio para el pueblo, which are titled Madame Vargas Llosa and Laguna.
Ernesto Sabato’s presence can also be felt—particularly Sobre héroes y tumbas (incidentally, one of my favourite novels)—what have you inherited from Sabato?
Thank you for this question, which I don’t frequently get asked. I read a lot of Sabato between the ages of eighteen—when I read El Túnel—and twenty-five, when I finished reading his essays. I find his three novels remarkable, although Sobre héroes y tumbas is certainly the truly masterful one.
In Vivir Abajo, there is something that I took simultaneously from the real world and from Sobre héroes y tumbas. Laura Trujillo’s home in Lima, the burnt-out house facing the sea, next to Ariadna’s house. That’s a house I saw frequently in Magdalena del Mar, a Lima neighborhood which I had to traverse on my way to university. But it’s also the burnt-out house in Sobre héroes y tumbas, because every time I would see it in Lima, I would think of Sabato.
But in a more general way, I believe the clearest mark Sabato’s novel left on me is the idea that gives the novel its structure: that the story behind any group of people always has at least three levels: first, the individual and familial story; secondly, the social or collective story, and thirdly, the hidden story, where the collective unconscious and the individual unconscious meet, the buried story.
I find that his influence/significance is somewhat neglected in anglophone conversations of Latin American fiction, especially in comparison to a Bolaño (for example). Would you agree, and do you have any thoughts on why his work does not have the stature it deserves outside Latin America?
What happens with Sabato is also a mystery to me. In part, I imagine that it must be because he’s older than the writers from the Boom generation, so he wasn’t included in that generation He’s closer to Borges’ generation but, at the same time, he was seen as a rival of Borges. I suppose these types of things left him isolated during a time where Latin American literature, in general, wasn’t translated.
On the other hand, there is the issue of the English-speaking world’s expectation in regards to what a Latin American novel should be: Sabato is not a magical realist, he does not write marvellous real literature, he is not an indigenist, perhaps he is too European; his first books are way too close to French existentialism (the first English translation of El túnel was titled The Stranger, like the novel by Camus).
It’s a bit saddening seeing it that way, but the truth is that the North American publishing market tends to satisfy its needs for “Latin Americanism” with just a few authors while the rest are discarded.
Are there any other influences, literary or otherwise, you would like to mention?
Writers from the past: María Luisa Bombal, Pablo Palacio, Armonía Somers, Rodolfo Wilcock, Rodolfo Fogwill. Writers from older generations: Diamela Eltit, Hebe Uhart, José Watanabe.
As for writers that are currently operating, I’ll only mention Peruvian ones so I don’t end up with an endless list: Mario Montalbetti, Enrique Prochazka, Jeremías Gamboa, María José Caro, Diego Otero, Carlos Yushimito.
In the author’s notes you mention that a VHS tape was your most important source of information for Vivir Abajo. How has cinema as a medium influenced the way you write and structure your prose?
Enormously. Between the years 2000 and 2020, I watched two films a week and the mark cinema left on me has been indelible. Since 2020, I watch a film every day. Films have become my way of thinking, a way of thinking by projection, watching my own ideas on the screen, along with the things I see in the images.
There’s a certain level of alienation that can be achieved by being immersed in a film, which, in my case, is hard to achieve with other forms of art. Painting does it in a different manner, literature in another, music in another, but the physical experience of an art form that must be perceived by the eyes, the ears, and the intellect, both in a temporal and a spatial sense, which is the experience cinema provides, strikes me as hypnotic and very special.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that in the last ten years, cinema has influenced my books more than literature has. In part, this has to do with a crucial question in my novels, which is: to what extent can we witness evil in the world and remain sane? And I believe the idea of bearing witness, of being a witness, and the connection between witnessing evil and madness, is a connection that cinema has explored more than any other art form. You only have to watch a film like Come and See by Klimov, but also A Clockwork Orange by Kubrick.
The USA is currently experiencing, more explicitly than previously, the mechanisms of a repressive and totalitarian government at work against its own population. Many of its citizens have been shocked by this, perhaps imaging their nation was somehow immune to such tactics. What is your perspective on these developments over the last decade (or so), and what is your opinion on how North American literary culture has responded/is responding?
I’ll start with the last part of your question: the response from North American literature is very small in relation to the magnitude of the phenomenon. This is not due to North American writers being less critical than other writers, but rather it’s because literature creates its own traditions, and in the United States, the literary tradition of criticism against the political system is based in complaints about specific details.
North American literature is not traditionally equipped to state that “everything is bad.” It is not designed to say: “this government should cease to exist.” In fact, the best critiques against the Trumpist political system happened many years before Trump became president. For example, the novels of Dick and Roth. Science fiction or counterfactual novels, as far as novels go. I think that North American poetry is far better prepared to critique the ravings of power in a way that is almost immediate, and it’s already doing so.
Are you working on anything at the moment? To what extent do you feel optimistic about the future of the novel amidst such intense and relentless political, social, and environmental turmoil?
After Vivir Abajo, Minimosca, and my book about Borges, I started a narrative project in long form, consisting of half a dozen of short novels. The general title of the project is Más Opio Para el Puebl. The first of those six novels, Madame Vargas Llosa, has already been published in Spanish. The second one, Laguna, will come out in February. The third one will come out the following year and will probably be titled Eleonor Rigby, like the song by Paul McCartney. The idea behind these short novels is that each individual one can be read independently, or they can all be read in any order, but when they’re finished, they will all be part of a single novel, a very long one, which will be an exploration of the construction of discourses, narratives and ideologies, and their role in today’s world.
In a more precise way, the idea behind this whole project is as follows: the 21st Century, and more specifically the 2020s, marks the historical moment in which humanity needs, more than ever, to distinguish between real stories and fictive stories, truths and lies, understanding and deception, logical association and paranoia, hypothesis and conspiracy theories, actual reality and virtual reality, natural intelligence and artificial intelligence, reality and hyperreality, etc. I believe that literature has been preparing itself to answer these questions for three thousand years, and I believe that the moment in history when a great effort must be made to answer these questions is this one—right now.
Gustavo Faverón Patriau was born in Lima, Peru, in 1966. An author, journalist and researcher, he is also professor of Latin American Literature at Bowdoin College, Maine USA. His published works include the novels El Anticuario, Minismosca, and Madame Vargas Llosa, and a contribution to an anthology dedicated to Roberto Bolaño. Vivir Abajo has recently been published in French (Les lieux souterrains, trans. Robert Amutio) by Éditions Christian Bourgois, and is a finalist for the Prix Femina.
Tobias Ryan is the author of GLANTZ (Equus Press, 2025) and SON! Of Lord Patchogue! (Stalking Horse Press, forthcoming). His writing and translations have appeared in The Kenyon Review, TOLKA, Asymptote and elsewhere. Alongside Yanina Spizirri, he is Editor-in-Chief at minor literature[s].
Yanina Spizzirri brings the meat.
