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