Matías Néspolo: Seven Ways to Interview an Author

Even Matías Néspolo thought that Seven Ways to Kill a Cat might be untranslatable. It's so full of lunfardo, the rough slang of Buenos Aires, and so deeply rooted in the villas miserias, the shanty towns that surround the city. But he agrees that Frank Wynne, the book's translator, has achieved what seemed impossible. In his translation, Seven Ways to Kill a Cat transcends the context of an economically shattered Argentina, becoming a universal story about gruelling poverty, gang violence and growing up.

At the end of 2010, not long after his first novel was published, Néspolo was named one of Granta's Best Young Spanish Language novelists, a list whose English and American equivalents have included Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Mitchell and Jonathan Franzen.

In London for events about the problems of translating street language and whether his brand of social realism is the new magical realism, Matías Néspolo talked to Booktrust about new writing in Spanish, Moby Dick and the problem with happy endings.

> The Granta selection talked about your generation of writers in Spanish. Do you feel part of a distinct generation?

I don't really, but I do recognise that there is a kind of renewal that comes with each generation. Each of the writers in the Granta selection has a very different way of writing, a different way of understanding literature. They all write in very different kinds of Spanish: Spanish from Mexico, from Peru, from Buenos Aires, from Spain. But they also have a lot in common. For example, many of these writers aren't living in their own countries. That makes them more open to other traditions, to literature from other places, to the influence of the internet.

> Only 3% of books published in English are translations. Which writers in Spanish ought to be translated into English?

There are lots. Several Argentinean writers of my generation are doing very good work, like Fabián Casas and Ricardo Romero. There's a Chilean author who lives in Barcelona, who is very good, Rodrigo Díaz Cortés. He has written a great, epic novel. There's a Mexican writer, Yuri Herrera, who has just been translated. Another writer from Barcelona, Carlos Zanón, is about to be published in the US. He writes noir; I say noir, because it's much, much more than crime fiction.

> Although it's about Buenos Aires, Seven Ways to Kill a Cat was written in Barcelon. How did that change the book?

If it had been written in Buenos Aires, it would have been very different. I think the distance helped me. The book is distanced from its setting not just geographically, but historically. It's set at the end of 2001 and the start of 2002, nearly ten years before I wrote the book. This distance in space and time allowed me to rediscover a language which is being lost. I was able to take a step back, to listen, to feel the language. I felt a bit freer. I was also able to see the social context much more clearly.

> Why did you choose to set the novel in the slums of Buenos Aires during Argentina's economic crisis?

To be honest, I'm not sure if I chose the story or the story chose me. I wrote one scene, the first dialogue, and then I realised that this setting, the suburbs I knew so well, was very clear to me. The whole novel grew out of that scene.  Some authors don't write even the first line if they don't know the title, others don't write unless they know the characters and the plot. I do the opposite, I work blind.

> Some of the funniest moments of Seven Ways to Kill a Cat are when Gringo, the main character, is reading Moby Dick. Why Moby Dick?

There are two things going on here. First, it's about reading a classic in a different way. I wanted to put myself in Gringo's shoes: how does a person who hasn't been contaminated by formal education read a classic like Moby Dick? I used to teach literature in a school in a slumin Buenos Aires, very like the one in the book. The kids in the class, like Gringo, used to say things that made me think about literature in an entirely different way.

I also wanted to make a point about the negotiation between literature and life.  If you pursue the whale to the very end, you won't live to tell the tale; if you want to tell the story, you can't live life to the limits.

> You've said before that all fiction is political. In what way is thisa political novel?

It's in the way that Gringo's character evolves. I've always liked to think of the book as a classic coming of age story, what the Germans call a Bildungsroman. Gringo moves from an individual struggle, at the start, to a greater sense of being part of a group. It's not exactly class consciousness, just an awareness that his problems aren't really that different from everyone else's. I always knew that this had to be a story about learning and growing up, because I was learning so much in the process of writing it.

> The book ends very suddenly - why?

I always knew that I couldn't give the book a happy ending. I knew things couldn't end well for Gringo in that social and political context. As a writer, you've got to remember that the beginning and end of a book are always false. You've got to think about what happened to the characters before, where they come from. It's the same with the end. At the same time, I wanted didn't want to close things off to Gringo entirely, I wanted to leave a crack of light.

Seven Ways to Kill a Cat is out on Harvill Secker

Interview by Ellen Hallsworth

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