“The fictitious events narrated here are real,” Méndez Guédez writes in his epigraph to Briefcases from Caracas, “and the real facts are fictitious. The author apologizes for perhaps imagining one or the other.” In this interview, we crafted questions that ask the author to explore the threshold between fact and fiction in the process of writing the novel. His answers trace Méndez Guédez’s evolution as a writer, and discuss the consequences of dictatorship on the human spirit, language’s potential and limitations for creating meaning out of life’s at once real and imagined stories, and his unapologetic dedication to exploring both the mythical and the real in his native Venezuela.1
Wilfredo Hernández & Barbara Riess: To begin, you work in many genres and literary traditions to create your own style. How would you characterize your writing? Where does Los maletines fit into your work?
Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez: I find it difficult to characterize my writing because each book is based on common foundations: a certain type of neurotic character, somewhat laughable, somewhat roguish, placed in a conflict that can be resolved through very different writing techniques. Broadly speaking, and in different proportions, I would say that many of my books move in a realistic setting with a mythical background. There is the everyday, but also voices that touch on the sacred, sometimes even from a humorous perspective.
W.H.: While you were writing Chulapos mambo (2011) between 2006 and 2011 and finishing Arena negra (2012), you started writing Los maletines. You finished Los maletines in 2013. Can you tell us about that process? What challenges did you face as a writer?
J.C.M.G.: You mention three very different novels: a comedy, a lyrical novel, and Briefcases from Caracas, a crime novel.
With Briefcases…, I decided to take a leap—a leap towards what some at that time still called sub-genres. For me, after reading Manuel Puig, it was clear that fiction could include very different material, like from popular culture, which the literary world previously viewed with skepticism. I wanted to write the plot in Briefcases somewhere in the realm of crime fiction and spy novels, something I greatly admired in Osvaldo Soriano’s work, like A sus plantas rendido un león. This meant expanding the range of my writing, which until then might have been labeled “sentimental novels”—based on the characters’ emotional world, their small stories and cultural references, in which boleros, 1980s rock—and soap operas, of course—had their place.
In Briefcases, the writing itself came from within the spaces of those popular referents. Meaning, the story emerged from whatever I was seeing on TV, in film, and on social media, which, from a social and political point of view, held more striking and powerful anecdotal references.
Indeed, something I kept very much in mind while writing this novel was The Sting, the movie starring Redford and Newman, which I’ve watched many times. I love that backdrop of some crooks trying to get revenge on some even worse crooks.
The challenge was, as always, to be myself while at the same time becoming a different writer from what I had been up to that point.
W.H. & B.R.: In Briefcases, you deepen your exploration of Venezuelan culture under Chavism, which you began with the publication of Tal vez la lluvia in 2009. You expand on what could be called an “inventory of Chavista criminality” and document a very complete record of everyday life in Caracas during the years leading up to Hugo Chávez’s death. Can you explain your process of documenting the events in the novel while also managing such a nuanced representation of the multiple symbolic registers in Venezuelan culture?
J.C.M.G.: Dictatorships are an evil that works through accumulation. They heap such an amount of humiliation, injury, and torment on people that there comes a time when their victims are left stunned and confused. So, in a way, I was explicitly trying to keep a mental chronology of the most aberrant moments of Chavism at that time; I kept mental and written notes. One day, I read a report about a Venezuelan military officer who had disappeared in Spain with illegal money, and then there was the arrest of a Venezuelan with a suitcase full of undeclared money intended to influence Argentine politics. I realized, noticing this repetition, reinvention, or reimagination actually taking place on the ground, that there was a story there. Because it turns out that the very same military that gained power in Venezuelan politics by proclaiming itself anti-corruption went on to unleash, along with their civilian allies, perhaps the worst wave of corruption of the twenty-first century.
When I started writing Briefcases, I realized that many of those loose pieces of information I had been gathering fit together well to tell a story. The Venezuelan government’s subjugation to the Castro dictatorship, torture, the criminal groups infighting to gain benefits in the Chavista regime, the rise of paramilitarism, and the flow of Venezuelan petrodollars to interfere politically in many other countries—that is the story.
The situation itself was a crime novel; all it needed was a narrative order. So, that’s what I tried to do. And I hope the story reaches beyond its immediate socio-historical references, like Soriano’s novels, and continues to be read as a picaresque tale that could happen anywhere, at any time, an updated narrative of the David and Goliath struggle.
W.H.: The main characters in Briefcases are atypical. Donizetti is a bureaucrat with an exquisite taste in music and literature. Meanwhile, Manuel, a gay radio announcer, is a deep connoisseur of boxing and has extraordinary spiritualist abilities. How did these two characters come about? Did they emerge simultaneously? What was the process of creating them like?
J.C.M.G.: In novels, for me, storytelling is about having a character to whom things happen. A character with singular peculiarities.
I knew people who fully embraced Chavism overnight and quickly became complicit in its abuses. For them, the dictatorship was a way to reinvent themselves—to change professions, ideas, and even their life story. That’s how Donizetti emerged—a regular guy who, in his quest for economic survival, becomes a loyal servant of the regime. A backhanded liar creating a parallel reality from inside an official news agency until he feels the effects up close. When his children are affected, he decides to turn the world upside down to save them. But, deep down, we storytellers are children of Don Quixote, where all the adventures are carried out by a duo, a pair, so I needed a counterpart. That’s where Manuel appeared. From a stylistic point of view, Manuel also allowed me, every so often, to refresh the narration with a change in language and worldview.
I enjoyed having this duo in operation, and realized I was writing something perhaps not too common in Spanish-language literature: a story about friendship, about two people who are very different from each other, who, simply out of affection for one another, share a common goal—nothing more than stealing money from the “bad guys.”
B.R. & W.H.: Throughout the novel, Manuel reflects on his adolescent hero, “El Ñato,” a criminal from his neighborhood. In the translation, we chose to call him “The Boxer” because the characteristic described by the word ñato—the flat nose—is shared with his boxing heroes. What were your intentions in creating this “hero” and his fate in the novel?
J.C.M.G.: For me, the best literature isn’t meant for educating, condemning, or teaching good manners to its readers; I’m drawn to literature that peers into the abyss.
I grew up in a working-class neighborhood that I adore, but it’s a dangerous place. Wonderful, incredible people lived there, and coexisted with what we call “malandros” in Venezuela. A kind of punk, but threateningly strong, cruel, and with a total lack of scruples. At the same time, their life on the edge—their short, reckless existence—produced a weird fascination along with the fear.
At some point, I discovered that a neighbor I occasionally said “hi” to, gave rides to, and talked baseball with was one of the local crime bosses. I found out he’d been wounded from a shootout with another gang, and I was shocked. He never said anything about it, of course. But for some reason unknown to me, whenever we crossed paths, he was very kind, a good neighbor. I think he eventually died. I wanted to give my character Manuel that naïve belief that the power of the “malandro” can also save you, that he is a kind of benevolent villain who, for some magical reason, would protect you from the world.
B.R. & W.H.: Reading Briefcases is stimulating on multiple levels: the constant memories mixed in with the present, the synesthesia intertwining bodily and emotional experience. For example, Donizetti processes the world around him with a keen sensibility that enriches the narration from his point of view. Meanwhile, Manuel yearns for an elusive authenticity in language, in his words: “How absurd is it that the whole world suffers from the same thing in the same words? I’m revolted by a sentimentality incapable of finding a new syntax.” Are these examples of your own sense of the possibilities and limits of language and writing?
J.C.M.G.: Octavio Paz, among others, depicts the artists’ struggle with language; our beloved tool often fails to express what we want or even hinders what we wish to convey. I experience this with those novels or stories where I get lost because the language gets in the way of my reading and the story itself. And you always live in fear that the same might happen to you with your readers.
On the other hand, I’m drawn to the language writers like Mónica Ojeda, Ana Blandiana, or Clarice Lispector use, one that creates a rare transparency from which other worlds and other visions emerge.
Indeed, being self-evident is essential. Storytelling isn’t simply about having a good story; to tell the story, you need to find the exact language, and then be capable of transforming it once you do. Narrating is about creating adequate structures in which to reorder and rearrange. I think each story demands its own language and its own order, although, of course, for me, the important thing is to stress the verb; to tell a story where a lot happens. This is something I started paying more attention to after hearing Guillermo Arriaga talk about the way he likes to write.
It’s something I tried to achieve in Briefcases, to make the reader always want to keep going, because even though there are logical moments to pause and breathe, a few pages later things happen to make the world start moving again and the action continue.
W.H. & B.R.: Last question. Los maletines came out in 2014. Since then, you’ve published numerous books. One, La ola detenida, explores Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro’s first presidency. In one of your more recent works, La diosa del agua: Cuentos y mitos del Amazonas (2020), you delve into mythical themes in Venezuelan culture. Do you see this shift signaling the future trajectory of your work?
J.C.M.G.: Georges Simenon (1903-1989) once said that his work could be divided into two types: stories with guardrails, books in a specific genre, and stories without. Novels of a different kind, centered on characters who journey to the limits of their very selves.
I recently realized that my current and future work will travel through these two universes: the “real” books, like Briefcases, somewhat close to crime fiction—political, humorous, and intimate narratives about characters sensitive to the agony of everyday life. But I’ll also write books on the “threshold”—a term I borrow from the Spanish novelist Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga—that approach the lyrical, mythical, and sacred—a much more elusive type of writing.
La diosa del agua is connected to this second type of writing, which also reappears in my most recent novel, Roman de la isla Bararida. It is a fragmented story set on a magical island in a sort of Medieval Age, where two characters experience an intense love story told through very different forms such as Arthurian tales, moral stories, tragedy, fairy tales, pre-Hispanic myths, and the world of witchcraft I encountered in my childhood surrounding María Lionza, the indigenous Venezuelan goddess who, from Mount Sorte, protects her faithful, animals, and crops.
I see my future writing navigating between both of these realms.
1 In LALT’s June 2017 issue, translator Katie Brown recalled that Méndez Guédez has described his fiction as “not autobiographical but ‘autogeographical.’” This interview delves into this descriptor as well, and updates the author’s thoughts since that time.
Translated by Barbara Riess
