Jaime Collyer (Santiago de Chile, 1955) is a man of many titles: he is a psychologist, holds a master’s degree in development sociology, and also serves as a translator—having brought Shakespeare, John Donne, and Aldous Huxley to Spanish-speaking audiences. He has received numerous literary awards, among them the Altazor for El habitante del cielo; the Premio Municipal de Santiagofor La voz del amo y otros títulos; the Grinzane Cavour for El infiltrado; the Jauja de Cuentos in Spain; and the Premio de la Academia Chilena de la Lengua de Chile. All of these honors recognize his work in a profession for which he holds no formal degree, yet they have earned him substantial recognition across the Spanish-speaking world and in the United States, where he has been published in English.
Here he reflects on his life, on literature, and on his latest novel, Agua que no has de beber, which centers on glacier melt and the struggle of Indigenous groups to combat it.
María Eugenia Meza: How did you arrive at this theme?
Jaime Collyer: Through a testimonial article by a French journalist about the glaciers surrounding La Paz, whose retreat has been so dramatic that they are at risk of disappearing altogether. It also discussed the glaciologists and experts who have spent years in the region trying to address this problem. The urgency of this situation and the quiet dedication of these individuals made me feel that they deserved to be honored in a work that would make their efforts visible. I first visited Bolivia in 1977, and it struck me as the living heart of the continent—a heart that beats steadily, yet at times rests quietly at its center. It is a country that, through its heterogeneity, embodies the impressive past and painful history of Latin America. When I learned of the melting glaciers, I had the feeling that I should return to Bolivia thematically.
M.E.M: Literature gravitates toward what overflows—what goes beyond the limits—while psychology tries to avoid it. Is that reflected in the novel’s characters?
J.C.: More than in this novel, I think that opposition is reflected in my own life. After graduating with a degree in psychology, I realized that the field tends toward restoring individuals to normality, saving them from their anxieties and the like. At the same time, I discovered that literature leaves a door open to wander freely into madness and the anomalous. So, I left psychology behind. As some might say, I had stopped being useful to it.
M.E.M.: How did you go about constructing the character of Nana, the “heroine,” along with Rovira? Did you feel the need to make a woman stand out in a masculine world? One could even say that Rovira is the yin and Coppens, the antagonist, is the yang of this story.
J.C.: Nana emerged from the need for a presence like hers and a sensibility of that kind: a woman rooted in the land and its people, connected to the local mythology through her beliefs and background as an anthropologist, descended from Indigenous ancestry on her father’s side and European on her mother’s. I wanted her to embody the continent’s ethno-cultural hybridity. Rovira shares that yin side with her, but in his case it’s tainted by Coppens’s patriarchal greed. I think your yin-yang reading is very apt, though it wasn’t something I consciously set out to do when creating the characters.
M.E.M.: How do you envision the process of climate change unfolding? Will it lead to social breakdown, or will it happen so fast that it will force a sense of solidarity?
J.C.: I fear that it will occur slowly, and that’s the worst possible scenario, because it gives predatory corporations time to regroup a thousand times without changing their behavior in the slightest, and without allowing much room for global solidarity. Kundera already expressed this in The Art of the Novel: it is possible that nothing is calmer than the end.
M.E.H.: Then where does the epic come in? Is there still a possibility for humanity to find its way out—perhaps the great global epic of saving the planet?
J.C.: The possibility exists, but it will only come about when capitalism exhausts its cycles of production and crisis, and when it finally leaves behind this current phase of barbarity and genocide in which we are living.
M.E.H.: What do you expect from a U.S. audience with this novel?
J.C.: North American readers used to be very cultured and perceptive, but that seems to have declined over the past few decades. I just hope that a thoughtful reading public still exists, and that they don’t approach the novel as yet another display of the exoticism that average Americans so enjoy, with all its prejudices and paternalism in tow.
M.E.H.: What are you like when it comes to the writing process? Are you disciplined?
J.C.: I’m borderline obsessive. In my twenties, I had already started to develop a writing routine that consisted of producing an average of five hundred words a day and then setting aside specific blocks of time for revisions. And I’ve continued working that way ever since.
M.E.H.: How do the words and the events of a story come to you?
J.C.: I usually have an underlying theme in mind and from there the setting emerges, along with the point of view I’ll choose, which tends to be that of one or several of the characters. That perspective works like a kind of subjective camera from which the events of the story—what happens, the plot—gradually unfold. The first thing to surface is a dramatic and self-defining image; in the case of this novel, it was that of a hand emerging from the subsoil and catching the protagonist’s attention. In a way, that image contains in condensed form everything that will follow: the struggle to protect this still-surviving snowy subsoil against the massive corporate interests that threaten the region. The same interests that, ultimately, explain the appearance of those bodies beneath the glacier.
M.E.H.: What is “the word”?
J.C.: That’s a difficult question. In a certain sense, and for my line of work, it is everything: the source of our personal liberation and, at the same time, of our potential oppression (when it is used for that purpose).
M.E.H.: You say you’re better at maneuvering in the short story form, yet you have written remarkable novels. What are the strengths—or structural demands—of each form?
J.C.: From my experience, with novels, sequence is crucial—the events gradually foreshadow the unfolding conclusion to come. In short stories, everything is more spontaneous and uncertain; one never fully knows where a story is headed, and that uncertainty is very gratifying when you’re the one immersed in it.
M.E.H.: Can literature make a country—or, for that matter, the workings of the world—more comprehensible?
J.C.: I think so, as long as that understanding isn’t pursued too deliberately. The greatest insights into the world, I think, emerge spontaneously, almost by accident, and only in those cases do they act as a true source of light. Cervantes makes a critical moment of the Spanish empire understandable through the story of a crazy old man who wants to save the world. It’s something that he certainly didn’t intend, yet it happened—and magnificently at that.
M.E.H.: You were one of the most important of the up-and-coming Chilean narrative authors of the nineties. Has any of that momentum persisted? Did it give rise to a generation, a movement, a new literature? Or are they separate pieces of a narrative puzzle that might someday be seen in full?
J.C.: I’m not sure. I tend to believe that there was a very healthy dispersal of those efforts, and that everyone has followed their own path—and for me, it’s better that way. In a way, it would be liberating to finally rid oneself of that somewhat artificial label of the New Chilean Narrative.
Translated by Iyan Smith Williams
JAIME COLLYER (Santiago, 1955) is an author of short stories and novels whose work has been translated into multiple languages. In a note on the U.S. edition of Gente al acecho (People on the Prowl), The New York Times called him “a born storyteller.” He is also a psychologist, a translator, and an academic. He has is the author of the novels El infiltrado, Cien pájaros volando, El habitante del cielo (Premio Altazor de Narrativa), La fidelidad presunta de las partes, Fulgor, Gente en las sombras, and, most recently, Agua que no has de beber. His books of short stories include Gente al acecho, La bestia en casa, La voz del amo, and Swingers (Premio Academia Chilena de la Lengua). He has also forayed into historical writing, and has published two volumes of research into sexuality in Chile from its beginnings.
