Diego Recoba (Montevideo, 1981) is the co-founder of the press La Propia Cartonera, which published over a hundred titles between 2009 and 2019. He has also written for outlets including La Diaria, Brecha, El País Cultural (Uruguay), Cinéfilo (Argentina), and Zona de obras (Spain). He is the author of the prose works Locas pasiones (2019), Sobredosis (2020), and El oso (2021), as well as a number of poetry collections. His latest book, published in April 2025, is titled Antártida y sus galaxias. In 2024, Recoba was awarded Uruguay’s Premio Nacional de Literatura for his novel El cielo visible (2023), which also earned him the Premio Bartolomé Hidalgo the same year. This 491-page text was selected for the 2024 Mapa de las Lenguas initiative, organized by Penguin Random House’s Alfaguara press in order to cultivate the broader circulation of Spanish-language works beyond their countries of origin. At an intensely busy time that found him representing Uruguay at book fairs in Buenos Aires and Bogotá, as well as launching his latest book, Recoba spoke with us virtually from Paris (where he now lives) to explore the many branches of this lush novel on Uruguayan and Latin American identity in contexts of territorial displacement.
Jorge Sarasola: For a start, could you tell us about your work on La Propia Cartonera?
Diego Recoba: La Propia Cartonera is a publishing house I founded in 2009 with Gonzalo Ledesma in Nuevo París, a neighborhood on the west side of Montevideo, a working-class neighborhood, a neighborhood where projects like that usually don’t come about. Rather than moving in orbit around ideas from the center, we wanted to find a way to create our own center. That’s why we decided to adopt the cartonero model, which emerged a few years before in Argentina and has since spread rapidly through Latin America. We tried to think up a horizontal model where every part of the book was represented, and to try to downplay the aura that surrounds authors and editors as the supposed gods of the book-making process. The one time César Aira gave a presentation in Uruguay, he did it in Nuevo París. A lot of people told us they didn’t go see him because they thought our announcement was a lie, a falsehood, a wind-up; it was that unbelievable that something like that would happen in Nuevo París.
J.S.: It’s interesting that you spearheaded a project like La Propia Cartonera and now El cielo visible was published by a giant of Spanish-language publishing like Penguin Random House. What can you say about that transition?
D.R.: I was a real big-mouth—I still am—and back then I had access to media outlets. I would really preach about the need to defend independent publishing and self-managed projects. I also really preached against the big publishing groups. But my most forceful discourse started to grow more nuanced a long time ago. Sometimes people think that, by splitting hairs, you’re changing your position, but in actual fact you’re just allowing the schema you had at the start to grow more complex. I realized that a great many of the problems I was criticizing at the big publishing groups might be just as present at independent presses. At the least, I had to stop thinking of the world as good versus bad. I didn’t start thinking Penguin and Planeta were totally wonderful, I just started adding nuance. Then they called me from Penguin and suggested publishing one of my novels. I thought I could make use of the freedom they were offering me so as not to abandon my reflections. I wanted to position myself at the center of the problem, at the center of that contradiction, and make it more visible.
J.S.: We could use that contradiction to enter into the contents of El cielo visible. During the narrator’s youth, the prologue to Roberto Arlt’s El lanzallamas seems to inspire in him a certain romanticization of the writer’s vocation, where “there is no context and no precarity that could hold him back.” But, over time, the increasing precarity of Uruguay’s literary scene seems to threaten to derail his career. What do you make of that tension between the quasi-inherent individuality of writing and collective struggle as a tool with which to improve working conditions?
D.R.: That’s a hypothesis of mine, from which I haven’t shifted: I think the precarious state in which writers find themselves in Uruguay undoubtedly has to do with their lack of collectivization. And the lack of collectivization has to do with the idea—which is full of fissures and cracks—that writing is an individual, intimate task. I’ve harped on about the idea that the author should be considered a worker. When you talk to artists from other disciplines, they don’t have such a hard time recognizing that. The book industry’s weakest link is still the author. When things get tough, it is still authors who go unrecognized as workers, who have no legal tools at their disposal, who don’t get social security.
J.S.: Speaking of authors, the protagonist and narrator of El cielo visible is named Diego Recoba and is a writer. He’s a fictionalized version, of course, who doesn’t necessarily match your own biography, but how comfortable or uncomfortable did you feel including a number of personal facets in the novel?
D.R.: It’s very uncomfortable inasmuch as all those tensions you mention are unclear to present-day readers, even to a specialized audience. It’s truly exhausting because they always identify you with what the book’s narrator says to the letter. That’s why I like to make a lot of things up, to such an extent that the narrator expresses opinions I don’t share. Beyond all the bad stuff, there is something good, and it’s this idea of unfolding and multiplying. It’s healing for both the reader and the writer; I use fiction to resolve my own problems. All my fears, my cowardice, and my courage is present in the narrator, and the narrator might overcome them or not, but at least he questions them.
J.S.: What captivated me most about the book’s style was how it confuses the reader with that contrast between quasi-autobiographical immediacy and the fantastical elements we find in the text.
D.R.: Yes, I think I know my reader, and I try, as if in a game of chess, to stay a couple of moves ahead. At a certain point in the book, I need people to stop Googling, whether out of exhaustion or because they have stopped believing what I’m saying, or believing anything I say. But I want people to be willing to play. Maybe this is less common in other Latin American countries, but in Uruguay, in the most Westernized countries, it happens often. What is this negation of the strange? For me, the negation of the strange leads to an absolute impoverishment of lived experience, meaning everything seems unrealistic to us. And why? It seems unrealistic based on our own experience living in contemporary, capitalist, Western societies. But, in reality, if you think about it, there’s any number of strange things I include in the novel that are stories I’ve been told, or true stories from other times, from the pre-Internet age.
J.S.: If we approach El cielo visible from an aesthetic standpoint, the idea of montage seems to be a focal point of the novel’s construction.
D.R.: El cielo visible is a child of its process. In recent years, I’ve met artists who practice visual art, film, theatre, and I’ve realized that they research very differently from how writers do; we tend to be more focused. The notion of the stockpile was at the center: the idea of putting together, putting together, putting together objects, discourses, information, facts, and then seeing what comes out. I mean to say, letting the vegetation grow out of proportion. It used to make me suffer, I had to get used to something more jungle-like, more excessive. This echoes through the prose itself, which ends up becoming more torrential. And it gives you a terrible sense of anxiety because you think: what am I supposed to do with all this material? I studied film, though I never worked in that field, and I realized that I had to work with cinematic montage more than text editing. I had to follow in the footsteps of the old montagists on celluloid tape, cutting and pasting. I used a room where I spread out all the material on the walls and the floor. It was chaos, but I realized you have to give up control. I feel that my literature has to go ever further toward the opposite of the author’s control over his own voice.
J.S.: I thought I found four “Parises” in the novel. There’s the Nuevo París of Montevideo, whose story the narrator tries to unearth. There’s the contemporary Paris, where the protagonist moves. There’s the Paris of the second half of the twentieth century, seen through the eyes of a migrant, Uruguayan writer Mirtha/Marta Paesaggi. And there’s the Paris of the nineteenth century, of the kidnapped Charrúas. Why does Paris have this central place of prominence?
D.R.: The first—and most obvious answer—comes from understanding the meaning of “Paris” in the name of the neighborhood where I was born. The fact that my neighborhood has “Paris” in its name has to do with a story they used to tell us, which I researched and realized was not true. Secondly, the literary tradition of which I form part—and of which Uruguay forms part—is the French literary tradition. This was apparent to me at university, where Paris was much more than an aesthetic guiding light of great authors; it was the guiding light of our modern state and our institutions themselves. Thirdly, in Paris (where I live now) I saw something that struck me as very interesting, which is the prevalence of multiculturality, which saturates this novel: diversity, hybridity, and contamination, which is something that really inspires me when it comes to notions of identity.
J.S.: Speaking of inhabiting other spaces and other languages, much of the novel is made up of translations from French to Spanish of texts by Mirtha/Marta, completed by the narrator. What role does translation play in your work?
D.R.: The novel talks about identity as a story, memory as a story, the past as a story, but also about translation itself as a constructed story, both fictional and collective. This takes us back to what we were talking about at the start: the idea that literature is the individual art par excellence. But there is nothing individual about it. It is, instead, an art of dialogue, an art of exchange, and translation is one clear example of this. The notion of translation is also related to the idea of unfolding that we mentioned at the start. In this novel, there are three registers: the narrator’s register, Marta/Mirtha’s register, and the register of the translation of her texts. The translator tries to have his own translator’s voice, using the voice of another. It’s a totally strange, somewhat parasitic affair.
J.S.: The idea of the search appears in all this novel’s branches. The search for the origins of Nuevo París, for the narrator’s family tree, for Mirtha/Marta’s texts, for the descendants of the Charrúas held captive in Paris. Could your literature itself be characterized as a search?
D.R.: Yes, all my novels are about searches. It’s the theme of our contemporary societies: from the search for those who have disappeared in dictatorial contexts to the search for a world that disappeared with the advent of the Internet. It has to do with our living in an age in which, supposedly, there are no longer any mysteries. In my case, I’m interested in the adventure novel, where the character travels and moves from place to place over the course of their search. But it’s also an age-old theme. For example, what are two of the fundamental works of Uruguayan music? For me, they are “Brindis por Pierrot” (Jaime Ross, 1985) and “Guitarra negra” (Alfredo Zitarrosa, 1977). Both of these works focus on those who are no longer here, on that which is sought. In my case, I focus on the people we can’t find in an age when it is supposedly impossible for someone to be lost.
J.S.: In closing, could you give us a synopsis of your latest novel, Antártida y sus galaxias (2025)?
D.R.: In actual fact, I wrote it before El cielo visible. I had already started with the idea of blowing up the plot, but I hadn’t gotten to the bottom of it like I did in El cielo visible. This novel is the story of a young Uruguayan woman in the eighties who tries to put together a pop group, with all the difficulties this implies in a place where this genre didn’t exist, and in a music scene dominated by men. None of the precepts of pop was acceptable in Uruguay’s post-dictatorship context of ruins, gray, impoverishment, and pessimism in the eighties. So it’s the story of a defeat that leads to Antarctica, as in all my novels: a journey across the world in search of a dream.
