Y_our story in this week’s issue, “The Size of Things,” involves an adult who seems to regress to childhood. Should we read it as a supernatural story or a metaphorical one?_
There is a gesture at the end toward the fantastic, it’s true, but it’s only a wink, and the story could all be read as merely a feeling of the narrator’s. It could be the story of an adult man trying to escape his mother’s control, who, in his desperation, becomes infantilized and takes refuge with another family. Really, if there is anything beyond that, it’s an idea that I’d like to trigger in the reader’s mind, but that isn’t formally written on the page.
We have the sense that Enrique’s mother has resisted his growing up—that she tries to keep him a child by asserting her power over him, physically and verbally. Is that what’s going on?
Yes. Even though we only actually meet that possessive and authoritarian mother in the final lines, it’s something that we can gradually deduce from Enrique himself, from the beginning of the story.
Do you think the couple who run the toy store are complicit in what happens to Enrique—or just innocent observers?
Their intentions are good, but they end up being passive accomplices to Enrique Duvel’s regression. Maybe it’s because for them it’s easier to deal with a child than with an adult, or maybe—because they seem to be a childless couple—they have a need to care for someone else, to feel needed themselves. In any case, it’s a strange relationship that clearly fills a need for all three of them.
Were you thinking of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” when you wrote this?
I wasn’t thinking of it, but, it’s true, the two pieces have points in common. It did occur to me, rereading the story for this publication, that the last line is very much like the ending of Roald Dahl’s story “The Man from the South”: both narrators have a revelation while looking at another character’s hand. And it’s strange because “The Size of Things” is an old story—I must have been twenty-two or twenty-three when I wrote it, and I read Roald Dahl many years later. I love it when those things happen. I like to think that at some point Roald and I passed through the same place—some corner of the collective unconscious—that caught our attention in a similar way.
In Argentina, the story appeared as part of a collection of stories, in which many things are not exactly what they seem or undergo transformations. Is the idea of metamorphosis important to your work?
Yes, it was for that book in particular. Writing it, I was at a stage when I felt as though ideas, to be strong, needed the power of more classic forms. It was a learning stage—though I’m still learning, really. But I do feel that, although the things I’m interested in writing about haven’t changed in the slightest, the forms through which I approach them have, and doors have gradually opened.
Do you have any models when you’re writing short stories? Any favorite stories you keep going back to?
I have my list of favorite stories, of course, although it changes every year. But I am fairly intuitive in my writing, and I feel that the clues to how each story should be written lie within the idea for the story itself. Even so, I think that past readings, even the stories I have ostensibly forgotten, are always there working silently in my mind—even if, when I sit down to write, I’m not thinking of them directly.
Your novel “Fever Dream” was recently published in the U.S. How does the experience of being published here differ from your experience in Argentina?
Being translated into English, for a young Latin American author, is a kind of prize; in the eyes of Spanish-speaking critics and readers, it’s almost a consecration. And this, along with the novel’s nomination for the Man Booker International Prize, has given it an unexpected push, which likewise led to translations into other languages. If the book had remained in the Spanish-speaking world only, it would have been difficult for it to reach so many readers. So I feel very grateful for and happy about everything that has happened since the book’s English translation.
(Translated, from the Spanish, by Megan McDowell.)
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