David Naimon: Today's episode of Between the Covers is brought to you in part by the nonprofit press Fonograf Editions. This year, Fonograf celebrates its 10th anniversary. Since their first releases in 2016 by Eileen Myles and Rae Armantrout, the press has put out over 55 projects spanning genres and mediums: LPs, EPs, and cassettes, alongside chapbooks, broadsides, and full-length books. In 2026 alone, Fonograf is releasing 10 full-length titles from both canonical and debut authors. To help carry the press into its next 10 years, Fonograf is raising $20,000. And thanks to a generous donor, every gift made in 2026 will be matched up to $10,000, doubling your impact on independent publishing. Give at the Friend level and you'll receive a year of membership, your name printed in the colophon of every 2027 Fonograf Editions release. Higher tiers include back-catalog selections, broadsides featuring poems by Eileen Myles, Brandon Shimoda, Mark Leidner, and Alice Notley, and even help fund an entirely new book or record. If you believe in publishing that moves between the page and the record player, head to fonografeditions.com/support and make a tax-deductible donation today. Today's episode is also brought to you by Water in the Desert: A Pilgrimage by acclaimed agrarian activist and ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan. Celebrated as a world visionary by Utne Reader and a lyrical poet of biodiversity by Mother Jones, Gary Paul Nabhan has authored dozens of books and been awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant. Water in the Desert is a profoundly inspiring account of interspecies belonging, collaborative conservation, and the sacred work of caring for the Earth. He traces his childhood growing up as a Lebanese American boy in the dunes along Lake Michigan's southern shore to his interest in earth-based spiritual practices that led him to take vows as an ecumenical monk. "A refreshing account of kinship with other species, Water in the Desert brings science to the service of land and culture, showing us what it looks like to reciprocate the gifts of nature with gifts of head, hands, and heart," writes Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass. Water in the Desert is available from Milkweed Editions at milkweed.org. Today's episode begins a new phenomenon for me as an interviewer on the show. It's part of a small but significant upcoming wave of episodes going into the fall. As part of curating a year's roster of guests, I create an artificial bottleneck for return guests so that the vast majority of guests have never been on the show in a given year, and perhaps four or five are coming back for the second, or much more rarely, the third time. If you were to ask me in the abstract about specific writers I love—for instance, if you told me I wouldn't have had Garth Greenwell on for his last book, or not have him on for every book of his, for that matter, or not have had Kelly Link on for her long-awaited first novel, or not have had Kaveh Akbar on for his move into prose with his book Martyr!, or after the amazing conversation with Percival Everett that he wouldn't be back on for his much-celebrated novel James—all of that would seem inconceivable to me, even though it is all true. But for the most part, the trade-off's upside, having remarkable first encounters with Cecilia Vicuña and Saul Williams, Olga Ravn, and Robert Macfarlane, has made sense. But something has changed this year, and it's not by design, but rather, I think, by time, where it has been so long since I've talked to some writers I love that the dam has broken on this artificial constraint. Not entirely. The show will still preference new guests, if a little less so. But I've measured my excitement all year to talk to three or four writers who I haven't talked to in over a decade, who were formative encounters for me as an interviewer and as a writer in what feels like a different era now, to have that opportunity to account for our time apart, to measure the passage of time together, and for me internally to measure how the show has changed since that first time we talked. Today is the first of those with the remarkable Valeria Luiselli. Perhaps I'm her ideal reader, as I love everything she has written. I love the serious playfulness of her work. So it's no small thing for me to say that the book we discuss today, Beginning Middle End, is my favorite of hers. Before we begin, whether this is one of your first encounters with the show or whether you're a longtime listener, consider transforming yourself, like the shape-shifting god Proteus that we discuss today does, consider transforming yourself from a listener to a listener-supporter by joining the Between the Covers community. Every supporter gets resources with every episode. Every listener-supporter is invited to help shape who we invite going forward. And then there are a ton of other things to choose from, whether access to the Bonus Audio Archive or the Milkweed Early Reader subscription. You can check it all out at patreon.com/betweenthecovers. And now for today's conversation with none other than Valeria Luiselli.

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David Naimon: Good morning and welcome to Between the Covers. I'm David Naimon, your host. Today's guest, Valeria Luiselli, earned a BA in philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a doctorate in comparative literature from Columbia University. She's been a professor in the Romance Languages and Literatures Department at Hofstra University, taught in City College of New York's Beyond Identity program, which develops political solidarity between young women of color from both immigrant and U.S.-based minority communities, has been a visiting professor at Harvard and a longstanding one at Bard College. Her books include Faces in the Crowd, Sidewalks, and the book she first came on the show for, The Story of My Teeth. Since then, she has published her American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, a book that tells the story of Luiselli's time volunteering as an interpreter for undocumented children fleeing violence in Central and South America and seeking residency in the United States. Brooklyn Magazine says of it, "Translating language, experience, bodies across space and time, thought and culture, Luiselli wants us to join in this work. Tell Me How It Ends calls for a wholesale reimagining of both the forces that have shaped contemporary immigration into the United States, as well as the way many Americans, disconnected from fact, picture it. It calls, moreover, for action." In 2019, she won the MacArthur Genius Grant. And just to prove her genius, the next year she released Lost Children Archive, lauded by everyone from Tommy Orange to Barack Obama, and heralded by The Atlantic as one of the great American novels of the past hundred years. Jordan Kisner said of it, "The migration in Lost Children Archive is constructed as an inversion of the American frontier fable—its anti-myth, its interrogator. The book itself is attempting to solve a heady problem: how to account for the past and the present at once, how to hear the people who remain undocumented, how to rescue what is lost and also make sense of what and who are still here." Since then, Luiselli was invited to be part of the Future Library Project, where 100 writers over the course of a century, one writer each year, will be invited to write for the future, having the work stored and preserved in a Norwegian forest, unread until the year 2114. Her work Force of Resonance joins books by past Between the Covers guests Amitav Ghosh and David Mitchell, as well as Margaret Atwood, Elif Shafak, and others. She's also the co-creator, with Ricardo Giraldo and Leo Heiblum, of the sound art project Echoes from the Borderlands, sound studies of the U.S.-Mexico border that employ field recordings, interviews, and archival materials, engaging with tourists, miners, historical reenactors, and Indigenous peoples to create a sonic documentary fiction that looks at everything from environmental destruction to reproductive rights to genocide. We're lucky to have Valeria back on the show today to talk about her latest book, Beginning Middle End, which Publishers Weekly, in its starred review, declares "a masterpiece." Samanta Schweblin adds, "This book is an animal from the future with five hearts beating at once—daughter, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and reader. Each time one of the hearts beats faster, it touches all the others. An instant classic. Valeria Luiselli at her bravest and most sincere." Finally, Tommy Orange says, "This book is a profound meditation on parenthood and the nature of change, the essence of story, of accounts and why we account, what should be accounted for. And at its core is the impossible attempt to return something lost and unknowable—something from the past that sees into the future. I loved it, beginning middle and end. It’s a beautiful, maybe perfect novel." Welcome back to Between the Covers, Valeria Luiselli.

Valeria Luiselli: I am so happy to be here, David, after so many years.

DN: Eleven years.

VL: Oh my God. [laughter] Yeah. I mean, this is a podcast that I love for so many reasons. I teach a lot of my courses using episodes. I think one of the things I enjoy most about it is how you take time. You really take time for this. There's no rush. There is a sense of time, of being in time when one is in this podcast that I cherish more and more in our days.

DN: Well, the 11 years since we talked feel, in many ways, like a century or centuries, given how much has changed, I'm sure, in your own life, but also in all of our lives at the same time.

VL: I'm trying to remember where we met. Was it at your studio, or was it in a hotel lobby?

DN: No, it was at a community radio in Portland, and you were here for the book festival.

VL: Oh, it was at a community. I don't know why I have this memory of discussing Borges with you in the lobby. [laughter] Maybe Borges dreamt that.

DN: It hasn't happened yet, but it's going to happen. I'm confident. [laughter] Well, I imagine this likely is one of your first English-language conversations about the book. You're returning from a massive tour, first in Italy and Europe in May, followed by a tour in Spanish in Mexico and South America. I imagine it might be too early for you to speak to the different ways the book is being received or framed or discussed between the Anglophone world and the non-Anglophone world. I'm curious if the conversations have differed, or the questions have differed, or the way the book has been framed has differed in Italian versus in Spanish, if it has.

VL: That's a great question. And also, just to tell you a little more anecdotally, it was a very difficult switch for me to go from Spanish to Italian because I do speak Italian, but I'm not really native. I remember when I was still on the first leg of the book tour in Spain, I decided to make some notes in Italian about the book and some of the ideas. But I wasn't feeling very confident about how I was writing them or even just how to speak them more naturally. So I asked a friend of mine, Laura Gandolfi, who's a great reader and a brilliant mind, if she could read my answers out loud to me in Italian. And, like a madwoman, for the entire time I was in Italy, I would play her voice reading out these notes while I was in my hotel room getting dressed. [laughter] And it's actually very beautiful, the way that if language travels back through sound, it comes in very deeply, right? And then every time I spoke in Italian, I heard her voice in my head, her cadence, and was actually able to navigate during the interview presentations in Italian. And yes, there I did sense some differences, of course, between the Spanish-speaking world and the Italian-speaking world in the questions asked, but especially in the background of readership, right? I think that those differences may even be more stark between the Romance languages and the Anglophone world. But as you said, this is really the beginning for me in speaking about this book in English. One thing is, for example, that an Italian readership is very deeply acquainted with classical mythology, more so than the Spanish-speaking world even, although also the Spanish-speaking world. A book like Virgil's Aeneid that I converse with, not very deeply, but I converse with it in the novel, is 101 canon in Italy. So my take on the Aeneid was coming up against a background of very solidified ideas about the Aeneid being a book about the foundation of Rome, for example, and the foundation of a patriarchal notion of empire, and almost a deep knowledge of it from the readership, but also one that was a little suspicious of it because of its cultural weight. And that was an interesting conversation. I would actually ask people in some of my book talks what the relationship was to that book. And everyone had read it, but there was also a resistance to it, but an interesting one, one that I learned a lot from in conversation with people. And then, for example, I think here in our Anglophone world, and maybe even to some degree in the Spanish-speaking world, reading Greek myths to your children is not maybe the most normal practice, but everyone in Italy was read myths as a kid by their parents. So we are definitely navigating very different backdrops in terms of how we grew up as children and what is in our deeper subconscious. I guess we, when I say we, I'm halfway because I'm here and not there. I'm Anglo, not Anglo. I grew up in American schools, but I've always felt also a little foreign. But for us, night reading was fairy tales. So our mythology, our deeper scaffolding of myth fantasy is more the fairy tale world, whilst in the Italian and in the Spanish-speaking world, Greek and Roman mythology is just a little more everyday stuff.

DN: Well, sometime in the year after we talked, I reached out to you to ask for your favorite places to go and to eat in Mexico City. I've been going there for, I don't know, 40 years perhaps. And I prefer now to see it through other people's eyes at this point. And one of the things you suggested at the time was to go to the Italian embassy for an espresso, which we did. And this advice and your last name made me presume you came from Italian ancestry, or partly, that perhaps, like your mother-writer protagonist in this novel, whose great-grandmother is Sicilian, you too were Sicilian. But you've spoken on tour in Spanish to a Spanish-speaking audience about how the Italians presumed this too, falsely apparently. So you aren't Italian.

VL: No, I am Italian.

DN: Oh, you are Italian. Okay.

VL: I am Italian. I have an Italian passport. My nonno, my grandfather, was from the north of Italy, and he migrated to Mexico in the 1920s. But unfortunately, I am not Sicilian.

DN: Got it.

VL: Italian ancestry is from the far north, almost Germanic. But what is very funny, and what I'm very happy about, is that a lot of Italian newspapers publishing reviews of the book and so on say that I am of Sicilian ancestry. And this is a lie that I am not going to unmake. [laughter] I'm very happy to be considered Sicilian. And I've always been an aspiring Sicilian. I mean, the moment I arrived in Sicily, I felt I was home for so many reasons we can talk about later. But amongst other things, it feels like the border of borders. And there's something that resembles Mexico in its geology and geography. So I was very much at home there from the beginning. It's very funny because a lot of the things that are fictional in the novel are often presumed not fictional. So not only is it now assumed that I am Sicilian, but also, in the novel, there is this artifact. There's an object, a tile that was presumably taken by a Sicilian nonna, or grandmother, taken from an archaeological dig and that is now in the family. It's a mosaic of Proteus, the sea god, the prophetic sea god. And this is an object that's present, as you know, throughout the novel. I recently went back during my book tour to this archaeological site because my Italian publishers wanted to record some video of the space and of me there. So we had sent the novel to the directors of the villa. It's the Villa Romana del Casale, so that they could read it and give us permission, knowing what they were giving us permission to do. Anyway, they gave us permission. The afternoon we arrived in Casale, the head of culture of the archaeological dig came out and greeted us. We started a conversation, and he lowered his voice at some point and said, "Valeria Luiselli, I just want to ask you if you may tell me the truth. Do you indeed have this mosaic in your family that belongs to us here in the villa?" [laughter]

DN: I love that so much. [laughs]

VL: I should have told him the truth. I should have said, "Absolutely. I do not unfortunately. This is fiction." I decided not to really say yes or no. I just smiled and I said, "Thank you for reading the novel." [laughs]

DN: Well, you did mention similarities in passing between Sicily and Mexico. Like this book and your last book, they're standalone books, but there's also a continuity. There's a continuity in the sense that it's the mother and daughter from Lost Children Archive, which was taking place in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, who are now in Sicily. And there's also a lot of continuity in theme. So spend another minute just drawing forth, obviously Sicily and Mexico are really different in many ways too, but draw forth some of maybe the less obvious ways in which you find a connection between why they both could serve as a way to meditate on similar themes and create a continuity between books.

VL: Yes, absolutely. I have been preoccupied and interested and in deep internal struggle and curiosity and love with borders for many, many years now. I wrote my unreadable bachelor's thesis in philosophy. It was a critique on John Rawls's theory of justice from the viewpoint of immigration. I think even before that, because half of my maternal family was based in Tijuana, I encountered the U.S.-Mexico border wall, that version of the border wall, which was a more makeshift aluminum. I think actually those were helicopter landing mats from Vietnam that were repurposed to become the wall that basically partitions Tijuana and San Diego from the airport toward the sea. And we used to drive along that wall every time we landed in Tijuana. That wall was lined with little white crosses on the Mexican side. So that was an image that I think I saw for the first time consciously when I was four or five years old, maybe, and was deeply scarred by it from that moment on in my life. I don't know. Borders, and that border particularly, the one that partitions our two countries, has obviously been the one at the center of my attention for most of my life. Then I wrote about it in Lost Children Archive and have been recording it, all its sounds, for the past five, six years in Echoes from the Borderlands. But then there's Sicily, right? Which is, as I said a moment ago, the border of borders. And I say so in at least three different senses. First of all, it is a tectonic border. It is right under Sicily where the tectonic plates of Africa and Europe meet and collide. So it is a geological, tectonic border. And beyond the obvious symbolic power of that, it is also very real. It expresses itself in a very active volcanic archipelago that surrounds the Italian end of the peninsula and Sicily and the Aeolians. So when you're there, you feel in a geological border, not only in a spatial way but also in a temporal way. You feel you're witnessing the beginning of creation and the end of it at the same time, right? That the end of the world is around the corner because everything can just erupt and destroy. But also hearing the bubbling or the exhalations of Stromboli make you feel like you're witnessing the beginning of time. Then beyond the tectonic and geological, Sicily is, because of its placement in the Mediterranean, the place where the entire Mediterranean, but also northern Europe, arrived and tried to conquer or inhabit at one time or another. So everyone has passed through there, everyone in the region, from obviously the Greeks and the Romans, but also the Phoenicians and Carthaginians and the Normans and the Vandals. And everyone made war there, made love there, made children there, made cities, destroyed them. And it's all there in this enormous palimpsest, very much like Mexico City is a city that's a palimpsest, right? In which you can see how the rocks of the Templo Mayor compose the structure of the Catholic cathedral. And you can read in the rocks of the city how time has passed and cultures have been destroyed and how they've reinvented themselves with all their violence, all their beauty. Sicily is at the extreme of that because of the amount of different cultures that congregated there. And then finally, it's a geopolitical border, much like our—I keep on saying our, and every time I say our, it's like, "Is it ours? Is it us?" [laughter]—the border between Mexico and the U.S., in the sense that it is a space of departure and a space of arrival, and it's an increasingly violent one. Most of the Mediterranean ships that left Italy carrying Italian migrants out to the Americas left from Catania, from Palermo, in the beginning of the 20th century. And the ones that now, in our days, arrive from northern Africa and the Levant region to Europe arrive in Lampedusa or Catania in the Sicilian region. So it continues to be this space of transit, of people arriving and leaving.

DN: Well, perhaps as a way to begin to talk about Beginning Middle End, I have to first mention the beginning of Lost Children Archive, which opens with our Valeria Luiselli-like protagonist and her husband each wondering what they will say to their children one day, what will be edited or reshuffled when they do, with the line, "But the children will ask because ask is what children do, and we'll need to tell them a beginning, a middle, and an end. We'll need to give them an answer, tell them a proper story." Also, that when she tells her friends that their marriage might be ending, they want to know when the ending began. And she remarks how beginnings, middles, and endings can only be known in retrospect. But whereas Lost Children Archive feels like a book about endings, the ending of a marriage, and also about the last free peoples resisting colonization in the Americas, the Apache, and the ending of the pre-colonial era, in a sense, in the new book, Beginning Middle End, by contrast, we are with the same protagonist and her daughter, but no longer with her husband or his son. And they, mother and daughter, are looking for a beginning, how to begin again, how to reinvent the story of their lives now as two people. And the question is asked, "What do we do after the collapse of the narrative?" Lost Children Archive has a certain fated inevitability to it, but this book exists, I think, in a more not-knowing space. So let's start with the title, which exists within your last book, which begins in your last book, so maybe puts us in its middle phase now. Talk to us about how and why this title is the frame for your newest novel.

VL: It's a beautiful question. And embarrassingly, maybe, my daughter pointed out to me that a line containing "beginning, middle, end," like "that's a beginning, the middle," also appears on the first or second page of The Story of My Teeth.

DN: Huh.

VL: She opened it and she's like, "Ma, you just keep on writing the same thing." [laughter] And then someone else pointed out to me that a similar phrasing appears in Tell Me How It Ends about stories and their beginnings and middles and ends, and how the story of the children that I'm trying to tell in Tell Me How It Ends is not really tellable because there's no end in sight. So it seems like this comes up again and again. [laughs] So I finally used it as a title, maybe. But no, really, one of the many reasons for this title has to do with my work process and slowly, with age, with time, understanding what I often feel as chaos as maybe a method, a method that renews itself, that needs to reinvent itself, but a method nonetheless. You know, for many years, when I set out to write fiction, I do not know the language I'm going to write it in. I do not know the characters that will be in it. I do not know, obviously, the plot, since I don't know anything else. Least of all do I know what the plot or the events that will take place will be. So I don't know anything. I know that I started writing something when, in one line, I notice a gaze, a tone, something that has pierced through the fog of the everyday and has maybe asked a question or put a question down on paper. In this case, in this novel, I think that happened during a moment in time when my then pre-adolescent daughter was having a lot of insomnia and childhood anxiety at night. I decided to read Greek myths to her, and creation myths more generally, and the things that I thought would take her to a space of the cosmos, to imagine seas and skies and planets, trying to fill her world with those big things and let her lift herself out of the human anxieties that sometimes torment us. And so I read to her every night. I read different myths. And one night she asked me, "What is this? Why, in all these beginning myths and all these origin myths about creation, are things always being torn asunder? And what is this 'torn asunder'? What does this really mean?" And I was able to answer the second question, just the definition of torn asunder. And I explained things dividing, things at a cosmic level, partitioning, breaking. But I was certainly not able to answer the very big question that she was asking, which was why are beginnings a form of things breaking? And I felt that I was in front of maybe one of the most important questions I'd ever encountered. That's where something began. I made a note of that somewhere. I started exploring that question at different scales. I'm very interested in the scales of things. There's one fascinating book called Scales. I forget the name of the writer. I read it a long time ago when I was reading as a judge for the National Book Awards. It's a book about how phenomena reproduce themselves at different scales in human and animal life and in the geological world. I remember, for example, this incredible, illuminating observation that this writer makes in that book about how most animals have the same amount of heartbeats in one lifetime.

DN: No way.

VL: So a mouse's heart beats really fast, and a whale's heart beats really slowly. But in the end of their lives, they have approximately the same amount of heartbeats assigned to them.

DN: I hope that's true.

VL: I really hope that's true. [laughter]

DN: It's beautiful.

VL: It's very serious. But anyway, I love thinking in scales and trying to understand the world in its scales. And I thought that this question, this very cosmic question about origins, was a question that I needed to explore at different scales. So both at the enormous level of myth, the even more gigantic level of geology and tectonics, and the life of volcanoes, but also, how is a volcano similar or not to a human uterus? And how do they behave in similar ways at different scales? And of course, in terms of beginnings being something broken or being a form of tearing asunder, how does that play out? Not only at a cosmogonic level, but in our human lives, in person, first in the very biological way, the way women are torn asunder to be able to give life, but then also in a more metaphorical way, perhaps how in our lives the many endings, the things we lose, the people we lose, can be or not beginnings, and how imagination plays a role in turning ends into beginnings.

DN: Well, I think the big irony of your mother character saying we need to give our children a proper story, one with a beginning, middle, and end, is that your stories are never proper. I feel like they always break form and break genre, that even before you were writing about actual borders between nations, you were already a border crosser in multiple ways at once. And just to take The Story of My Teeth as an example, you were commissioned to write something for the Galleria Jumex, a contemporary art gallery whose money comes from the Jumex juice company of the same name. You not only include the Jumex factory workers within the book itself, you give them agency in the composition of the book. They critique your drafts and they provide feedback for a book that was meant to exist in a world where the art gallery is public-facing and the factory workers are invisible, and you subvert that. Likewise, before there was a push for translators to get more recognition, whether their own portion of a book prize's money or their names on the cover, you invited your translator to write a chapter of the book itself in the English iteration of the book. As you mentioned today, and also in a conversation you recently had with Carlos Puig in Mexico, one beginning for the book is your daughter asking you when she was nine or 10 why things begin with something being split in two. In the book itself, you mention the etymology for the word beginning is to open, or also to cut open. Many things are broken in the beginning in the book. The form of the family is broken with the divorce, with the mother, for example, going to the fish market, or the vegetable market, in Catania and being so used to shopping for four that she's confounded now how to shop for two. And they are even in Sicily in the first place because the mother-writer doesn't know how to move forward as a writer now, not knowing how to be as a mother or as a writer. And she fills her schedule with European press events and drifts through them. But the best part is that we open the book in her lover's Sicilian apartment, but with just the mother and daughter there. The lover, who she doesn't know that well, is elsewhere on tour himself as a musician and has offered his place. The daughter doesn't know him. The mother has never been to this place before. So here they are, mother and daughter, groping for a new form, but within someone else's form, and among this other person's books and among this other person's style and way of living. Everything is out of joint. And I'd love to hear about anything that comes up for you about any of this, whether border crossing in your work, brokenness in beginnings, as you've already spoken to. But I also want to center something that really isn't central. It is only prominent at the very beginning, but nevertheless, it somehow continues to loom large in my imagination as a reader through the whole book and feels to me like maybe it's a key that resists meaning and yet somehow also generates meaning. And that's the swordfish head that she buys in the market and brings home to cook. So, for one thing, here we have something that's been torn asunder, right? So we have a swordfish head. But it's also, I'm imagining, quite difficult, unlike almost any other sea beast, to store in the fridge. So we have this out-of-joint head, this swordfish head that is now stored in the fridge that stares at them whenever they open the fridge. And she doesn't know how to cook it. And so she's bought this thing that's perplexing in its usefulness, its shape doesn't fit in the fridge, and unaware to her that she was fooled by the fishermen because no one buys the head. It's typically not used at all. So there's this whole subtext that she's unaware of. And it's not like you pull the swordfish necessarily in a very explicit, foregrounded way throughout the book. But it sets something in motion that's beyond, I think, a reducible meaning. And I wondered if that was true for you because it feels to me like, I don't know if you put it in near the end or near the beginning, but it feels to me like maybe you put it in near the beginning and then everything spirals out of that head.

VL: I love that you see that. I have to say that you're absolutely right in the sense that the swordfish head was the first scene I wrote. I had written notes here and there. I knew that I was grappling with this question of beginnings and brokenness. I indeed early enough understood that this mother and daughter were someplace and out of place, as you said earlier, in developing this question. They're living in an apartment where they're in a Goldilocks situation where nothing belongs to them. They are foreigners in this apartment and in their lives more generally. But the first scene that I wrote for this novel was a mother and a daughter going out into a fish market and buying a swordfish head. And I knew—maybe knew is giving myself too much credit—I intuited that when I knew what the meaning of that was, or why it was present, when I solved that, I knew that I would understand the novel. And for years, and when I say years I mean almost six years, I did not know. I did not know how that connected with everything else. And the moment I solved it, which I think was during a drive at night with my daughter discussing... We did serious writing room sessions. I took so long to write this novel that my daughter was a child when I began it. She was a fully formed, very intellectual teenager by the time I finished it. [laughter] And I think she was very anxious that I was never going to finish it. In fact, she poked me several times with things like, "Mom, my dad has finished two novels in this time."

DN: It's horrible. [laughs]

VL: "Are you ever going to finish this?" And I was like, "Oh my God. I'll help you. Tell me what you wrote today or read to me." And we actually did really proper writing rooms, to the degree and to the point where, when I finished the novel, I said, "Hey, darling, you've really helped me put this together. You've really contributed criticism, ideas, solutions, the swordfish head thing. I've written in collaboration before. You mentioned my wonderful translator, Christina MacSweeney, who wrote a chapter of The Story of My Teeth. Do you want me to sign the novel as written by me, but in collaboration with your name?" And she said to me, "Let me think about it." "Yeah, sure. Think about it. Take your time." And then a few days later she said, "Yeah, I thought about it, and I don't think so. I think you should just sign it with your own name because, you know, who knows what kind of criticism you'll get for this." And I was like, "Okay." [laughter] I thought that was very sweet, and I thought how smart and thoughtful she is. And, "You know, you're 40-something. You know how to deal with criticism at this point, but I'm not old enough to deal with criticism. So don't include me in it."

DN: I love that.

VL: I said, "You're absolutely right." Anyway, all this to say it took me six years and many conversations, many puzzle-solving conversations, to understand the meaning of that swordfish head. And when I say meaning, I don't mean at all that it needed to have a symbolic value that cast a light on the rest of the novel and neatly packed it into one allegory or one big metaphor of anything. I really just mean how that image, that first scene, obtaining this awkwardly large, sad, severed head of a marine beast and storing it in a fridge, would trigger or not trigger a series of metamorphoses in the writing of the novel that would give the novel its pace, its tempo, its shape, and its ultimate meaning in that way.

DN: We at least have begun to answer the question I'm going to ask, but I'm going to ask it anyway. In the real world, you've talked about how after your divorce, your house unexpectedly became very woman-centric. Not just you and your daughter, but your mother moved in and some nieces. At one point, there were something like eight women living together. And in Beginning Middle End, it feels like this woman-centric universe feels true too, in at least three different ways to me: intergenerationally, but also in the realm of mythology and in relationship to the land itself and the way it's personified. I'd love to explore all of these, but I wanted to start with the matrilineal line of the book, the four generations of women that animate the book. The grandmother of the mother protagonist, the one of the four who is not alive, is, on the other hand, the spirit around which the whole book is organized. Her daughter has inherited a mosaic tile that the grandmother had stolen while she was working on the dig, the one you referred to. The protagonist's daughter, the 12-year-old, feels like it's her duty to return this tile. The mother of our protagonist lives near the U.S. border in Mexico. She's a radical, but she might also be exhibiting signs of early dementia. And she says she's going to be going offline for a while to be part of a protest of a secret plot that the U.S. is planning to build a canal along the border. The protagonist can find no evidence of this secret plot that her mother speaks about. She ends up sending what she's writing of her book to her mother from an anxiety to try to keep her mother's mind active because she's worried about what's going on with her mother's cognition. The mother main character is in the middle of these two generations and having to contend with the desires, the impulses, the insights of the generation before and after. She links looking for a new form of motherhood to finding a way back to writing. But she also inverts the hierarchy within the three living generations, I think. There's a line I love that goes, "Parents think of their relationship with their children way too teleologically, never considering the reverse." In that spirit, you have great respect for the wisdom of children, I think, in your last three books in particular, that really no age has a monopoly on it, nor on foolishness for that matter. I think every generation becomes a source of comedy also, even the possibly demented grandmother. She has an oracular wisdom beyond the rational. So I was hoping maybe you'd talk to us about questions of knowledge or wisdom or memory or inheritance when it comes to this matrilineal lineage, but also more generally. I feel like it reminds me of Le Guin's engagement with child consciousness and child intelligence too, on its own terms, because it feels like you're confronting all the living generations as living archives, even the archives of the young, which you would think wouldn't necessarily be archives if you were to look at it in a more mechanistic way, that their archive hasn't been filled yet. But there's another archive or another way of finding a source of knowledge and wisdom in the way that a child experiences the world on their terms, not as a stepping stone towards future knowledge.

VL: Wow, this feels like an enormous question. And I hope to be able to navigate backward or around and with all your reflections here. I'll start where you started, which is what was happening outside the novel when I was writing the novel, but inside my psyche and inside the world of home and family lexicon and the space of intimacy, which is the laboratory, I think, for language and humor, right? The family lexicon is where we construct the pieces with which we then relate to the world with, how we humor with it, how we understand its complexity, the language we use to describe it. Anyway, so from that space. We'll start there. Indeed, in the months and then years following my separation and divorce, my household... I had just bought a big house, a very old house, and slowly I've patched and reconstructed and renovated it. But then it was a very old house needing a lot of love in the Bronx. And my mother arrived to live with my daughter and with me and with our dog Lola. And then a niece arrived. And then another niece arrived. And then a friend who got divorced arrived, and another friend who got separated arrived. And then, for now, about eight years, it's been a house that's always homed women in my family and friends and so on and so forth. And yes, at times we've been 10, 8, 7, 6, 4 different women living there. And that space, although it's not the theme nor even the space written about in this novel, it's there at its silent heart somehow. And it is so in the way that generational conversation took place in this new reinvention of a family structure. The presence of my mother talking about her own mother to my nieces, who were very good at asking questions and getting information out of my mother because my mother never tells me anything. She's very discreet. You know, my mother joined the Zapatistas in '94, for example, with a collective of women who went down to Chiapas to support women and children in the insurgency movement. She never told me anything about it. And once we were in the movies, you know, two years ago maybe, watching a documentary, and suddenly there were some scenes recorded with night vision binoculars or something. And she suddenly turns to me and whispers, "Oh, I used to traffic those from New York to Chiapas." [laughter] I said, "What?" And that was it. I got nothing else out of her. But my nieces were very good at getting information out of her, and also just getting her to talk about the violence towards women in our families, the violence that we come from. I have an Otomí great-grandmother whom we always had been told was adopted by a Spanish family. And only in those years, with my nieces talking to my mother, did we find out and realize that that was not at all the story. It was a story of something called derecho de pernada in the haciendas in Mexico, which is basically that the landowner had rights to not only the land but the bodies of the women living in it. So our story, like so many other stories and families, begins with a story of rape of an Indigenous woman who then birthed a Mestiza girl, and so on and so forth. Anyway, that was the space from which Beginning Middle End was written, even though Beginning Middle End is not about our story. But it is about all our stories. Stories of violence, stories of poverty, stories of migrating, stories of leaving, stories of starting again. And you mentioned Le Guin, but you mentioned her in the context of children's imagination. But you reminded me of something that Samanta Schweblin sent me during COVID. I remember this beautiful essay by Ursula K. Le Guin about how a world reimagined... I think she sent this to me because my house structure was starting to shape up in this way, this house of women. And it was an essay about how we really don't know what a world imagined by women would look like at all. We just don't know because all the institutions that we live by were imagined and played out by men. And we inhabit those structures. And now women sometimes are at the top of those structures. But in the end, it's structures imagined by the male form of interaction, imagination, organization, hierarchy. So the university, the military, companies, countries, they all have identical structures in terms of their hierarchies and pyramid forms. And Le Guin doesn't give an answer about how a world imagined by women might look. But she suggests that it might be something a little more fluid, a little more chaotic, a little more like a river might flow, without romanticizing it. Imperfect, but somewhat more horizontal in its structure. And that resounded a lot with me in the way that we were reimagining, not even consciously, just reimagining conversations and accountability and responsibilities at home, but especially conversation, how conversation happened. For the first time, there wasn't a capotavola. And for the first time, there was just a different form of organization. And that started to interest me as the beginning of a reflection on how we can reimagine the way that we think about legacy and inheritance, not of objects but of story, of pastness. And indeed, how we usually think of the past as raining down on us and us just holding it, maybe up on our shoulders, carrying it, the burdens of it. And how, in fact, it doesn't quite happen that way, that there is a renewal of the past every time it gets told in the present, at least the potential. Not by adulterating it or sugarcoating anything or erasing it and ignoring it, but by reactivating it and questioning it, imagining, reimagining the past. And we are always rewriting it in the present. And so it's always a very... I wouldn't say a circular re-signifying of past and present because a circle might be too neat of a structure, but maybe more like a tide. You know, it comes, it goes, it gets messy, it reshapes. And I wanted to be able to explore and reproduce that kind of motion in this book, the way that the story from the past hits us in the present and the way that the present wants to rethink, reshape, and go back to the past. And the whole structure of the novel is very much thought in that way. Especially how the youngest member of the generation that appears in this novel listens to a story about her great-grandmother and decides that she has to do what she has to do. I won't spoil things, but basically, to go back to a past in some way, to mend what was originally torn asunder, extracted and taken, and how memory might be restored if we were a little more gentle with the world. And I think that takes me to the final part of your reflection and question. You ask about knowledge, knowing, and how it is that we conceive knowing and knowledge. And I remembered one episode of this podcast that I love particularly, your conversation with Natalie Diaz. I've taught that episode to several generations of students. And there's a moment where Natalie is reflecting on translation and untranslatability and says that knowledge, the way we often use it and conceive it—I'm paraphrasing her here—but the way we conceive it, we use it as a form of extraction. And that untranslatability might sometimes be a very good thing because what you cannot translate, you cannot know, and therefore you cannot have, you cannot extract. And she's talking there about Indigenous bodies of knowledge and how untranslation might be a form of important protection and preservation. You know, I think that indeed we think about knowledge in that way often, as having it, possessing it, accumulating it. And I came across a very beautiful word the other day, unfortunately, after I'd already finished the novel, so it didn't make it into the novel. But I was reading a book about how the ancient Greeks and Romans related to the ocean. There are different conceptions of the ocean, there are ways of navigating it, there are words for it. And there is one word, anoixis, which meant at the same time to set sail and to comprehend a new idea for the first time.

DN: Wow.

VL: And just the idea that that word means both things blows my mind because it really overturns the notion of knowing as accumulating and extracting and taking and having, and maybe recasts knowledge as a way of departure.

DN: That's great.

VL: Leave-taking and not taking.

DN: Yes. Well, I don't know if this is true in Mexico, but in France people celebrate not only their birthdays but their saints' days too. So my wife Lucy gets greetings on Saint Lucy Day, for instance, and her aunt Odile gets greetings on St. Odile Day, which is the next day, and so on. For a long time, we would go to Europe in the wintertime and meet my in-laws on an island of my choice. So one year we went to Cyprus, one year we went to Corsica, one year we went to Crete, and one year we went to Sicily. And that winter we happened to be there during the Santa Lucia festivities, not knowing but quickly learning that Lucia was the patron saint of the island of Sicily and one of the earliest and most widespread Christian cults of devotion that eventually spread all the way to Scandinavia. But she is Sicilian, was martyred in Sicily for refusing to marry, either plucking out her own eyes to stop herself from being forced to do so or, in some stories, having them gouged out as punishment for her refusal. And because she is the saint of eyesight and vision and light, it makes sense that these festivities happen around the winter solstice. But we were amazed by them, the festivities around her statue, which is brought out from the church for this many-hour procession to the place of her martyrdom on the date of her death, where she remains for a week until the solstice, when another procession returns her to the church for the year to come. And her relics, remains of her body, are part of the procession. Some of her relics come from Venice, where they are for the rest of the year, for the festivities. But there are also pieces of her ribs in the main silver statue that is carried by many men. It's this immense statue that requires, I think, probably eight or 12 or 15 people to carry. A statue of Lucy that portrays her with a dagger stuck in her neck and holding her eyeballs out on an outstretched platter. And the festivities felt to us almost, or to me, almost pre-Christian. Or maybe another way of putting it, they felt like they retained many pagan elements. The chanting of her name, "Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia," over and over again. The throwing of things from balconies down to her as she passed. The eating of cookies that were shaped like her eyes. It was really just mesmerizing. So for Lucy's 50th birthday, we went back specifically to have a trip organized around both processions, not just the one that we accidentally stumbled upon. And during that trip, we encountered the other famed female martyr, saint of Sicilian origin, martyred earlier than Lucy, Saint Agatha, who had her breasts removed as part of her torture. And like Lucy, she holds them forth on a platter while also still often possessing her breasts at the same time in the portrayals, just as Lucy often is shown with her eyes and also with her removed eyeballs before her. And like Lucy's eye pastries, there are breast-shaped pastries with these cherry-red nipples that are eaten in her honor. And Agatha is a spirit that hovers over your book in many ways, I think. So I was hoping you'd present her to us and also your particular interest in her. And lastly, if you had any thoughts about how these women are powerful through this mutilation of their bodies. And I'm not meaning to draw a parallel to your book Tell Me How It Ends, where, if I remember correctly, something like 80% of the women traveling through Mexico to the border in the hopes of crossing are raped at some point on the journey. But nevertheless, I can't help but think about the status of women and about women's autonomy over their own bodies when I think of both of these saints who are so revered and, in some regards, extremely powerful, and yet also through this sacrifice of their bodies on behalf of their spirits.

VL: Well, first of all, I love that the two patron saints of Sicily are women who refused the marital violence, refused having to be subdued to the will and wish and violence of a man, and that their martyrdom is also a form of power. Saint Agatha refused a prefect, Quintianus, I believe is his name, and then she was raped and her breasts were ripped out. And she, in representations, indeed offers her breasts, somehow reversing and/or complicating the notion of agency and violence and who does what to whom, and how violence ripples back into the minds of those who perpetrate it. I've been thinking about violence against women for many years, of course. One of the books that has stayed with me and that I reread and, as I said, teach over and over is a book by Dolores Dorantes, a Mexican poet from Ciudad Juárez, a brilliant poet who wrote a book called Style in English, Estilo, where the persona of the poem is a group of mutilated, raped, and assassinated women from Juárez, but where they give instructions to those who violated them to do this to them or do that to them. So there's this complication and reversal of violence enacted and reenacted. There are three or four images of women in this kind of reversal that really interest me. And this is not what this book solved. And I think in all my books there is a failed book, one that was not written, one that was there, latent. And this is certainly one of them. Maybe a book for the future. Maybe I've thought about it as a project as part of the sound project that I'm working on in the border, Echoes from the Borderlands. And in fact, let me go back a little bit and tell you. When I began Echoes from the Borderlands, I was reading Dolores Dorantes. I had read Trojan Women. I had been reading a lot about Ciudad Juárez and the beginning of the violence in Ciudad Juárez. Sergio González Rodríguez's amazing and chilling book The Femicide Machine, as well as Rita Segato's work in Ciudad Juárez and 2666 by Bolaño. I was navigating that universe, trying to think about structures of violence in the border in Mexico. When I went to a town called Shakespeare in New Mexico to write about reenactment of violence in the southern border, I had gone to Tombstone to interview reenactors. And then I went to Shakespeare, which is not a reenactment town but became a rehearsal town for reenacting lynchings and hangings and gunfights. So I interviewed some reenactors there. And this was back in 2019, I believe. I was trying to write a piece for The New Yorker about violence and reenactment in the border. In Shakespeare, New Mexico, I asked the group of reenactors that I was talking to if they could reimagine any other form of reenactment, other forms of violence there. And their answers were a little bit more of the same, like, "Oh, maybe more. We should do more Doc Holliday." Or, "No, Billy the Kid is amazing. We should do more Billy the Kid." And I remember leaving the town with this feeling that, no, this town, if I had ever the means to, I would love to turn into some archive of all those stories of violence against women in the borderlands. And this town is now privately owned. So I've had the fantasy for years that I'm going to raise money to buy it back from this rancher who owns it so that we could have ongoing sound installations that talk about the actual violence against Indigenous women, Mexican women, Black women, and all the women that have disappeared from there and whose stories are invisible, inaudible. And the idea there was, or it stemmed from, a combination of these ghostly, Saint Agatha-like women of Dolores Dorantes' Style, but also of the women of Troy. And here is where this connects more deeply to Beginning Middle End. I was, during the beginning of Beginning Middle End, contending with the two great epics of Mediterranean displacement and war and exile and travel. On the one hand, the Odyssey, and on the other hand, the Aeneid. And the heroes of the Odyssey are not very interesting to me. They're not very likable either. That doesn't mean I don't read it and read it over and over. But it's a group of heroes who win a war, who then go out into the Mediterranean and get lost and have adventures. They kill incredible creatures like Polyphemus, or blind the poor Polyphemus, who only has one eye. And they go and take all the women of Troy to traffic them as sex slaves. Odysseus, our greatest hero of Western civilization, is a woman trafficker. He does what narcos do today, which is abduct women and traffic them as sex slaves. "How can that be?" And then they go back home, back to their wives, and carry on with their lives. Then there are the heroes of the Aeneid who lose a war, whose city is burned down, whose women are abducted, and then they get lost in the Mediterranean. Aeneas is lost with few men and women still alive on ships. All the gods are horrible to them. Then they have nowhere to go back to because home does not exist anymore. They have to reinvent the notion of home. They are refugees in the absolute sense of the word. And thinking about old epics that inform our way of understanding and building story with our present, those heroes, I think, are much more like our millions of heroes today who have to leave their home and have to reinvent it, lost all the wars and have nothing but the grain of imagination to reinvent a sense of beginning and a sense of home. And so those women of Troy, in other representations of the stories of that moment of historical violence, come out to the street the day before they are sold as slaves. And they decide to have one last chant together, a lament. And they lament not their individual fate but their collective fate and the loss of their city and the loss of their freedom. The first time I read that play, Seneca's version of The Trojan Women, was around the same time that a group of women in Latin America called Las Tesis, a group of young women in Chile who were readers of Rita Segato and who were rethinking forms of protest against femicide in Latin America, came out into the streets and engaged in a collective chant lamenting the violence against women in Latin America, holding the state as a structure accountable for the systematic violence against women. So in that constellation, thinking about the women in Style, in Dolores Dorantes' Style, thinking about the women of Troy thousands and thousands of years before Las Tesis, and thinking about Las Tesis and their taking over a public space to engage in a collective and not an individual lament, became for me a kind of through line, or lifeline maybe, to think or rethink about how we speak about violence. And Beginning Middle End is not a book where violence is displayed, where violence against women is center stage. It is a book where women are coming from that violence, but it's in the backstage, like in Greek theater. You don't see it. You hear it. You intuit it. They are a consequence of that violence. And there is only one fragment in the entire book written in a we, in a collective we. And it's a fragment about men and their zippers, men unzipping their pants. And it's a fragment about violence, about rape. And it's the only one written in that collective we. And yeah, it was thought of as a fragment originally that I wanted to stage in Shakespeare, New Mexico. But since I haven't been able to buy Shakespeare, New Mexico, back for it to become an archive for the borderlands and the violence there, for now that passage lives inside Beginning Middle End, maybe as a future echo of something else later.

DN: I hope you're a future mayor of the town of Shakespeare at some point.

VL: [laughs] I would love to erase everything in my bio.

DN: Mayor of Shakespeare. [laughter]

VL: I have no wish to be the mayor of anything. Thank you very much.

DN: We've hinted at this just now, but the collapse of the marriage in this book isn't the only collapse in the book. If you were just to list the threats and obstacles in the book as a list, decontextualized, of earthquake and volcanic eruption of Mount Etna, which is actually erupting quite forcibly right now this week, of an impending storm and dangerous winds, of a hurricane hitting her Mexican mother's house, of dementia, of the refugee camps in Sicily, of the racist, xenophobic signs on the island, "Italy for Italians," a country whose leader right now is from the radical right, who's Islamophobic and who has talked of naval blockades of immigrant ships. And yet the falling apart here, compared to your last book, feels also like a cracking open, an opening up. And I want to explore that with two questions from others. Counterintuitively, the first question isn't really actually about this at all. And it's not even really about this book. But in addition to answering it in its own right, as a meaningful, if digressive, aside, I'd love for us to find a way to bring the kernel of this question into the book itself, into the questions of the book itself. Also, this question by necessity is in Spanish, so I will be enlisting you to translate in broad strokes what is asked before answering. This pregunta is from an author frequently mentioned when people guess who might win the Nobel Prize in Literature in any given year, a writer of classics such as Bartleby & Co., Dublinesque, and Never Any End to Paris, which chronicles his time living with Marguerite Duras while working on his first novel, as well as the upcoming book to be published this fall in English by Yale University Press as Camera Obscura. So here's a question for you from the great border crosser and supreme genre defier Enrique Vila-Matas.

Enrique Vila-Matas: [Asks a question in Spanish]

VL: Enrique. [laughs] That's so beautiful, to hear his voice in this context. I have to say first that Enrique Vila-Matas, who is one of my favorite writers and literary heroes, is also one of the most generous writers with young writers. And I'm no longer young, but I was when I started publishing. My first book was Papeles Falsos, in English titled Sidewalks. And it's a tiny book that was then published in what was then a tiny publishing house, Sexto Piso. It's no longer tiny, but it was. And it was a book that not many people read. But Enrique Vila-Matas read it, and he agreed to launch the book with me in Barcelona when I was 25. And that book flew as high as it could have flown thanks to him. I think people would not have read it or taken it seriously in any way. Seriously, humor. [laughter] The way that Vila-Matas' humor should be taken. So Vila-Matas here in this question wants to get me to... It's an old conversation of ours, whether Kafka is funny or not. I shouldn't say funny or not. "Funny" is a very English-language word. Whether there's humor in Kafka or not. I think he thinks that I don't find him humorous [laughs] because I resist Enrique's insistence upon Kafka's humorousness. So he asks me here, "Why don't I find Kafka humorous? And can I speak more about that?" And I think that both Kafka and a writer like Vila-Matas, and then darker writers whom we might not consider immediately humorous, like Samanta Schweblin, who writes about such dark depths of the human psyche and fills reality with this electric tension, are, of course, humorous writers in their very serious way. But the way I think they handle humor, the three of them very differently, by the way, is maybe how Cortázar used to think about humor or how he used to think about play and game. And Cortázar wrote an essay about the short story in which he says that la literatura es un juego, pero un juego muy serio. Literature is a game. It's a way of playing, but it's a very serious way of playing, just as serious as play is to children. Once you're playing a game when you're a child, you don't violate the rules of the game. [laughter] It's a very serious matter.

DN: It's true.

VL: Once you've engaged, you cannot not be there, right? And you have to play by the rules that you've set up. And I think that humor in serious writers like Kafka or like Vila-Matas or like Samanta Schweblin plays a similar role. There is nothing to laugh at, but there is something to be made deeply uncomfortable by. And it's in showing the entrails of reality and situation in all their absurdity that we can laugh an uncomfortable laugh and acknowledge the absurdity of things and acknowledge the violence of things that we find normal. So I think, yes, humor in that way. Do I find Gregor Kafka hilarious? No. [laughs] Although I know that there are some hints. There's a moment where Gregor Kafka. Gregor Kafka... [laughter]

DN: I like Gregor Kafka.

VL: Gregor Samsa, remember? He goes from the bed, and there's a moment where he's on the wall, but he's not on the wall but on a picture. And I think the picture is of this slightly erotic picture, I want to say, who is it? I don't remember. I think she is named. I suppose that was meant to be humorous, that he's up against her in this ridiculous scene where he's about to be hit by an apple. I don't know. I do still think that Vila-Matas likes Kafka more than I do, maybe. [laughs]

DN: Well, either way, humor is a super important part of your writing, and it's not of the Kafkaesque type. It's not infused with horror necessarily, but it also feels like it's subversive with the potential of liberation. Like if we go back to the way the mother might be made to look foolish by the daughter, it's an upturning of a hierarchy in a way that presents possibility, I think, which I don't feel the same in Kafka. But the reason why I put Enrique's question here is this question of how can everything be falling apart and yet the book feel full of possibility. So this is where our second question for you comes in. I'll just say that I think that humor is part of how you do that, but I think there are other things you're doing too. Our second question is from the Mexican writer and past Between the Covers guest, Jazmina Barrera. And Jazmina came on the show for her National Book Award long-listed book, The Queen of Swords, about the writer Elena Garro, a book which, like your books and Enrique's books, refuses easy categorization genre-wise. This is what Eileen Myles, another past guest on the show, said about The Queen of Swords: "This neo-bio is a total pleasure. I’d never known Elena Garro and now I’m riveted by the entire morphing fact of her. Jazmina Barrera’s take is intimate and playful, and transgressive in the ways we generally get condemned to when considering a life, especially a literary and a female one. Here we splash dramatically, surrounded by Garro Barrera’s obsessions..." Garro-Barrera's obsessions reminds me of Gregor Kafka, [laughter] "...surrounded by Garro-Barrera's obsessions, toys, affairs, homes, animal friends, the works. It's a joyous, brainy blast, and I'm intrigued and changed by The Queen of Swords as a reader and a writer." So here's a question for you from Jazmina.

Jazmina Barrera: Hola, queridos Vale y David. This is my question about Beginning Middle End. I don't want to spoil the end for anyone, but let's say that as we get closer to the final fragments of the book, one of the things I love the most is how some of the events related to time travel and memory, I thought, pointed to the idea that when confronted with tragic fate, with loss and grief, fiction can be a comfort, what in Spanish we call consuelo. But consuelo can be many things. It can be at the same time beautiful and sad. It can be very powerful, but also not good enough. How do you see the possibilities and the impossibilities of fiction in the face of pain? Thank you. Abrazos.

VL: I find it so moving to hear people's voices through this. Jazmina is one of the writers I love the most. In your quote from Eileen Myles, they use the word "brainy." And what was it?

DN: "A joyous, brainy blast."

VL: That. Eileen says, "A joyous, brainy blast." Never better described Jazmina's writing and her being more generally. There's this joyous braininess about her that never feels heavy-handed. She's always essaying. She's always thinking about words from all their possible angles, pulling them apart, thinking about them with this tenderness and a humor and a piercing intelligence. And I love the way she describes the word consuelo here, which is a word I realize that we don't have in English because "comfort" is not the same at all as consuelo. By the way, if you take apart the word—this is false etymologies, which I love too, the real ones and the false ones—but if you take the word apart, it would be con suelo, "with a ground," like something that gives you ground. But it doesn't mean that at all. That's a false etymology. [laughter]

DN: Well, it can mean it now.

VL: And how can literature be a consuelo in the face of pain and grief? I'll go back to something that is mentioned in the book because it's always with me, this particular short story by Borges called "Shakespeare's Memory." And it's a short story where Borges imagines that the character protagonist is offered to possess Shakespeare's memory, or for Shakespeare's memory to inhabit him. The character agrees to that, and overnight something happens in his brain. And when he wakes up, he is indeed a man who is now inhabited by two memories: his own on the one hand, and Shakespeare's on the other. And the Argentinian writer Ricardo Piglia, who was an assistant to Borges at some point, I believe, but also then a very acute and imaginative reader and critic of Borges' work, among many other things—he's also an incredible novelist—reads that story in a short essay from the book Formas Breves. He reads that essay as a metaphor of reading and us as readers more generally, meaning that we are all that character, Hermann Soergel, I think is his name, because we are inhabited both by our own personal memories of past events, but also our memories as readers. We have these two consciousnesses with us. I would take one tiny step further and say that there's no such thing as these two separate things because memory behaves more like wind or like water, and things are combined constantly with its particular alchemy. So there is no way really to distinguish what we read from what we live. Not in a psychotic sense of not distinguishing what did happen from what didn't, but in the sense that the very fabric with which we compose and thread the narratives of our lives is the fabric of us as readers of other stories or listeners of other stories. The scaffolding for the way we organize events in our lives to compose a particular version of something that happened to us, of what our lives are, that scaffolding comes from the place of fiction, the way that we learn how to organize events in time through storytelling, through storytelling that is not our own. And in that sense, everything we remember, construct, combine—we combine—is made up of both things. We are that windy, watery combination of both things. How does fiction offer us consuelo in that way? I do think that the better readers, the more varied we are as readers, the better we can reorganize, constantly reimagine our lives and our world, the world we live in now, the stories of those who live alongside us. And it almost feels like a joyous, brainy duty for us to engage in the responsibility of being great readers because then we can be better storytellers. And it does matter a lot how we tell the story, right? That's our version of the world. That's all we have. We have no control over what happens to us. We'll lose people. We get sick. Loved ones disappear. We can't control any of that. What we can control is the way we thread it all together.

DN: That's a perfect segue for this next question, which engages with this question of control, I think. Because my experience of why I find your work as a whole, but this book in particular, as one of possibility and also solace, but also as a way to reframe catastrophic change, is that first the book acknowledges that everything is cracking apart, that much of this cracking apart is happening at such a scale in so many different ways at the same time that it is completely unmooring from having a sense of control. But there's a way that all that is happening in this book—the storms and impending eclipse, these different winds that bring with them discrete mythological valences—gives the sense that things aren't falling apart or just falling apart, but also that they're being remade, and that perhaps we aren't the storyteller but are caught within the countervailing moods of the spirits and the gods. You talk about the etymology of chaos. One origin is that of a cosmic cleft. And thinking of that cosmic cleft, we of course think of Mount Etna erupting, but also I think of these lines in the book about our protagonist's menstruation: "Before we leave, I go to the bathroom. Heavy period, cavernous, purple, thick, and almost gelatinous, lava-like. The thicker clots are expelled with spasmodic moans and contractions of the uterine muscles, which I hope will be tempered by the two ibuprofens swimming in my pocket." That we're at the mercy of a geologic and cosmic cleft that is as much birthing something else and other as it is also carrying something away. And I think of how the bells of Saint Agatha's church in Catania are resounding through the book too. Agatha, who's the patron saint protecting people from natural disasters, whose miraculous veil that contained her relics protected the people from an Etna eruption in 252 AD, stopping the lava from flowing. She's also the patron saint of the bell founders because of the fire used to forge the bells, because the blacksmith's tools are like the torture devices used to remove her breasts, because the bells were used to warn people. So you could imagine this sound like a veil cast across the island. And this next question for you is about sound. From the two-time Grammy Award-winning sound engineer, Charles de Montebello, who's worked with everyone from Jon Stewart to Frances McDormand to Stephen Colbert to Michelle Williams to Valeria Luiselli. So here's a question for you from Charles.

Charles de Montebello: Hi, Valeria. Hi, David. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast. This is such a fun opportunity to put Valeria on the spot and ask her a question that I have been curious about. I will try not to be too long-winded. Having never really had a reason to give this a lot of thought, I've just assumed that when a writer or a novelist sits down to write, ideas come from a visual place and, obviously, a command of language, but that it comes from imagination, and that's a visual imagination, imagery, but not so much from sound. Sound, I just presume, plays a part more in accents and in illustrating specific things. With the work that we've been doing on Beginning Middle End, something you've been referring to as another translation of the novel, not an audiobook, we've been really purposeful in not creating a radio play where specific moments are echoed directly by sounds. We don't hear bells right when bells are mentioned. We don't hear dishes when dishes are mentioned. And instead, we've paid a lot of attention to creating a kind of conversation between the sound and the story, something that stirs underneath. It's not a literal underscoring, but more a way to inhabit space or to create space and provide a canvas in which the narration can live without being distracting, hopefully. And I know sound definitely has played a part in other work of yours, the border project, obviously, and Lost Children Archive. One of the main characters is a sound recordist. I'm wondering, though, because of this work and how specific it's been with creating and using these layers of sound that we recorded on location in Sicily and the Aeolians, if you imagine that it might inform your writing going forward in a different way. Is it going to affect your imagination somehow? And does sound become a new source of ideas the way language and imagery typically are? I'm just wondering what your thoughts on that are.

VL: Oh my God. [laughs] Definitely put on the spot here. [laughter] I'm not sure if you know, but also Charles and I are partners.

DN: Yes, I didn't know when I reached out to him. I quickly learned. [laughter]

VL: Yes, Charles is my partner of now more than three years, and we've been working tirelessly and very joyfully on the sonic translation of this novel, recording sounds with another collaborator, Ricardo Giraldo. But a funny story before I go there and before I answer Charles's question is that when Charles and I met a little more than three years ago, after we started talking a little—I won't go into much detail—but basically we realized that not only had he edited the audiobook of Lost Children Archive. So way before we knew each other personally, he had been in very close contact with my work, and he had made a very beautiful audiobook for Lost Children Archive. Very thoughtful, very well-paced. Not only that, but in Lost Children Archive there are two narrators, and I narrate the voice of the female narrator, and a 12-year-old boy narrated the part of the boy. And that boy is Charles's son.

DN: Oh, wow.

VL: Who, in that novel, is the narrator's stepson.

DN: Yeah. That's incredible.

VL: So we were very amused to learn this when we had just met. And also his son, a brilliant young narrator then, Kivlighan de Montebello, had won an award, an Audie Award, for his brilliant narration in Lost Children Archive. So he'd had a certificate from the Audies where all our names—Kivligan's, mine, Charles's, and my daughter Maia's name—all lived together for five years. [laughter] Just these names on a piece of paper in a boy's room way before we all came together as a composite tribe. So, I don't know, life and literature are obviously more intermingled than we ever think.

DN: For sure.

VL: Anyway, after Lost Children Archive, essentially I became very curious about what it was to record soundscapes because my characters there are a sound recording engineer, as Charles is in reality, but this was all fiction. And the woman narrator is also a sound documentarian. And these two characters became, for me, a source of enormous curiosity. And I decided I wanted to do what they did and actually go to the border and record sound and understand the sounds of that liminal, violent, and beautiful space that is the borderlands between Mexico and the U.S. I met along the way in those years two wonderful sound engineers and musicians, Leo Heiblum and Ricardo Giraldo. And we spent five years recording the border. We have been spending these past years... We've had to suspend this last year because of situations at the border, because of funding situations. And so we haven't recorded this past year. But for five years in a row, we recorded. And something happened to me that I think changed my life and my conception of writing and thinking forever in doing this project with Echoes from the Borderlands. I had previously worked with some oral histories and listening attentively as a form of finding a source of not only story but attention. But in recording the borderlands, I think I had to relearn to listen completely. It's as if I realized I was illiterate as a listener, and I had to educate myself and become literate as a listener because recording nature particularly requires hours of silence, of sitting very still and just letting a storm pass in front of you and not making a single sound, just sitting put and listening. Or dropping a hydrophone into a river and listening there for 40 minutes. Or understanding that what you normally maybe conceive as noise, if you atomize it into its parts, is really a composition of a lot of different sounds. And actually understanding what is what is an entirely new, for me, way of not only listening—and here's where I'm going to try to start answering Charles's question—but also of paying attention, of noticing things. Charles was asking there about image as a source, imagination as something primarily visual. But is sound also something that is a source of writing? And I think I'd say not in the same way. Sound is not a source in the same way that a visual composition might be. But it is, in a deeper way, a source for me because it is a state of attention, like a place of deep concentration and observation. Because sound requires you to be in space and in time, inserted, rooted in space and in time, like no other sense. You can't really fast-forward sound because then you don't get any... You can scroll images. You can quickly see. You can compose quickly with just a few glances. But sound doesn't allow that. You really have to take time and be in time and be deeply inserted in it. So that trains the imagination and consciousness more generally into a state of observation that I think is the space from which I prefer to work now. That's the only space I can find as a more meaningful way of noticing and caring about the world. So is sound going to then play a bigger and bigger role? I mean, it already has with Beginning Middle End. And Beginning Middle End is informed by sound in that way. But then it also, of course, now through our work in translating it into a sonic novel, where indeed what you listen to alongside and with and threaded together with the narrative are the sounds of the four Empedoclean elements in their different expressions, right? So there's fire and water and air and earth. So we've recorded Etna's grumbles and rumbles with geophones, or recorded tides with hydrophones, different tides in the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Mediterranean. We've recorded most of the eight winds that zigzag across the island at different times. We've recorded an incredible Scirocco, a Mistral, I think a Libeccio. And we've recorded songs of fishermen and bells that tell time. And all of these sounds are threaded in a Greek chorus of elements that accompany and converse with the novel. I think something that happened to me with this novel, which is what happens to me in general with all my books, is that I begin to learn about something late into the process of writing a novel. So I began to learn about volcanoes with this novel late into the novel, years after writing, just by observing them, listening to them, recording them. Just as I had learned about sound for the first time while writing Lost Children Archive, and then became interested in sound and then started recording sound with others. In this one, volcanoes and observing and thinking about observation and documentation of nature and its sounds differently, all that was learning that began with Beginning Middle End. That's where I'm interested in going now. I don't know exactly how we might do it, but we've been thinking a lot about doing a kind of sonic Pliny's Natural History, like a rewriting of a natural history, observing the world and the phenomena that Pliny observed in the year 70 AD. And 2,000 years later, how do those things sound? But also, how do they look? How might we register and observe the world with a similar attention and a similar kind of composite way of doing it? Pliny's Natural History is a mashup as well. It's his own observations, but he brings in a lot of other people's testimonies, and he quotes. He's one of the first people in history to properly quote others and include a polyphonic narrative of the world because it's many different eyes and ears observing the world, listening to the world. So, yeah, how might we do a sonic natural history? I'm curious.

DN: Well, your publisher pointed me to, or shared with me, the website that's still being built that gives us a taste of the audiobook, but also has a lot of really visually appealing elements too. You see the volcano erupting. You see the timeline of the book. And then you can listen to and watch different audio pieces and video pieces. So I'm just going to play one so we have a sense of what you and Charles have been working on with others.

VL: With Ricardo Giraldo.

DN: Yes.

[audiobook excerpt plays]

DN: Is that your actual daughter and mom?

VL: Yes, that is my mother and my daughter.

DN: Wow.

VL: Yes. The first time I recorded my mom answering those questions was actually early on when my household became a slowly matriarchal household. I was just beginning to think about Echoes from the Borderlands, and I had a kind of thesis. It was the wrong way to begin a project, with a thesis. I think now, looking back, that one should begin projects like that with questions, with very open questions. But my thought was, "Okay, the border is very violent. It must be because there is a lot of fear. So let's ask people what they're afraid of." But I began to explore the question of fear in my own small family circle, asking just everyone in my household what they were afraid of. And then that question, "What are you afraid of?" became one of the first questions for Echoes from the Borderlands. But the first person I ever asked that question, and I recorded her answers, was my mother. And I asked her, "What are you afraid of, Ma?" And she said, "I'm afraid of perder claridad, perder la mente, to lose my clarity, to lose my mind, to lose my memory."

DN: I can't not ask you the question that most people so far have started with when interviewing you, a question which I think exasperates you. Nonetheless, it feels like your book also very actively invites this question. And it's a question about your fiction's relationship to reality, especially given how you've said that for a long time you didn't know if you were writing a novel or an essay. To me, the most natural thing to say would be that your work is autofictional, that it lives in the seam between the two, and that it plays quite overtly with that mystery between the real and the imagined, and with what language does to the real. But you push back against this framing of autobiographical fiction. Yet this question of autofiction even enters the narrative of this book, where the mother is worried how her fictional narratives are affecting the actual memories of her daughter, a daughter who often witnesses her mother's readings on her book tour. And the daughter believes that she almost drowned in a guitar-shaped pool in Memphis, Tennessee, which didn't happen to the daughter in the real life of the book, only in the narrator's fictional rendering of the daughter. But this vignette in your novel is actually true out in the world. So your engagement with autofiction within the book feels, in some ways, like it strengthens the case for it, not the reverse, as it strengthens the correspondence between your daughter and the fictional daughter, which is the play and the mischievousness of autofiction to begin with. The narrator in this book is also writing a book called Maternity Leave, whose opening lines are the same as the opening lines of Beginning Middle End. And the mother of our protagonist is involved in radical politics, much as your mother was, as you mentioned, leaving your family when you were young to work for a women's collective in Chiapas for the Zapatista movement. And your ex-husband and former guest on the show, Álvaro Enrigue, his latest book has a fictionalized version of your road trip to the Southwest, much as you did your fictional version in Lost Children Archive. Your response to this question, somewhat cheekily in Spanish, is that 27% of the book is true, which I suspect is also true with lots of autofiction. And I think here of Vila-Matas' interview in The Paris Review, where he talks about how what is so appealing about language is how it destabilizes existence, exactly because it doesn't reproduce reality. He says this is true since the second volume of Don Quixote, that he's doing something in the aura of Book Two of Don Quixote, an automythography, something metaliterary, similar to the second volume where Cervantes has Quixote now as a well-known figure, confronted with and contending with his own legendary reality wherever he goes. It seems like great autofiction or great automythography is playing with and foregrounding this aspect of narrative and language, as I think yours does really delightfully through many of your books. But I want you to tell me where I'm wrong, or how you would push back, or why this is a thorn in your side, and what language you would use to describe this, this very clear way in which you're not abandoning signposts. They may not be important to the interior of your book, but you're not abandoning signposts that correspond with, you know, broad-stroke signposts within your own lived experience in the world.

VL: Well, first of all, I have to say that that 27% true is advice that Vila-Matas gave me.

DN: Oh. I love that.

VL: We were launching Beginning Middle End together in Barcelona a few months ago, and I told him about how much this question bugged me. This "How much is true? What happened? What didn't really happen?" [laughter] I say it bugged me, but I, as a reader, have to confess that I am also always wondering that when I read someone. It's natural to want to know, but it also doesn't shed so much light on the story or on anything if we are given an answer.

DN: I agree.

VL: Yeah. So Vila-Matas said, "You should just tell them every time anyone asks you how much of the story is true, say 27%." I thought that was the perfect answer. So ever since then, I've been saying it's 27% true. Now, of course, I am interested in the way that fiction spills into reality and the way that reality threads itself into fiction, and the back-and-forth movements, the tidal movements between those two spaces, which are very much like a shoreline. They're not a clear marked border. It's a shifting border. Sometimes the tide is higher, sometimes it's lower. The shape of it changes constantly. There was a moment in my book tour for Lost Children Archive, where I was traveling with my daughter, and I was in an interview in Amsterdam, and the interviewer really wanted to get me to confess that this was more autobiographical than I was letting on, that Lost Children Archive was more autobiographical. And I kept on saying, "It isn't. I never lost my children in the desert. My child never almost drowned." But he kept on cornering me. And my daughter was sitting next to me reading a book, just quietly reading her own book. And at some point she put her book down and stared the journalist in the eyes very seriously. And I was like, "Oh my God, what is she going to say? What's going to happen?" [laughter] And she started reciting jokes that the girl in Lost Children Archive recites. Knock-knock jokes. She noticed a growing tension, I think, and she decided to break it telling knock-knock jokes, but stealing them from the character in the novel.

DN: [laughs] Oh my God.

VL: But I really thought, "What a brilliant vengeance of hers," right? Because indeed he was asking me questions about things that had happened. She had some false memories of her childhood because I'd written fiction with bits and pieces of our lives. And here she was turning it all around, confusing me and confusing this journalist, not really allowing us to differentiate where the shoreline ended and where the sea began. So who was stealing from whom? And who is a character? And I thought, this is brilliant. And this is exactly the part of whatever we may call autofiction—a very broad category that includes way too many things in it. Here it was playing out in its more picaresque way, which is where I'm interested in it, which is where the serious game starts for me, in the notion of literature as a very serious play. And then I was telling you earlier about the fact that I was just recently in the Villa Romana del Casale, which is a setting for the novel, for Beginning Middle End from where fictionally a nonexistent grandmother of mine stole a mosaic. And here I was just weeks ago having a conversation with the head of culture, who actually believes I stole something or that I have a stolen artifact. [laughs] In fact, they've invited me to do a book presentation in two weeks from now, on July 22nd, at the ruins because we're all going to Sicily in a few days. And I've said yes to presenting the book there at the ruins where, I mean, I don't think I'm going to get to talk about this book in a better setting. But I am also a little concerned that they might still believe that I have a stolen mosaic and that that might still be part of their reason for inviting me there again. [laughs] But in this back-and-forth of where fiction threads itself in or spills into reality and gives it a different kind of life, a different tempo, that is where I find space to play. And I love that you went back to really the first instance, at least in Spanish, at least in modern Spanish, the Quixote of autofiction, in the sense that there's this amazing essay by... Give me a second. Oh, I'm blanking right now on his name, but I will remember. It's an essay about how the Quixote is not avant la lettre, but après la lettre, in the sense that he is a character that realizes at some point that he is being written about. So he begins to act so as to be written about in better ways.

DN: Yeah. Whereas in the first book, he's just trying to be written about, but no one knows who the hell he is. He's inspired by those romance novels that he's been reading and wants to be in one.

VL: But in the second one, he already knows that he's being written about. So now his actions have to be at the measure of becoming literature.

DN: And what's so great about that, too, I think, is that when you talk about fiction escaping into the real world, like these people thinking you actually stole the mosaic tile, is that he only wrote the second book because someone stole the story and started continuing-

VL: But he was in jail.

DN: Yeah. So someone's continuing the book, and he needs to steal back the story again.

VL: I remembered the name of the writer who wrote this essay about the Quixote as the first après la lettre novel, and it's Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio. I don't know if it exists in English. I suspect it doesn't. But it's a brilliant, brilliant little essay about precisely this. So that's where I think things get more interesting, right? To live life in a way in which we can find our life to be digna de ser contada. I might want to say "worth being told," but not in a sense of greatness, the greatness of a life, but in the sense of the care and attention we give to the mundane. How do we allow fiction to reconfigure our sense of attention and therefore care for the world? So much so that our lives can feel like they are simultaneously being lived and written with the threads of fiction. That is, with the threads of observant care.

DN: I love that.

VL: You know, I think that in many borderline events in life that feel like cracks, like big, deep cracks in our souls, when we lose someone, when we are sitting next to someone who is in agony toward the end of their life in this form, in this body, I've had many conversations with writer friends, but also friends who are not writers but are good readers, who declare that they go into writing mode in their brain in this moment. Observation. A kind of observation that is deeper, that is trying to hold on to a moment while making sense of it, documenting it at a deeper level of consciousness while also being present for it. I think that that's something that fiction gives us. Autofiction becomes interesting to me when it is a vehicle toward that form of observation of our own lives.

DN: Well, one of the things I love about your books is how the writer's process and materials enter the narrative itself. For instance, in Lost Children Archive, the seven boxes in the back of the car that the family is road-tripping in, different boxes assigned to different family members for either the research materials they want to bring along or as receptacles for things they discover along the way, so that the mother can, during an insomnia in a random motel, wander out to the car at night, secretly looking through her soon-to-be ex-husband's boxes, discover what books he brought with him, bring one back to her bed, and that narrative from that book then enters the narrative of your book. And similarly, as mother and daughter inhabit the main character's lover's apartment without him present, they engage with his Loeb Classical Library, which is a series of bilingual books, either in Ancient Greek or Ancient Latin, with the green books in Greek and the red in Latin, and with the English translations on the facing pages. Unlike the lover, who mainly apparently wants to just display them, the daughter wants to read them, and they end up stealing some of them to take on their quest when they flee this apartment. Because of this, the thoughts of ancient philosophers become a certain substrata of this book. You, like me, studied philosophy as an undergraduate in university. I imagine this might have been an opportunity for you to revisit some of these texts decades later. But either way, you've also said in interviews that you now teach a class that centers the pre-Socratic philosophers. So I'd love to hear anything that comes to mind about your interest in them, why they figure so prominently in the book, and maybe a favorite philosophical idea or philosopher from antiquity that you'd want to share with listeners today.

VL: I love that. Let me read you one fragment from Empedocles' On Nature. Where do I have it? It should be here. I still can't make sense of this. I know that the day I understand it fully, I will have understood something enormous. I still don't quite understand it. These are two lines from the poem On Nature. Empedocles writes: "To join together diverse peaks of thought, and not complete one road that has no turn." I'll read them again: "To join together diverse peaks of thought, and not complete one road that has no turn." I don't know exactly what he means, but this idea of joining peaks of thought and then not completing roads, but just meandering in them, returning or getting lost at the end of one of them or another while observing these peaks of thought. I mean, the image I get in my mind whenever I read that is driving across Appalachia on that beautiful highway, the Blue Ridge Highway, and how the mountain peaks appear in the distance, but they're all covered in fog. So the only thing you see really are peaks. Or the Popocatépetl volcano in Mexico City that's often covered in fog and you can only sometimes see its little peak, or the peaks of Iztaccíhuatl. But how the creative process is a little bit like that, where we observe something in the distance, or a constellation of things in the distance, and the task is to put them together, understanding that around everything and beneath everything is a greater mystery that we can never quite penetrate, but that it also is the sustenance, the consuelo, the ground under which everything gains greater meaning. And there is something about reading, particularly pre-Socratic philosophy, partly because of the way that archive comes to us, which is just fragments. I mean, Empedocles' On Nature is one of the fullest pictures we have because enough of it survives that we can get a sense of his philosophy and his idea of there being four elements. And the universe begins as this vortex where everything is spinning around, all the elements, and love, or some such force of attraction, is pulling things together. And another force that he calls discord, or that is translated into English as discord, is pulling things apart. And so love and strife, or love and discord, are pulling apart the elements and creating things. Then there's this first image—see if I find it here—of how the first beings are created from this vortex, where he says, let me see, here. It's fragment 57. He says, "There budded many a head without a neck, and arms were roaming, shoulderless and bare, and eyes that wanted foreheads drifted by. In isolation wandered every limb, hither and thither, seeing union meet." This image, to me, of beginning, an origin, the origin of beings being just limbs, like arms looking for torsos and eyes looking for foreheads and legs wandering around looking for something to stick to, feels so very true to what the creative process is like at the beginning. This being torn asunder, this being parts of things, these fragmented times and thoughts and peaks of thought that have to be then put together by the force of imagination or by the force of love or by the force of the erotic, as Audre Lorde did, the force of creativity. I think that reading the pre-Socratics, because they come in these fragments and that's all we have—Anaximenes and Anaximander, Thales of Miletus, Heraclitus, of course—we just have to put together these peaks of thought. And it's an invitation to observe playfully and imaginatively and also quietly, right? Because they were the first naturalists. They were the first ones to try to understand the world, not only through the framework of gods and greater forces, but just the forces of nature themselves. And I think we are in front of a world that is so daunting, so rapidly changing. I think a lot of us feel like we're at the end of one form of civilization and the beginning of another, that I think those eyes, those ears, those early forms of documentation and observation that the pre-Socratics engage with are ones that can really teach us how to see and hear and think and imagine.

DN: Well, I love that both Pliny and Empedocles die by volcano. And also how you say it's the tourist view of Odysseus that he's the greatest hero. You've mentioned this already today, and not the greatest hero of civilization and not a trafficker of female sex slaves. And that you also throw your lot in with Polyphemus, the Cyclops. And I do the same when I talked with Omar El Akkad about the ancient origins of the West's othering of people outside of its borders. And this inversion makes me think of how you continually point out the hypocrisy of Europe today. The "Italy for Italians" people, when so many Europeans were themselves refugees. The grandmother in this book ends up in Mexico from Sicily to escape famine. My wife's great-grandmother is from Argentina because part of her family escaped a horrible famine in part of France ruled by the Kingdom of Sardinia in the 19th century. I want to ask about this inversion of allegiance in ancient texts and/or your indictment of the modern xenophobic attitude to immigrants by people who themselves, in other eras, have greatly benefited from being taken in. But I'm going to push that into the final question, not this one. Before we talk about that, I want to first talk about the mosaic tile that the great-grandmother stole, a tile from one of the most amazing sites of mosaics that I've ever visited. A tile the daughter wants to return, but the notion of return and what that might entail changes as the book progresses, and that's not something I'm going to spoil. But in relation to this tile, I think of a line in the book: "If you are born a tuna fish, you can't die a swordfish." Because the tile they have is of the god Proteus, who would disagree with this saying, not only because he is the god shepherd of the sea beasts, but because he's a shape-shifting god. And you said in one interview that you first discovered this god reading the book Dart by a past guest of this show, Alice Oswald. I feel like your books are very Protean, generally speaking. This book could be seen as a road novel, a novel about writing, a family drama, climate fiction, a feminist retelling of classical mythology, maybe a field guide for the apocalypse. But talk to us about Proteus. Why Proteus on the tile, and what is the influence of Proteus on the book and the story?

VL: Proteus is a minor god in the Greek pantheon. He doesn't make many appearances in some of the most important compendiums of mythology. He practically does not appear in Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is the place where one would imagine Proteus to be almost a protagonist figure, and he's not in Hesiod's Theogony—I always mispronounce Hesiod. Hesiodo. All those names are etched in Spanish in my mind. Hesiod's Theogony. So he's hard to find, but he appears here and there. Yes, the first time I ever encountered the name Proteus was in Alice Oswald's Dart, which is one of my favorite poems ever written. It's like a sonic cartography of a river through the voices, real or imagined, that bounce off the water. But it's also the water speaking, but it's also myth, but it's also folklore, and it's also a naturalist, and it's also a swimmer. Anyway, I encountered Proteus there, and he quickly became, in my mind, a fascinating figure as an oracular god. Because here's the difference between Proteus and any other oracular divinities. Usually, in oracles, we think of clairvoyance as a way of being able to see into the future, right? But Proteus, who is a sea shepherd, sees not only the future, but the past in complete clarity and the present in complete clarity. That really changes the way we think about clarity and observation and what it is to know and understand. It's not the future; it's time in a bigger sense. But Proteus hates being consulted as an oracle. So when anyone captures him, he begins a series of metamorphoses so as to escape his captor. And so he becomes a rainstorm or a wave or a lion or a tree or thunder. And he usually escapes. And from what I know, there are only two accounts where someone has successfully captured Proteus. One is in the Odyssey, Menelaus, and the other one is in Virgil's Georgics. And in the case, at least, of the Odyssey and Menelaus, when he finally captures Proteus and gets information out of him about the past and the future and the present, he is devastated. He didn't actually want to know. And I think there's a lot to think about there, about what knowing can also do to us, and how we always want to know, but knowing too much is also unbearable.

DN: I also think of the first time Mary Ruefle came on the show. She said something like, "I'd rather wonder than know," and how she liked to have a dinner party before you could Google everything and look up everything and know, and you could wonder together. It may or may not be true, but there is something wonderful about wondering.

VL: I love that. At the beginning of your question, you asked about overturning the geopolitical narratives of East and West and South and North. And I remembered—and this is connected to knowing and seeing and not knowing and not understanding and understanding too much, and the death of Empedocles and Pliny in volcanoes. When I was teaching a course last semester with a wonderful group of students at NYU, at the MFA at NYU, we were reading pre-Socratics and also some Latin writers like Virgil and Pliny, the two Plinys. And the classes were divided, the sessions I gave were divided into random categories. There was a class devoted to volcanoes, another one dedicated to tides, another one to wind. We threaded the moon in there in various sessions because I wasn't quite sure where to place the moon, but it just orbited in and out of the syllabus. And the last session of that course was devoted to fire and to volcanoes in particular. And I did not know until preparing for that last session that the notion of a volcano did not appear in Latin until the 1500s, and that the story of the word volcano, in fact, started in Arabic, even though it's taken from a Roman god. And here's the story. So if you look at Pliny's Natural History or at Virgil's Aeneid, where volcanoes appear all the time, they are never called volcanoes. Mount Etna, that appears both in the fictional Aeneid and in Pliny's Natural History, appears as a mountain that behaves strangely and whimsically. [laughter] Pliny, in fact, never saw a volcano as a volcano when he was looking at one. In fact, the last years of his life he lived in front of Vesuvius. He was on the other side of a very long bay, at the end of which was Pompeii and Vesuvius looming over Pompeii. He was at the other side of that bay, and the day that Vesuvius started erupting in the year 79, he was having a bath because he was a very large man whose nose bled too often, so he took a lot of baths. He always had someone reading to him while he was soaking in a bath because he thought that one minute of the day spent without reading was a wasted minute of the day. So he was always either reading or being read to. He would have been a lover of podcasts, of long podcasts. [laughter] And he was soaking in the bath, and his young nephew, Pliny the Younger, came to tell him, "Something is happening over there in the mountain. It has a really strange cloud in the shape of a pine tree." So Pliny got out of the bath, went to look at Vesuvius, said, "Indeed, that's very strange. I'm going to go check it out." And he had a large fleet of boats at his disposal. And at that moment, when he was getting ready to go and see this from a closer distance, he receives a letter from a friend who lives on the other side of the bay saying, "Please bring your boats over and help us get out because the earth is trembling here. Rocks are falling. There's something weird happening. We need to get out." So he prepares all his fleet and navigates over to the other end of the bay. And he arrives, and instead of helping everyone get out, he's like, "No, it's okay. Nothing's going to happen. Let's have dinner." So they have dinner, and the earth is rumbling. And then he's like, "No, it's okay. Let's go to sleep. We'll be fine." And they all go to sleep. And it's reported that they heard him sleeping soundly. He was snoring loudly in his room. And at some point in the middle of the night, the eruption becomes much more violent, and everyone is woken and they have to actually flee. And he leaves his bedroom with a pillow on his head. This smart, one of the smartest, keenest observers of nature, left his room with a pillow on his head while Vesuvius was erupting. They go down to the beach, and that's where Pliny dies, they think because he inhaled too many fumes. But by that point, they couldn't just leave freely because the sea had retreated and the boats were stuck on the sand. All this to say, Pliny, the best observer of nature in ancient history, always called volcanoes mountains and never realized that Vesuvius was a volcano that was erupting until maybe too late. And so on and so forth with later versions of observations of volcanoes until Arab cartographer Al-Idrisi took the name of the god Vulcano, who was the smith of the gods. He worked underground, supposedly under Mount Etna, creating spears and other weapons for gods. He takes the name Vulcano, the god Vulcano, and applies it to mountains that he thinks are, in fact, not mountains, but something else. And he places them on a map, one of the early maps of the Mediterranean, one of the earliest and most precise maps of the Mediterranean. And that's where the word vulcana comes, but it comes in Arabic, and it's vulcana. And only more than 500 years later does a Roman cartographer take the name again from Arabic back into Roman languages and call them vulcanos or volcanoes. And I don't know, it's just sometimes words have to travel out into other cartographies through another language to come back and allow us to see things with more clarity. There's some kind of an allegory there about translation and circumnavigation and knowledge, better kind of knowledge as a result of that.

DN: Well, that's going to be a perfect lead into my final question. But before I ask my final question, I'm going to play one more sonic field from your audiobook website.

[audiobook excerpt plays]

DN: So both of these are examples of the beginnings of chapters. But what you said about Empedocles and the connecting of peaks, and then also the secret history through Arabic of this Latin word appearing back into Latin, and also thinking of these comments about a house in this excerpt, I think of the dislocated and/or erased-from-the-narrative figures in your book. About this entire book not taking place in what most people would consider a home, but in someone else's, with lines like, "Maybe home is things on a desk. Maybe home is repetition," and "Home is washing vegetables." That maybe home isn't a place, or isn't a place without a certain active relationship to it, and that it might not be fixed in a place. I think of how mosaic tiles that together depict a grand scene are both fragments and fragments brought together to make a whole. And I wonder if it is, in a way, the perfect way to understand your work: mosaics. Hearing your family in the audiobook, inviting your daughter into the composition of the book, your partner into the sound design, your mother character sending her own writing to her mother in the hopes of keeping her mind sharp and alive. All of these feel like homemaking activities or mosaic-making activities. Same with the way your books are so full of other books and of your love of other writers, that your books swim within an ocean of books that you want to be among. And I also love how you mentioned to Carlos Puig that at many Sicilian archaeological sites, the mosaics, counterintuitively, were preserved by the volcanoes rather than destroyed by them. And it reminds me how the tablets where we discovered Gilgamesh, our oldest epic, were preserved by the heat of the fire from the burning of the Library of Nineveh. Because it does feel like the world is burning in many ways. And in these instances that you put forth, the volcano preserving the mosaics, the burning actually produces a certain continuity somehow. I also think of how, as you also mentioned today, Empedocles, who originated the theory of the four elements, believed that the forces of love and the forces of strife would either mix or separate the elements, respectively. Because it feels like these books of yours are about bringing the elements together, the mosaic fragments together, knitting us together against the odds somehow. In this book, you talk about how Virgil thought of Sicily as the hinge between Africa and Europe, or the hinge where Africa and Europe were once linked, and how the southernmost part of Sicily is farther south than the northernmost part of Tunisia, and how the gesture of this book feels, in a way, like a future-oriented gesture that is knitting something back together in the face of what appears to be a further and further rupture apart. Because I think of similar things like Mathias Énard's work, who not only uncovers the deep ways Islam has influenced Europe in history, but how many of Europe's cities, in his mind, he would call great Muslim cities too, which makes me think about this secret Arabic history of volcanoes. Or Teju Cole's great essay where he follows the flight of Caravaggio from the law in Italy and Sicily and Malta and elsewhere. And he's painting some of his most iconic paintings while he's on the run. But he's not only stopping to visit the paintings that Caravaggio made along the way, but he's visiting the refugee camps too, sometimes creating intersections between the two, bringing people from the camps into churches where they didn't necessarily, on their own, feel welcome to be before these paintings and to discuss them together. In a way, I bring this up simply to say thank you for your work, Valeria, but I guess also to invite any final thoughts you have about throwing in your lot with the Cyclops against Odysseus on behalf of a different model of self-definition or self-reinvention, but also collective reinvention, I think, perhaps, too.

VL: I love your final reflection, and thank you for having me here. I love this space of conversation that you create, and it feels so watery, so Latin American, so past and so future. The only maybe last thing I would say is that there is no reimagining without collectiveness, or there is no reimagining without collectivity. Where collectivity means past, present, future in an oracular, Protean way. Where collectivity means multiplicity of minds and imaginations. Where collectivity means not hierarchical forms of organization, but rather tidal forms of back-and-forths, of putting together, tearing apart asunder, pulling things back together. And for all of that to happen, I think, first of all, reading across time and across languages is indispensable because there is no way for us to renew our observation of the world if not through traveling out and coming back the way the word volcano has to travel out and come back to finally allow us to see what was there in front of us enormously, which is not a mountain but a volcano. How many volcanoes are we not seeing? What are our contemporary volcanoes? For us to see those and name them, we have to travel out and come back. And when I say "travel out," I mean travel out of our present into our past. Not everything that we read from the past we like. It feels sometimes daunting. "Oh, canon. Oh, the classics. Oh, boring. Oh, difficulty." No. I mean, it's just a matter of time and attention. Everything, when given time and attention, can become dear to us, even if we don't agree with it. Refutation is a way of reading. Contention is a way of engaging. We need not accept everything that we engage with, but we need to engage with it. And traveling out also means traveling out into other languages and other literatures. I'm a very, very firm believer in multilingualism because I really think that it makes our own monolingualism problematic. As soon as there's a second way of saying things, our way suddenly feels less sure. Our house suddenly feels shaken a bit. And that's a good thing. And it's never too late. I mean, now, after writing this book and the aftermath of writing this book, in which I've been engaging with cartographers like Al-Idrisi or other literature, I want to learn Arabic. [laughs]

DN: Oh, wow.

VL: I thought I wanted to, because I studied some Ancient Greek when I was studying philosophy, and I tried to study it again a couple of years ago when I was teaching at Harvard. And I thought, "Well, I should take some classes while I'm here." [laughs] And I went into Ancient Greek, but all my peers were very young med students, and they were so brilliant and so fast. I was like the old lady in the class, perpetually left behind. So I don't know. I might go back to Ancient Greek or not. But really what I'd love to study is Arabic. There's also so much in Spanish of Arabic that we just know, like almohada and azúcar, but really it's deep in the composition of our psyche too. And so, yes, other languages and the language of the past as much as the language of the present.

DN: Thank you, Valeria Luiselli.

VL: Thank you very much, David.

DN: We've been talking today to Valeria Luiselli about her latest book, Beginning Middle End. You've been listening to Between the Covers. I'm David Naimon, your host. Today's program was recorded at the volunteer-powered, non-commercial, listener-sponsored, full-strength makeshift home office of me, David Naimon. If you enjoyed today's conversation, consider transforming yourself from a listener to a listener-supporter by joining the Between the Covers community. Every supporter can join our brainstorm of future guests, and every listener-supporter receives supplementary resources with each and every conversation of things I discovered while preparing, things we referenced together during the conversation, and places to explore once you're done listening. In addition, you can choose from a variety of other things as well, including the Bonus Audio Archive, with contributions from past guests, whether long-form translator conversations, such as the ones with Megan McDowell talking about translating Alejandro Zambra and Mariana Enríquez, or the one with Sophie Hughes translating Fernanda Melchor, or readings by past guests, such as Natalie Diaz reading from Borges' Bestiary of Imaginary Beings, or Jazmina Barrera reading Elena Garro. There are also writers reading their own translations, whether Lisa Robertson reading her translation of Charles Baudelaire's long poem Hags, or our current U.S. Poet Laureate reading his translations from four eras in Chinese poetry and discussing how doing these translations led to breakthroughs in his own writing practice. Or perhaps you want to subscribe as a Milkweed Early Reader, receiving 12 books over the course of a year before they're available to the general public. You can check out all these options and much more at patreon.com/betweenthecovers. Or if you prefer a one-time donation, you can do so by PayPal at milkweed.org/podcastsupport. Today's episode is brought to you in part by World of Wonders, named, hands down, one of the most beautiful books of the year by NPR. Aimee Nezhukumatathil's World of Wonders is a classic from Milkweed Editions that encourages readers to look past the distractions in order to appreciate the world's gifts. Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, this book is full of sustenance and joy, taking us through many landscapes with the kinship of funny creatures. The New York Times Book Review says, "It's a very fine book indeed, truly full of wonder." World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil is available at Milkweed.org. I'd like to thank the Milkweed team, particularly Claire Barnes and Craig Popelars, for everything they're doing to make this partnership a reality. And finally, I'd like to thank past Between the Covers guest, poet, musician, composer, performer, and much more, Alicia Jo Rabins, for making the intro and the outro for the show. You can find out more about her work, her writing, her teaching, her music, her film, at aliciajo.com.