Interview with Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

Interview by Mehroo Siddiqui

A distinguished academic, Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza is a best-selling novelist who lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A Window in Copacabana is the fourth book in the Inspector Espinosa series; the previous three titles-- The Silence of the Rain, December Heat, and Southwesterly Wind-- are available in paperback from Picador.
 

When did you write your first book? Was it also a mystery? What made you choose to become a writer? Had it always been something you had wanted to do or did it just happen?

I became a novelist late in life. My first mystery novel, The Silence of the Rain, was published in 1996, when I was 60 years old. Before that, from 1972 to 1995, I had written only theoretical essays (eight altogether: in philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis); at that time I was a professor of psychology and philosophy at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Fortunately, The Silence of the Rain was honored in 1997 with two great literature prizes in Brazil, which encouraged me to write the second book, December Heat, followed by three others-- Southwesterly Wind, A Window in Copacabana, and Pursuit.

When I was a professor, it was too difficult to accommodate my academic obligations while finding time for literary activity. The only time the two overlapped  was when I was writing my first novel (1995 to 1996). In 1998, after having taught at the university for thirty-five years, I retired and started devoting all my time to writing novels. I think it is important to point out that before this decision, I had never written fiction. Until 1995, my relationship with literature was as a reader not a writer, despite having written eight theoretical books. In my opinion, writing theoretical essays is as different from writing novels as being a chemistry professor is from being a poet (or as being a poet is from being a novelist).

So, how did I become a novelist? Making the final decision was quick but the process was long, through the shadows of my academic activity. Important decisions can be sudden…as a result of a very long process of maturation. But the final decision involved a rupture with the academic life, and the beginning of a new intellectual activity. And the two are different in many respects; for example, a fictional narrative gives me freedom compared to the rigid conceptual structure of the scientific discourse I was used to; another distinguishing aspect, from my point of view, is the fact that mystery novels, like mythological thought or ancient Greek poetry, bring to the center of a fictional narrative the most intense and fundamental questions of the human being: death and sexuality. These are also the main questions of psychoanalysis (the parricide and the incest). They can be addressed with much more freedom in fiction than in theoretical essays.

Why the genre of crime fiction? Is it difficult to come up with mysteries and such thickly-laid plots that keep the readers guessing until the last moment and grow more and more intriguing with each page?

The question about the genre-- why crime fiction?-- is not a simple one. Crime is not an accident for human beings. From Greek tragedy to Freudian psychoanalysis, crime, more than an accident, is an essential part of the human being, a principle of his or her constitution. Crime and sexuality: Together, they form the basic components of our psychological structure. They also form the nuclear theme of crime fiction. What fascinates me in crime fiction is the refusal to think of this question (murder) as exterior to the human universe, as something like “the animal part” of humans. Metaphysical literature tends to treat these matters as transcendental (in the sense of external) or in terms of the deep and darker part of the human world. What I see as the extraordinary feature of crime fiction is that it takes a horizontal view of these questions. It doesn’t "verticalize" them. (Crime fiction remains in the horizontal level of the events (that is, in the level of language). In this sense, we can say that crime novel is superficial. Yes, it is. But in the same sense we can say that the events are superficial. Do not forget that events have the richness of language. Crime fiction such as Greek tragedy deals not with depths but also with intensities as in Sophocles’ "Oedipus Rex.")

I hope my books are read with a non-exclusive rationalist point of view of human acts. A murder is not a problem, or at least, it is not only a problem to be solved, but it is also an enigma, in the same sense that ancient Greeks conceived the enigma: something that holds the truth but also holds the shadow side of the sentence, the ambiguity and the silence. So, I hope my readers are left with a vivid sensation of an open story. The sense of the story is always given by the reader, not by the writer. The writer gives only the text, and the richness of a fictional text is its capacity to produce countless senses and meanings. There is no final meaning.

A Window in Copacabana is the fourth book in the Inspector Espinosa series. How did you come up with this character? Tell us more about him.

Espinosa is a common man. He is not a hero, he is not always fighting against dangerous criminals, and he does not get all the beautiful blondes and brunettes that cross his path. He is a public employee, a middle-aged person, and a solitary man. He could be our neighbor. However, at the same time, he has a critical mind and a romantic heart; he feels he is an eccentric in the police world and out of place in general. He is a contradictory common man, if this makes sense. Above all, Espinosa is an ethical man. Two decades before the birth of the character Inspector Espinosa, Brazil was still under a military regime, which had ruled for a very long time, and the police were conceived as a repressive force and not as an investigative apparatus. Besides, several divisions were corrupt. Therefore, the image of Brazilian police at that time was not good, and that bad impression has persisted until the present time. Nowadays, after more than two decades of full democracy, we still have a police force contaminated by the past. With Inspector Espinosa, I intended to create a character that provided the image of an ethical policeman, not as a utopian ideal but as a real possibility.

The book has received great reviews. How does it feel to be a best-selling novelist? How do you think a writer achieves this position?

Having received great reviews is not an isolated merit of A Window in Copacabana, but something that came in the wake of the three previous books. Of course, each novel has its own merit but I think that each one has benefited from the positive reception to the previous ones. In this sense, the first book in the series (or the first one that is well received) is especially important because it prepared the ground for the next one. So, The Silence of the Rain being honored with two literature prizes helped the reception of the subsequent novels.

There is no general prescription to be a best-selling novelist, besides the double meaning of being a “best-selling novelist.” In an immediate sense, it means your book sells thousands of copies (a quantitative meaning); on the other hand, it could mean that you are recognized as a good writer by novelists and critics (a qualitative meaning). And of course, a writer could be best-selling but not a good writer (in a literary sense) or could be a good writer without being a best-selling one. But there is another duality in being considered a best-selling novelist: No doubt it is an extraordinary experience and makes you feel good, successful... But extraordinary also means not ordinary or out of ordinary, uncommon, something that isolates you, makes you feel alone, and I think this is one characteristic of a novelist: the feeling of solitude. Creation is always a solitary activity, a unique act.

Tell us about the novel. What inspired you to write it? How was the writing process? Is there anything else you want to share about it?

What set this novel (A Window in Copacabana) in motion is the question of the look and paranoia. But this question is not mentioned or brought into the foreground in the text, but rather it is in the emotional shade of the plot. It is difficult to say what inspired me to write this novel (or even any other novel). The raw material of creative writing, especially novels, is on one hand the imaginary of the author (imaginary conceived as a noun-- the unconscious-- not as an adjective) and on the other hand the reality, conceived not as a monolithic objectivity but as that unstable and fragmentary world of our experience, both with the emotional intensity inherent in each one. But this raw material is not used to inform somebody about something, it is used to create fiction. Perhaps the muse that inspires me is the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Did you ever encounter any obstacle at any point during the writing of the novel? Did you ever feel completely at a loss as to how to go on with the story, or were any of the characters unmanageable? How did you overcome this and manage to go on?

My creative process is semi-anarchic or quasi-anarchic. I start by letting the fantasies come up, and then I put them in order. I am sure this is not the most economical way to work because sometimes the amount of ideas is overwhelming and they can be lost by overflow. This is an obstacle. If you are not able to administer the full flow of ideas, you can lose your best creative moments. Another sort of obstacle is due to the way I draw up the plot. My starting point is usually a singular, isolated, and unimportant event. From this event I arrive at other events, which little by little form a horizontal net in space and a vertical one in time. Sometimes I get lost in this structure. At other times, I get lost with an isolated character. In these cases, the problem is not the complexity of the structure but the opacity of the character, and of course, it is my fault. But I think that a worse situation is when your mind goes blank. When that happens, the best thing to do is to take a walk.

What do you love most about being a writer and writing these wonderful books? Is there anything you dislike about it? What and why?

What I love most about being a novelist is the feeling of liberty in writing fiction, the extraordinary sensation of being free to create a cosmos and its inhabitants and put them on the march. The fiction writer is a small God creating His creatures. In this sense, he is a solitary person in a solitary adventure. But in the everyday life, he is a common person who likes being recognized and greeted in a restaurant or while walking on a street.

One thing that I dislike as a writer (a small thing among great satisfactions) is when people confuse the author with the character, or people that look to the author for the intelligibility of the characters or for the story as a whole. Fortunately, these people are a minority.

How did you get your first book published? Do you think people who have been rejected by a publisher once should send their work to her or him a second time?

I was lucky enough to have my first book accepted by a very prestigious publishing house on my first attempt. Yes, I do think that people who have been rejected by a publisher once should send their work a second time to the same publisher and a first or a second time to different publishers.  It is important to remember that Proust, Kafka, and Joyce (among many others) were rejected on their first attempt.

What kind of a writing schedule do you follow? Since writing is a somewhat solitary activity, is it difficult to discipline yourself to keep at it? How long does it take you to complete a novel, and generally, how long do you think a person should spend writing one book?

I spend every afternoon writing. But the fact that I use all my afternoons to write doesn’t mean that I write all the time during the afternoon. I am not able to work for long periods-- I get distracted easily, and it is difficult to avoid the distraction and discipline myself in a solitary activity. In general, I take one and a half years to complete a novel. From 1996 to 2005 I wrote six books with no interruption in my activity as a writer. There is no general rule for this. I know writers who take four or five years to complete a novel, regardless of the number of pages.  But I think that on average, two or three years is a good length of time.

Is there anything like a dream project in your mind? Any half-developed idea that you are really looking forward to developing, or any famous piece of work that you would like your own to be like? Can you tell us about it, please?

Not yet. I have just handed my sixth novel to my editor and I need a kind of wash out period, something to let the old city out.

Where do you plan on going from here? I hear that another Espinosa book will be out next year. Have you started working on it? Is there something about it that you would like to share with us? Anything about the plot, how you plan to write it, or anything else?

The next Espinosa novel will be Pursuit, which is ready to be published by Henry Holt in the United States. And I am handing over my sixth novel to Companhia das Letras, my Brazilian publishing house. About Pursuit, as the title suggests, it resumes from a new point of view the problem that starts in A Window in Copacabana, that is, the problem of paranoia. But there is no relationship between the two books; the plot and the characters are entirely different. Pursuit is about a psychiatrist at the university hospital who feels he's being pursued by a patient. Mysteriously, the patient disappears, and after some months he is considered dead. Others deaths ensue, without people being able to determine who is the pursued and who is the pursuer, and whether or not these people are dying by natural causes or if they were murdered. In the center of this plot, Espinosa tries to separate what is real and what is fantasy.

The next book (the sixth one) won’t be with Espinosa. I’m opening a parenthesis in the Espinosa series to introduce a new character and a new point of view in the narrative. And I am not sure if it is a “crime novel.”  No doubt it is a novel; but I don’t know if we can call it crime novel… maybe a mystery novel. After this one, Espinosa will be back; he is only on vacation, not exiled or dead.

Any advice for other people planning to write their first novel?

Not advice but just a note. I think there is a moment before planning, a moment when the thinking wanders around the limit between madness and full rationality. This is the real moment of creativeness-- when ideas arise freely and with a minimum of censorship. But this moment can only be fruitful if in a second moment it is captured and put in order by the logical thinking. Creativity is made with a bit of madness and a lot of rationality. So, do not abuse the first element and do not forget the second one: if you only have the first, a book would be unintelligible and if you only have the second, a book would be extremely boring. Finally: Don’t give up.

Originally from Pakistan, where she worked in the publications department of an organization, Mehroo Siddiqui is currently doing her Masters from George Mason University in Virginia.

Sponsored links

Ring binders

 

Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer!

How to find a book publisher

Home

Text on this site Copyright © 1998-2007 Absolute Write, all rights reserved.
Please contact the authors if you'd like to reprint articles on this site.  All copyrights are retained by original authors.  And plagiarizers will be rounded up, handcuffed, and stuck into a very small and humid room wherein they must listen to Barney sing the "I Love You, You Love Me" song over and over again.

writers writing software