Patricio Pron was born in Rosario, Argentina in 1975. His father was a political journalist and his mother worked as an archivist. As a child he spent summers with his paternal grandparents who immigrated to Argentina from Turin, Italy. His maternal family was originally from Bern, Switzerland. By seventeen, Pron was writing for La Capital, Argentina’s oldest Spanish-Language newspaper. He attended the National University of Rosario and received a degree in Social Communication. He continued to write for La Capital as a correspondent in Europe in the early 2000s.
By 2002, he was accepted into the doctoral program in the University of Göttingen and graduated in 2007. Pron relocated to Madrid in 2008 and his work started to be recognized in literary publications internationally, including winning the renowned Alfaguara Novel Prize in 2019. His 2009 short story, “Ideas,” about a child vanishing was published in The Paris Review. The theme of people disappearing is a through-line in Pron’s work, a reminder of the horrific political convolution he was a witness to growing up during Argentina’s Dirty War. His 2013 novel, My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain is semi-biographical. The unnamed narrator returns to Argentina to connect with his dying father and stumbles into a psychological journey involving his father’s connection to a man’s disappearance.
I began a two-and-a-half-month correspondence with Pron via email in early July 2023. He offered candid insights about literature, the writer’s life, the current state of literary criticism, following in Borges’ footsteps, and the exploration of dreams. In a 2023 La Capital piece Pron wrote, “Fiction belongs to the order of resistance and it is not in vain that it is the type of work that a person like me who has always felt out of place does. Perhaps in the apparent idea of a displaced thing, without a place in the world, there is a paradoxical justification for the existence of fiction." Out of survival, Pron used fiction as a powerful resistance to the horrific realities caused by the Dirty War. By its very nature, today's world is arranged to conceal literature's light. Pron's work is a codex on how to navigate in the realm of fiction even if you find yourself countryless.
Patricio Pron
An Interview
with David Saccone-Braslow
July - August, 2023
David Saccone-Braslow: In your semi-autobiographical book, My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in The Rain, the idea of a man dreaming appears in multiple places. My favorite dream sequence is:
I dreamed that I was writing in my old room in Göttingen and discovered insects in my pockets; I didn't know how they'd gotten there, and, although that would have been useful information, the only thing I was thinking about was making sure no one noticed that the insects were there, trying to get out.
When did you realize Jorge Luis Borges and his alchemy of dreams and spectral duplication? Do you feel you have entered Borges’s world through your own work?
Photo: “Mural en homenaje a Jorge Luis Borges (Adrogué)0" by Ulises Icardi is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED.
Patricio Pron: I first read Borges when I was fourteen or fifteen years old and was, as I wrote somewhere, a poor teenager from a poor neighborhood in a poor city in Latin America. Naturally, I was completely fascinated, and this fascination has remained with me ever since, although its object has changed over time and, probably, I now think that Borges was a better essayist than a short-story writer. In fact, I reread him a few months ago while preparing a seminar on old sensibilities and new fears as a visiting professor at the University of Cologne in Germany and discovered that, whereas his stories may have lost some of their appeal with successive rereadings, his essayistic work remains unobjectionable to me, as well as inexhaustible.
Actually, Borges is a stone in the shoe for all Argentine writers. His is the usual case of a writer who is much larger than the literary tradition of his country of origin and therefore it does not know what to do with him. Every Argentine writer has to solve, at some point, in some way, the "Borges problem." The most frequent attitudes are to either imitate him to the point of adoration or pretend that he doesn't exist.
I suppose that my first two books of short stories, Hombres infames and El vuelo magnífico de la noche, were the product of the first of these strategies. The following ones were, and still are, attempts to answer the question of "what to do with Borges" and try to update and take a little further the narrative procedures and forms often associated with him. In particular, the breaking down of the conventional boundaries between essay and short narrative and between the act of reading and the act of writing.
It would never have occurred to me to pretend that Borges never existed, since without him my ideas as an author and as a reader would be even poorer. Borges gave us Argentine writers the freedom—manifested, for example, in his 1951 essay "El escritor argentino y la tradición"—to write about all subjects in all possible ways. And that is what I try to do, so many years after having embraced that freedom, which is also a responsibility and a mandate.
Saccone-Braslow: Do you dream? If so, how do your dreams affect your creative process?
Pron: I don't think I dream more than other people, but maybe I pay more attention to what I dream. I started a dream journal, possibly around the time I began reading Borges. (And Kafka, both of them being some of the greatest and best dream writers of the 20th century.)
At first, I did it under the illusion that my dreams would be a great starting point for writing fiction. But, as I soon found out, it was an illusion. Dreams cannot be used to write fiction because they are a fiction of sorts themselves: nothing somebody could turn into literature because they already are literature in their own right, though not of the most usual kind. Nevertheless, I continued to write down my dreams, and last year I published a selection under the title Traumbuch, which means both "book of dreams" and "dream book" in German.
There are not many dream books by Spanish-speaking authors. Perhaps this is due to an excess of modesty on the part of the authors, or perhaps because dreams confront us with key questions that are somewhat difficult to answer: Who wrote them? Who is their author? More generally—and this was what interested me the most—who is the "Patricio Pron" who signs a dream book? And the Patricio Pron who signs those written in a waking state? Is the latter not his twin, though somewhat inferior?
The dreams narrated in El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia are, as a matter of fact, all real dreams, including the one you mentioned [was your favorite].
Saccone-Braslow: In Italo Calvino's essay, "The Fates of The Novel," Calvino states, "all good writers have to be classified not just in a single category but in the intersection of at least two." I can say that the part in My Fathers’ Ghost Is Climbing in The Rain with the game of killing frogs was magic. It is dark, zany, hilarious, and sent me back to the absurdity of childhood.
Where do your intersections manifest? What does Patricio in the process look like? What is your writing schedule like?
Pron: A writer is never the best critic of his own work. Not even one who, like me, has had specific training in reading others. In our reading of our own work operates what I would call a "proximity blindness," which inhibits us from identifying interests and motivations in it with the same certainty we would have if that work had been written by someone else.
Even if we could, however, it might be better if those interests and motivations were identified by the readers. Not in the manner of a foolish and sad thing, like Goodreads and other social media outlets now teaching people how not to read, but in the manner of the not always conflict-free dialogue that takes place between a writer and literary critics. There aren't many reasons to publish books after having written them, and the only one that interests me is that you need to publish those books so that a handful of excellent readers can tell you what you've tried to do, and if you've succeeded.
Apart from this, I think I can safely say that my purpose lies in contributing to expanding the repertoire of narrative forms and themes in contemporary Spanish-language literature by connecting it both with English-language literatures and with its own tradition, which is being obliterated by the passage of time and the haste and greediness of the publishing industry. My interest lies in finding new ways to narrate the old link between words and things and emphasizing the fact that the tragic events of the recent past, as well as those of the present, need to be articulated in narrative series that, by making them understandable for the first time, will prevent their tragic repetition.
Frank Kermode once said that we tell ourselves stories to make us feel that we have a certain sovereignty and margin of action over events and the passage of time. And that sovereignty, I think, is our most precious asset, as well as the one most seriously threatened by disruptive technologies, climate change-related disasters, and the fantasy of unlimited economic growth in a physical world that, by definition, is not limitless. The most obvious result of all this is what some experts are already characterizing as the emergence of a post-enlightened, post-literate and, therefore, post-democratic society. I think it is not possible to continue reading and writing without paying attention to these things. Not possible for me, of course.
As for my work habits, they are simple. I write in the morning, with the aid of large amounts of tea and in the presence of two Abyssinian cats who do everything possible to prevent me from doing it. I also write in the evenings, but generally I try to only do it in the mornings.
For years I thought I could never write anywhere other than in my studio and surrounded by my books, but in recent years, due to various circumstances, I have also learned to write on trains, on planes, in artist residencies, in libraries, and in hotel rooms. For some reason, these now seem to me like great places to work, I don't know why. My impression is that their deliberate anonymity contributes to a feeling of freedom that, at least in my case, is always necessary to write. That anonymity also demands, from someone who writes in a hotel room, the effort to do it in his own style, more personal, less anonymous than if, surrounded by the things he likes, at home, he knew who he is and what he wants.
Saccone-Braslow: In Octavio Paz’ 1967 book of essays Alternating Current, Paz states the following in a chapter addressing literary critics:
I consider modern literatures to be single literature. And how can we ignore the fact that often foreigners see what the critics on the spot have failed to see? Caillois did not discover Borges, but he did something that those of us who admired him failed to do when he was a writer for a small audience: Caillois read him within a universal context. Instead of repeating what anonymous reviewers in Chicago and Milan say, our critics should read our authors as Caillois has read Borges from the point of view of the modern tradition and as a part of that tradition.
Do you agree with Paz here? What is the “universal context” in 2023 as it pertains to literary critics. How do you field criticism about your work?
Pron: Nobody in their right mind refutes Octavio Paz. Never. But of course, 2023 is not 1967, and the question about a "universal context" might seem out of place at a time when postcolonial currents and identity politics aim to deny the existence of such a context. What Paz is referring to here is, I think, something we should aspire to in our own day as well: to a literary criticism that performs the much-needed operations of translation between cultures and national literatures that the publishing business and the academic field are not in a position to do. A literary criticism that expands the repertoire of possibilities for readers, that enlarges their world instead of dwarfing it by repeating the same thing told in the same way, which is, essentially, the way the academic and the publishing industries operate.
Some time ago, I elaborated on this in a short essay titled “No, no pienses en un conejo blanco” and I think I said there, better, what I can only imperfectly summarize here. To put it briefly, I might say that criticism is the wall which we writers and readers use to gather impetus for the race to the next book. And that much of the literature we read today is a product of the current state of literary criticism, since, in my experience, it is virtually impossible for good writers and good books to exist where literary criticism is bad.
All things considered, what we should aspire to is a literary criticism that allows readers and authors to remain intellectually and emotionally alive. A literary criticism that can make possible such miracles as Borges, a writer who, instead of offering his readers a melodramatic story and a bit of local color—or, even worse, misery porn, like, alas, most of his [Latin American] Boom colleagues—disputed the cultural hegemony of the central countries by appropriating their artistic themes and forms and taking them a step further, perfecting them as can only be done by one who, from a distance, contemplates a fortress and is more capable of recognizing its flaws and weak spots than those who inhabit it and believe they are safe inside.
Saccone-Braslow: The last chapter of My Fathers’ Ghost Is Climbing In The Rain, father and son are deep in the woods. It’s an extremely touching and sad chapter in which the father made the son witness the slaughter of cows, hens, and horses as a coming-of-age ritual. The chapter once more reminds the reader that Alberto José Burdisso was killed. This “inescapable garden of fear” is an emblem for Argentina, and it seems like Burdisso is the emblem of the loss and violence that befell the Argentinian people during Juan Perón’s presidency. The reader is left with the mystery of if father and son will make it out of the preverbal “forest of fear.” The violence is so subtle and powerful at the end.
Is it the guarantee of chaos that forms the bond between father and son, an inherited destiny, like with Burdisso?
Pron: I think that what unites father and son in that novel, and me with my own father, since the novel was inspired by our own experiences—the ritual that you describe was often conferred upon me by my father—is the certainty that the tragic events of the recent past and the crimes committed in their name, as is usual when a Government perpetrates crimes in the name of its citizens, are much stronger than the ties between parents and children and those of blood, race, and nationality. I think that what unites them is also a longing for justice and the conviction that the terrible legacy of destruction that they have passed on to each other is also a promise of reconstruction, a demonstration that, as Walter Benjamin believed, history has a salvific nature. That, if as Stephen Dedalus says, history is "the nightmare from which [we are] trying to awake," it can also be the motor of political action and artistic practice.
As for Perón, his is one of the few cases in Latin American history of a military man who became president, every time, through free elections. A democratic military man, as absurd as this sounds. Political violence in Argentina has a long history, but the one that would end with the tragic disappearance of at least 30,000 people began after his death in 1974 and lasted until December 1983, when, after the ridiculous, terrible war of 1982 against the United Kingdom, the military had to call elections. I want to clarify this because the violence referred to in the book does not actually take place during the Perón period but immediately after.
Saccone-Braslow: If you were tasked with rewriting an ending to any story or novel from history, what would it be and why?
Pron: Our age is obsessed with endings, right? As TV shows and other mass entertainment products are stretched out season after season to allow their creators to continue making money and not face the problem of how to finish the story they have begun to tell, readers have become terrified of spoilers and, in general, fiction books are reduced by Twitter and Facebook users, as well as by BookTubers and BookTokers, to two absurd categories: happy ending or its opposite. We live in a cultural moment in which everything, from the creative writing program freshman's first novel pitch to the new big-budget film aimed at harnessing the purchasing power and nostalgia of 1980s kids. Everything should be capable of generating a sequel or two or a spin-off. Or a reboot, whatever that is.
In this sense, I think accepting that certain things do not have an ending is a necessary act of resistance. The effect of Kafka's novels stems from the fact that we will never know how their author could have completed them. "Black Draftee (James Hunter)" by Alice Neel moves us because we can imagine the reasons why its subject never returned to the painter's studio. If we did not believe that we have not yet finished knowing the whole story of William Shakespeare, not even the extraordinary quality of his work and his impact on Western culture would make him what he is, our contemporary.
So no, I would prefer not to write an ending to any story, novel or play left unfinished or badly finished by its author. Although I did so recently when, in a short story, I rewrote the end of Madame Bovary so that reading is not presented as the damnation of a young woman driven by her impulses and desires, but as salvation. So, you see: writing is contradicting yourself.
Saccone-Braslow: Is there any time in your writing process that you engage the cognitive dissident and betray your instincts but to a good result? What degree of uncertainty do you experience when making plot or character decisions?
Pron: At the beginning of what some might call “my literary career” many years ago, I had a very interesting discussion with myself about the axiom, “write about what you know.” I came to the conclusion, after a long reflection of about 7 seconds, that the axiom was irredeemably stupid. Since then, I have firmly believed that only what we don't know is worth writing about, or, as Marguerite Duras put it, in much better words, “writing is finding out what we would write if we wrote.”
Thus, most of my stories and novels begin with questions like, "What would happen if I wrote the interior monologue of someone who clearly lacks any interiority, like an influencer or a reader of The New York Times Magazine?" "What would happen if we reversed the order of a conspiratorial narrative and what kind of story would emerge from that?" or "Is it possible to tell a story with book blurbs alone?" These questions may seem absurd—let's not kid ourselves, they are questions that are rarely asked—but they are not really absurd as they give the writing process an explorative character without which I would not really be interested [in] writing.
For what is the point of writing what one has already written or, worse, what others have written, sometimes better than one possibly could? No one wants to live the same day over and over again. No one wants to bathe twice in the same river. No one wants to read the same book over and over. Nobody wants to go to a restaurant and eat the same microwaved chili con carne on the menu of every other restaurant. And so on.
Sometimes the question behind the beginning of the writing process is more like an image, a situation, or one or more characters in a place I know nothing about. For example, someone in a darkened room tearing every second page out of all the books on his shelves. Who is this person? Where is he? Why is he destroying the books? What is he going to do with the torn pages? To be able to answer these questions, I had to write my latest novel, Mañana tendremos otros nombres.
The indisputable advantage of my method is that it takes both the readers and myself to places neither of us knew we would go to. Neither they nor I have been there before, there are no maps or signposts to guide us, but neither is there the possibility of taking a wrong turn. "To narrate is to make decisions," said one of my masters, the Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia, and we writers can easily find ourselves paralyzed by questions regarding the “right” decisions. In my opinion, the only way to avoid this paralysis is not to bet everything on “correctness” or “writing well” but to make writing—with the help of our readers—the shared experience of exploring the limits of our world.
Saccone-Braslow: Has the literary world in recent years experienced a reverse inertia? Perhaps a similar perspective of Victoria Ocampo, who wrote in 1931 that the main purpose of Sur, a literary magazine devoted to foreign literature, was to study the crucial problems faced by Americans without ignoring Europe, but in reverse. Latin American writers in Europe on a journey of interest and friendship?
Pron: It's tempting to think so, and also to think that the arrow on the Sur logo, which pointed north to south, has been reversed. However, the tendency has not really been reverted, except on a cosmetic level. Yes, it is possible that, nowadays, more literature from peripheral countries is being translated in Europe and in the United States, where the number of translations has always been surprisingly low. But the decision about what is translated and why is in the hands of a handful of people in the capitals of the central countries [and] whose interests and agenda are those of their countries and not of the peripheral countries that, on occasion, provide them with texts.
In other words, what is translated in Europe and the United States is neither the most interesting nor the most representative of, say, contemporary Argentine literature, but rather what best reflects what, in the eyes of Europeans and Americans, literature is, and what it is supposed to have to say to them. Much like the concept of “Latino,” which is unknown and inapplicable outside the United States and says more about what Americans believe they are than about the people to whom that identity is attributed. The Latin American literature published in the United States is, in terms of expectations, procedures and results, more American than Latin American. The same can be said of that published as Latin American in Europe.
In another category, we have the Latin American writers who live in Europe and the United States. But we do not form a common front, we do not have similar aesthetics, nor do we have shared concerns. Explaining why each of us lives in Europe or in the States would require a case-by-case study, and we should probably leave it to the immigration agencies and the xenophobes.
I suppose every writer has a personal answer to why he or she is living abroad. Mine is quite simple. I always wanted to live and work where many of the writers and artists who have influenced me the most and whom I admire the most have lived and worked. And I wanted to live out of my country of origin, as this completely changes—and often contradicts—all our ideas about our country, our identity, our race, our class, our history. It is such a transformative experience that I think everybody should be able to go through it, either temporarily or permanently, at least once in a lifetime.
Saccone-Braslow: How are you received by the German intelligentsia? Immanuel Kant stated that space and time are “forms of intuition.” Does that mean dreams are a measure of distance?
Pron: Perhaps dreams are ways of experimenting with time, as Vladimir Nabokov and, before him, J. W. Dunne surmised. [The] German intelligentsia is relatively small in number and is, at this moment, too preoccupied with its own threatened livelihood to pay attention to Argentine writers. In Spain, on the other hand, they usually remind me that I don't have the right to write about Spanish literature because I'm not Spanish. And in Argentina, they probably think that I am no longer Argentine enough to have a word to say about local politics or the new trends in body hair removal. So I try not to think too much about those things.
A writer is never completely alone: he has his readers and his books, which make up archipelagos of islands that have never been fully mapped and are still worth losing oneself in. And he writes—or rather, I write—because he or she is trying hard to find his or her real home country, not the one his or her parents have given them, as a general rule, without his or her consent.
Saccone-Braslow: Would your life and understanding of writing be different in any way if Diego Maradona (aka, "El Pibe de Oro”) would not have existed?
Pron: Oh, absolutely. It would have been exactly the same. That is, completely different.
A FICTION Interview with Salar Abdoh
Saccone-Braslow: My final question is always the same in my interviews: If you weren’t a writer, what would you be in this life?
Pron: Between the ages of 12 and 15 I worked on weekends in a second-hand bookstore. So, in the absence of other circumstances, I could have been a bookseller, a profession that apparently is still legal, although not very profitable. I studied journalism in Argentina and worked as a correspondent in the Balkans,¹ North Africa, and Eastern Europe before doing my PhD in Germany between 2000 and 2008, and I guess I could have carried on doing it. If I had stayed in Germany, on the other hand, maybe I could have been a full-time teacher.
All these possible destinations, these roads untrodden, could have been perfect for me. But I don't regret not following them. There's something about the way I see the world as one huge text to be read that might not have been captured in those professions as it is in writing. As Cyril Connolly wrote, “You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang.” Naturally, this is easier to say if you're Cyril Connolly than if you're anyone else. But let’s ignore this last bit and just tell the others to go hang themselves. Writing is the best thing you can do except for reading. But writing is really just another form of reading, so let’s leave it at that, and others can go hang themselves if they feel like it.
1. After the interview, Pron told me the following story about his work covering the Balkans, post-war. It is a window into his mechanics.
“In 2000, I was traveling by bus from Sarajevo to Belgrade to cover Slobodan Milosevic's last fraudulent elections as a correspondent and was forced off the bus by an armed teenager wearing a uniform several sizes too big. I spent five or six hours with him and his companions until the same bus came back from Belgrade and I was able to return to Sarajevo. The initial mistrust dissipated when the border guards learned that I was Argentinean. ‘Maradona!’ they shouted. They ended up telling me their personal stories, which were heartbreaking, and sharing their meager food with me. It was touching, and I have never forgotten it.
“It was a lesson in humanity. It was also a test of the difficulty of judging historical facts: before coming to the Balkans, I thought I knew who were the ‘good guys’ and who were the ‘bad guys’ in the Balkan Wars, but my moral judgements were contradicted by reality and by the stories I was told. From a distance everything seems clearer and easier to interpret. But it is on the ground that one acquires a true understanding of things. And one discovers that there are no ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ in history, but a succession of horrors of which we are both victims and perpetrators, albeit to different degrees.
“The experience did not turn me into a moral relativist, but into someone a little more judicious. Hopefully more humane. Someone more able to surrender when ‘regarding the pain of others’ that Susan Sontag spoke of.”
by David Saccone-Braslow
Salar Abdoh is a novelist, essayist, and translator born in Tehran, Iran. He attended a boarding school in England before relocating to Los Angeles when his father left Iran for the United States following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Abdoh received his undergraduate degree from U.C. Berkeley and his Master's from the City College of New York, where now teaches creative writing.