Photo by Mark Lafferty.

I met Darin Rossi standing in a thick, gooey pool of fake blood, on an early-December night in Los Angeles. He wore a striped umpire’s uniform and had the beefy look of a lapsed athlete entering middle age: thick chest and neck, black hair gelled with heavy brilliantine and combed straight back. We were both waiting in a slow-moving line for the bathroom, between fights at the inaugural event of a crypto-gothic fight club called the Foam Weapon League (FWL). We made small talk, discussed other fight clubs we’d seen. I squished my sneakers against the floor and felt them stick. He did the same, and we laughed. Even the organizers had been unprepared for this detail – there was so much fake blood! After each fight – or were they battles? – the assistants got down on hands and knees to wipe the floor as clean as they could with gobs of thin paper towels. Everything was improvised. How hard would it have been to buy a mop?

Rossi didn’t mind. He’d once been a Major League Baseball umpire, but since the early 2000s had transitioned into a career in film, television and commercials, playing an umpire. He blew his whistle with the confidence of a professional. Did he miss it – the real thing?

Rossi shook his head. ‘Everyone hates the ump.’

Of course – any sports fan knows it.

He went on: ‘Too much travel. Acting is way better.’ He rattled off the names of a dozen productions he’d been a part of – Bad News Bears, Coach Carter, The Longest Yard, Superman Returns. In each case, he’d played a referee. Apparently he wasn’t concerned with being typecast. For this gig with the FWL, his character was named Rossi the Regulator, and he even wore his old Major League pads under his black-and-white shirt, for extra bulk. He was hoping, he said, ‘to get in on the ground floor’.

It’s one of those uniquely American phrases that connotes a certain desperation, at least in my mind; a phrase that one imagines flying from the lips of a salesman looking feverishly for investors. A huckster Two oddly dressed warriors with plastic swords flailing wildly at one another – it was brutish, simple and disappointing. might say it, or a swindler, but the romance of it is selfevident: the ground floor is where the real money is made. Buying in early, before the rest of the world has realized that what is being pawned is pure gold – that’s what daring, hungry Americans do. The sad reality is that more often than not the ground floor is the only floor and my sense, after watching a hapless hour and a half of the FWL, was that this was the case now. Unexploded blood packs kept falling off contestants’ vests; the fights were short, fitful and not particularly exciting. Two oddly dressed warriors with plastic swords flailing wildly at one another – it was brutish, simple and disappointing. All atmospherics, but no content. This was the ground floor?

Los Angeles – not the real city, but the version of that city that exists in the popular imagination – is a glamorous, glittering place of palm trees and movie stars. The actual city, which I’ve come to know just a bit over the course of many visits, is at once more interesting and superficially much less attractive. I’d go so far as to say there is no glamour at all remaining in the city itself, but only in its reflected image. It is a quality that tourists themselves import, something created spontaneously when out-of-towners photograph the names engraved on the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard, or crowd the windows of a boutique on Rodeo Drive, straining to see some second-rate starlet try on a pair of overpriced shoes. These attractions – if they could be called that – are collectively created works of fantasy; delusions beautiful in the way that all brands of faith are, made perhaps more poignant because, in the entire history of film, praying to a movie star has not yet produced a single documented miracle.

The rest of the city – its millions of residents, in thousands of mostly glum residential neighbourhoods – is essentially unknowable. Like many cities, Los Angeles has reached a size beyond which there can be any explaining. It is impossibly large, perfectly confounding, and absolutely surreal. Like many cities, Los Angeles has reached a size beyond which there can be any explaining. It is impossibly large, perfectly confounding, and absolutely surreal. No statement about the city can be made whose opposite would not also be true. The beach you see on television is, for most city-dwellers, a rumour. The mountains and canyons, too. Long, straight, featureless avenues like the one where the FWL held its inaugural event – these are legion. They stretch hundreds of blocks long, east to west, crossing elevations, climactic regions, time zones. Downtown looms. You arrive, only to find it empty. At noon, the smog hangs low and fetid, but if you look straight up the sky is still blue: a good, old-fashioned mirage. Quite unexpectedly, you smell the ocean, but it’s still miles away.

It goes without saying that most of the contestants were actors. Or models. Or somehow connected to the behemoth industry that defines Los Angeles to the world and to itself. I knew this without needing to be told: it was apparent in the way these costumed men and women preened for the many cameras, apparent in the overheard chatter, anxious talk of agents and auditions and workshops. On the surface, the evening could have taken place in any American city – a curious group of eccentrics getting together to role-play on a weekend – what could be more wholesome? But in Los Angeles, it was that and something more: a way to build one’s résumé, an experience that, with a little luck, would turn into a job.

That night at least, the possibilities felt real. The room was pregnant with dreams of stardom. There were signs along the walls, at the doors, that said FILMING IN PROGRESS. Rossi told me a few cable channels had shown interest, and talks about a pilot were in the works. The prospect was exciting, of course: his friend and fellow FWL referee had once been a regular on the show Gladiators, and it had paid well enough. I nodded. I liked Darin Rossi very much; there was an earnestness to him I found charming, all the more because it seemed so at odds with his career choice. He’d rather pretend to be something than actually be it. It was less risky, less arduous and probably paid better: I’m not an umpire, but I play one on TV.

Possibly less honest was Rossi’s statement about his next project, which was, according to him, ‘a film with Reese Witherspoon’.

About the FWL: how to describe the sensation of standing in the smallish front room of what was, by all appearances, an abandoned warehouse, drinking beer from a can and surrounded by men and women of all races, sizes, shapes and ages who’d come out this Saturday evening dressed as demons and cavemen, ninjas and wizards, escaped inmates, cartoon characters and the like? How to describe the disconcerting pleasure of it, the discovery, the sound of blood packs bursting, spilling their contents, the sight of the sticky red liquid spreading across the rutted cement and pooling in the fine cracks? How to describe the silliness of it? The farce? The man whose entire face and shaved dome were tattooed solid black, as if it were the helmet of a Roman soldier, and him screaming into a camera, the veins in his neck stretched taut and popping like tensely coiled rope?

I stood surrounded by monsters – whether their intention was to frighten or amuse wasn’t clear.

The fights Rossi and his partner officiated were stylized battles between real-life avatars, characters created especially for the occasion. Their names were evocative, as were the costumes: Hardcore (tight black shorts, bare chest, the aforementioned tattooed face); Cavewoman (just like she sounds, adorned with a missing front tooth, for authenticity’s sake); Arkon (think dark wizard). And there were others: The Squid; The Butch-Dyke; The Hammer; Big Bertha; and Three-Pac, I stood surrounded by monsters – whether their intention was to frighten or amuse wasn’t clear. who looked not like the rapper his name referenced, but like a deranged version of Bamm Bamm from The Flintstones. These were men who’d read comic books, perhaps studied them; women who’d spent hours staring at computers back when the one-colour screens showed only text and featured a cursor flashing like a hospital monitor showing a beating heart. It was all very playful, but also deadly serious and, except for a young Asian-American man decked out in all white playing a character he called ‘Arctic’ (whom the crowd adopted and re-baptized ‘Kung-fu Panda’), there was no irony. Two of his drunker fans snuggled up to him and pronounced themselves proud members of ‘Team Asia’. They posed with him, flashing peace signs; Arctic winced, but let himself be photographed anyway. Then he went out and slashed up Cavewoman. He was merciless. She never stood a chance.

I spent a few minutes talking with a narrow-faced man who introduced himself as Phil and asked for help pinning back the sleeves of his oversized black robe. He had a shaggy look to him, with stringy, light brown hair and a goatee that had not quite filled out. He had an advantage over the other competitors, he said: he was a martial arts instructor and worked with weapons all day. He spoke these last words boldly, stretching out the phrase ‘all day’ for emphasis. When I asked him about his character, Phil said, ‘I’m the Angry Monk.’

He didn’t seem particularly angry, I thought, but before I could point this out, Phil corrected himself. It was sudden, as if he’d just recalled the story he’d invented for the evening: ‘Angry Ex-Monk, I should say, since I murdered my whole family.’

He didn’t smile, so I didn’t either, but instead tried to imagine what this timid, thoughtful man’s family might have looked like, and how exactly he might have killed them. He probably hadn’t made up that part of the story yet.

‘How about that?’ I said.

Across the room, Hardcore shouted into a digital video camera, fierce, violent, terrifying, his mouth open wide like the jaws of a raging beast. It was a guttural, nonsensical roar, one I imagine he’d practised in front of a mirror.

Even Angry Ex-Monk seemed shaken by the sight. He became Phil again, and nodded at the spectacle across the room.

‘That’d be really scary if he wasn’t acting.’

Or was it more scary because he was? ■

Granta editor John Freeman interviews the author about book piracy in Peru - the subject of Daniel Alarcón’s piece in Granta 109: Work.

I flew to Washington a few days before the inauguration, doing my best to recall the optimism and emotion of the night of November 4. It wasn’t easy. Even the most partial listing of bad news since election day was sobering: the horrific terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, the endless drug war along the Mexican border, the savage assault on Gaza and the ensuing humanitarian disaster, the European and Russian natural gas stand-off, with its dire intimations of energy conflicts to come. One could go on and on. Closer to home, the State of California teetered on the brink of insolvency, while in Oakland, the city where I live, a riot erupted after an unarmed twenty-two year old man was shot in the back by a police officer on New Year’s Eve. The victim was a butcher at my local grocery store – I recognized his face from the posters that appeared all over town – and he was killed at the train station I use almost every day.

With few exceptions, presidents do not comment on or even recognize an individual loss like this one; they operate on another scale, and there is no room within their discourse for something so small. It’s better left to mayors, pastors or activists. But the mood of a city or a region can be profoundly affected, and in the early days of January, this particular death seemed for many to be of a piece with a more generalized gloom: a tragedy, a local one, to join the wide and grim chorus coming from all sides. The night of the riot I fell asleep to the hum of police helicopters buzzing overhead, and the next morning went downtown to find the sidewalks of my city littered with broken glass, the smashed, ruined storefronts boarded up and tagged with slogans like ‘We’re Still Here!’ or ‘Open for Business!’ – statements designed to reassure the frightened storeowners inside, rather than the few passersby, who were not likely to believe it anyway.

Washington was, just as I’d hoped, an entirely different story: festive and expectant, overrun with out-of-towners eager to soak it all in, tipsy with thoughts of a bright future. The crowds were happy, as if they hadn’t read a newspaper in eight weeks, and seemingly unfazed by the freezing temperatures. For their benefit, the nation’s capital had been transformed into an open-air emporium for all manner of Obama merchandise, an endless stream of ordinary consumer goods made new and historic by the word ‘Obama’, for sale on fold-out tables set up on every corner. Men in heavy black coats hawked T-shirts at Metro stations and bus stops; they stomped up and down Eighteenth Street, announcing their goods with the enthusiasm of carnival barkers, pushing shopping carts brimming with commemorative sweatshirts and posters and shot glasses. There were inaugural pins and scarves and handbags, naturally; but also bottles of filtered water and earrings and chocolate-covered sunflower seeds and eighteen-month wall calendars with photos of the smiling First Family. It is a quintessentially American brand of faith, this one: that anything can be sold, that anything can be bought. History can be commodified, as can hope or change, or any notion large or small, no matter how abstract.

Late Sunday night – it must have been two in the morning – I met a man who’d driven up from a small town in north Georgia to stand before a brick wall and sell portraits with a life-size poster of Barack, Michelle, Malia and Sasha. I wasn’t interested, but in a vague sort of way I’d been thinking about a souvenir. I must have paused for just an instant, but that was enough. He was a hustler, a good one, and businessmen like him always have exactly what you need. I’m not sure how it happened. ‘What you looking for?’ he asked.

We Americans are people who sell things: a moment later, I was following him to a blue van where a woman of indeterminate age slept in the passenger seat, covered in Obama blankets. He opened the trunk, and even in the low light, I could see how tired he was, how hard he’d worked that day. There was perhaps a thousand dollars worth of T-shirts and posters piled in the van, items he’d printed himself, his own optimistic investment in this national milestone.

‘They’re beautiful,’ the man said of his own T-shirts as he passed me one after another. He touched them all, rubbing his palm against the fabric. Most were imprinted with the front page of a newspaper or magazine from the campaign – ancient history by now, those days when candidate Obama was just beginning to make noise. Some bore the date – January 20, 2009 with the words I WAS THERE. ‘I’m almost out,’ the man said proudly. Others, more to the point, read simply MY PRESIDENT IS BLACK, and of these only a handful remained. I bought one of the November 5 Chicago Tribune cover, just for old times’ sake.

On Monday, I went out into the cold to prepare myself for the trials of the following day, and to see something of the city. I wandered for a few hours, pausing for the occasional squealing motorcade, joining a group of tourists taking photos as a fleet of tow trucks cleared an entire city block of parked cars in a matter of minutes. By the early afternoon, I was lost; even with the Washington Monument to guide me, downtown seemed to keep getting farther away. I crossed the Duke Ellington Bridge heading east and came across a newly-painted mural of the last eleven American presidents: Eisenhower at one end, Obama at the other with an arm around George W. Bush. The unlikeliest detail of all: except for Ike and Kennedy, each of these men was smiling.

The painting adorned the wall of Mama Ayesha’s, a Palestinian restaurant, and when I stopped, a man named Roberto handed me a business card. Not his, but the artist’s. ‘The pride of El Salvador.’ Her name was Karlísima, and she was inside, he said, giving an interview to Univision, the country’s largest Spanish-language network.

Roberto and I got to talking as we waited for Karla to come out. I asked him if he intended to go to the Mall the next day, and he nodded. Of course he’d go. He had no work, nothing else to do, and besides he liked Obama. He loved the US, Roberto told me, and he’d seen much of it on his travels. He was in his early forties, I’d guess, grew up in Quito, Ecuador, had run away at sixteen and lived for years as a vagabond in his native country and later in Colombia. It was a good life, a free life, but eventually he joined his parents, who’d been living in the US since he was a boy. He described how difficult things were in DC when he first arrived – the violence, the drugs, the punishing wars between Latinos and blacks fought over turf in Columbia Heights. After 9/11, he lost his job, then got mixed up in drugs, and was looking for a change. He met another Ecuadorian, a man who made his living selling watches – Rolex knock-offs sent from New York – and together they decided to see America.

His friend’s name was Oscar, and they travelled together for three years, becoming like brothers. Oscar read the Bible a lot, and Roberto picked up the habit too. He didn’t crave drugs anymore, never searched for them out on the road as they made their way from Washington to Atlanta, down to Florida, across the Deep South, into Texas. ‘It’s a great country,’ Roberto said, and though we must have crossed paths before, he’d seen more of it than me: Arizona, Las Vegas, Seattle, dozens of small towns dotting the Plains and the Midwest. They got their watches for three or four dollars each, sold them for ten, making enough money to keep moving. They’d arrive in town on the Greyhound bus – ‘Greyhouse,’ Roberto called it – find the Latino neighborhood, and go to work on street corners, in bars, at pool halls. The watches sold themselves: they were cheap, but looked good. On Father’s Day, a customer, feeling particularly generous, might buy ten or twelve at once.

We talked for a long time out there in the bitter cold, as people kept coming to get their picture taken with the mural. Roberto offered them business cards, and eventually Karlísima herself came out to attend to her many admirers. She gave a few impromptu interviews, and Roberto went on with his story. By the third year, he and Oscar had come to Pittston, Maine, the last leg of their journey, and were about to turn south back to Washington. It was 2006. He doesn’t remember much about that town, except that it was small and sad. He and Oscar were in a bar, playing pool against some white men – ‘winning,’ Roberto noted – when things got out of hand. Oscar had his duffel bag full of watches in the corner, his life savings, really, and for a moment it looked like the white men were going to rob them. Threats and slurs, and then the pushing started, a bottle was broken – Roberto and Oscar barely had time to get their things and escape as the white men chased them. At the door of the bar, the two friends, the two brothers, split up: Oscar, his duffel thrown over his shoulder, went right. Roberto ran left. The night was very dark, and they never saw each other again.

By the time Karla came over to talk to me, I could think of nothing to ask her. Still, I pretended to be a journalist, stumbling over a few questions and dutifully writing down her answers, but my mind was elsewhere. Listening to Roberto’s story, I’d forgotten about the inauguration of Barack Obama, or the millions of visitors who’d descended on the capital, or this mural and its many smiling presidents. The sun was bright, but it was painfully cold, and all I could think about was this disappearance, and the vastness of this nation; the imagination required to consider it a country at all, and not a loose collection of provincial concerns, of tribes occasionally united by a broader grievance, or by virtue of consuming the same set of television programmes and roughly the same goods and services. I thought of the many kinds of people who feel loyalty to this place, who live here, work here, and all the places they hail from. It seems impossible to fashion a nation out of this. Sometimes it’s easier to imagine it all falling apart, each of us heading home – however that word is defined – or moving on, disengaging from a project far too outlandish and foolhardy to survive.

‘Where is Oscar now, you think?’ I asked Roberto.

He shrugged. ‘He always wanted to go to Canada,’ he said. He was quiet for a moment, as he reconsidered the idea. ‘Oscar is here, probably, in the US,’ Roberto said after a while. He found it hard to envision his friend doing anything but travelling and selling watches, discovering his adopted country.
I was still thinking about Roberto’s story the next day, on the Mall, when millions of Americans arrived before dawn and waited for hours in the cold to hear Barack Obama recite a thirty-five word oath.

Roberto’s friend, I thought, could be anywhere, but wherever he is, he’s likely watching right now, or is, at minimum, aware of this moment. Oscar could have even been in Washington: indeed, it seemed like the entire country had come. We saw the sun rise over the Mall, felt the space filling with people, heard a children’s choir singing, kept our eyes fixed on the giant television screens. We pointed as we recognized the dignitaries who arrived, laughed and joked with strangers as we wondered aloud how someone like John Cusack scored a ticket. ‘He hasn’t made a movie in years!’ someone called out, and everyone laughed. A mixed-race couple held their two heavily-bundled infants on their shoulders so the children could see the big screen. My legs went numb around mid-morning, but I didn’t mind. The waiting was endless, the crowd joyful and calm, and the first real jolt of the day came when the camera panned out to show the entire area from above, the endless crush of people amassed between the Capitol and the Washington Monument. The crowd saw itself then, its nearly infinite size, and roared.

On the night of the election, my cousin Mario was sitting in a New York City sound booth watching the crowd gather in Chicago’s Grant Park. He and his fellow translator, a Spaniard named Tony, were working for NY1, a local cable news channel that broadcasts in Spanish to the entire Tri-State area.

In 2003, Mario began working in New Jersey’s state courts, and in 2006 moved to the US Federal Court in Lower Manhattan, a sordid and depressing world far removed from the glitz of national politics. Mario’s daily tasks include being the English voice of record for accused drug kingpins, small-time traffickers, undocumented immigrants facing deportation, frightened witnesses and distressed family members, as well as court officials, lawyers and judges. The work is intellectually and emotionally draining: a single witness might remain on the stand for days or even weeks. Dense legalese must be rendered word for word into its Spanish equivalent, while the similarly impenetrable idioms of a Latino criminal class must be somehow transformed into English. Real lives are in play each time the court meets, and the fate of a defendant can hang on a poorly translated line of testimony.

Recently Mario began translating for local Spanish-language television stations for extra money: an occasional boxing match (for which, he says slyly, he’s had to learn to sing), voice-overs for English-language interviews, that sort of thing. Television, Mario told me when we spoke just before the New Year, requires an entirely different approach. In court, a witness’s testimony is translated consecutively – you take notes, you listen carefully, you have time to think. Your legal obligation is to the language, not the intention. If, for example, an under-educated defendant says, while pleading clemency before a judge, Yo siempre he vivido al margen de la ley – a commonly-used idiomatic expression meaning, literally, ‘I’ve always lived outside the law’ – you must translate the statement exactly this way, even if it’s clear that the defendant has misunderstood the sense of the phrase they are employing, that they intended to say quite the opposite.

Television is more forgiving, as the spectacle exists outside of the words themselves. Interpretation is generally simultaneous: you listen in one language as you reproduce the words in another, which necessitates a certain flexibility. In any case, interpreting the call of a boxing match is more about creating atmosphere than precisely replicating phrases, which no one listens to anyway. It’s about the music of it. ‘It’s Hollywood,’ Mario said, and assured me the same is true of political speech-making.

NY1 in Spanish is a small station in a big market, and functions on a relatively meagre budget. The studios are comfortable, though hardly luxurious. On the night of the election, Mario simply showed up, made his way directly to the sound booth and waited. No one was there to receive him, but then he’d done this before and knew the procedure. There was a talk show on air called Pura Política, just five men chatting about the election, the same sort of thing you might see on any other news channel, except in Spanish. When the live image broke away to some off-site interview, Tony and Mario had to decide on the spot if the speaker looked Latino. If not, they’d decide whose turn it was and be ready to translate. If the person was a Spanish speaker, they’d relax and turn their attention back to the results coming in over internet radio, chatting as they waited for the important speeches to come. There would be two – McCain and Obama. Mario chose Obama, not because of any particular political affinity but simply as a matter of convenience. ‘He speaks like an academic,’ Mario told me, and that makes him easy to translate.

What did it feel like to translate the most electrifying political speaker of the last forty years? My cousin was, in a word, underwhelmed: neither the historical significance of the outcome, nor the inspirational words, nor the images of weeping Americans of all ages and races braving the frigid Chicago night made much of an impact on him. Though Mario would have voted for Obama (my cousin is a legal resident, though not yet a citizen), his support was tepid at best. He’d followed the election closely and thought of it as an interesting, even picturesque spectacle, and he had been genuinely surprised by the results. ‘If I’d bet money on the outcome,’ Mario said, ‘I would have lost.’ He considers himself politicized insofar as he cares deeply about politics, but insisted that he had no illusions about Obama or anyone else.

Mario’s stance is idiosyncratic and certainly quite personal, but in some respects it is typical of many Peruvians of his generation – people born under dictatorship, whose childhoods were punctuated by car bombs and blackouts and atrocities, who entered adulthood governed by another corrupt syndicate whose leader, Alberto Fujimori, President of Peru from 1990 until 2000, is now on trial. They have never been given a good reason to believe in politics. Campaigns in Peru are furious, absurd affairs whose sinister protagonists sometimes strain credulity. Elections are often decided in the last two weeks, when an outsider appears on the scene, unknown enough to seem tolerable. No one believes anything. Presidents are elected, survive their poor approval ratings, and then go off to live in Europe or Japan or the United States. Bathos abounds. Voting is obligatory, and Mario suspects that if it weren’t no one would bother. After a decade or more in America, this is still the lens through which he sees all struggles for political power, a point of view which the presidency of George W. Bush has further justified. The historical, epochal nature of the moment was something Mario understood rather than felt.

In order to feel it, I wondered, was it necessary to have been raised in the United States? Mario allowed that this might be true. But in any case, he said, ‘I don’t identify with this country. And I’m not the sort to participate in widely-felt, popular emotions.’ He doesn’t trust them. He did note that while he was translating for Barack Obama, unmoved, his wife María, a Uruguayan who emigrated to the United States in her teens (Mario came in his twenties) was at home watching the results on television and crying. I’ve spoken to many friends, Americans born in the most far-flung places – Tehran, Mumbai, Bogotá – but raised here who told me similar stories about that night: they watched, they wept.

But it’s not just a matter of identifying or failing to identify with this country. Even if he believed every word, nothing said in a political speech could rise to the level of emotional involvement Mario feels in a trial. ‘In the court,’ he said, ‘I’ve often wanted to cry. I’ve often felt like praying that the judge will show some mercy on a particular defendant.’

So he did his work, as professionals do.

Barack Obama began speaking that night around midnight eastern time. If you are an interpreter, the words come almost automatically as you slip into an unconscious sort of ventriloquism. You have trained yourself to process language in this way. The simultaneous translation is always approximate, always ad hoc, but political speeches are easy. They are written, after all, to be transparent and accessible to the broadest possible swathe of voters, the exact opposite of legal English or the impenetrable argot of the drug game. Every eight sentences or so, the speaker is interrupted by applause, giving the interpreter an opportunity to catch up, to breathe. Someone like Barack Obama is easy: he speaks in complete sentences and complete ideas. He pauses at the right moments, understands how people listen, and has an intuitive sense of what they want to hear.

I asked Mario if he remembered anything of what Barack Obama said that night.

‘Not a word.’

Things went well for Daniel Alarcón last year. His debut novel, Lost City Radio, was named a best book of 2007 by the Washington Post and the LA Times, and he was recognized as one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists.

Born in Lima in 1977, Alarcón was raised in Birmingham, Alabama. After teaching posts at a public school in New York and then in Peru, Alarcón attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and completed a collection of short stories, War by Candlelight, which was published in 2005. He is also an associate editor of the Lima-based magazine Etiqueta Negra, which he describes as ‘Harper’s but written in Spanish, obsessed with culture instead of politics and with much better design’.

When we spoke, Alarcón was at home in Oakland, California, packing for a trip to Buenos Aires to meet the Peruvian artist Sheila Alvarado with whom he’s collaborating on a new project – City of Clowns – a Spanish-language graphic novel.

A new short story by Daniel Alarcón, ‘The Bridge’, appears in Granta 103.

HG: I was wondering what drew you to the idea of a graphic novel? As a writer it’s a form that’s new to you…

DA: I didn’t grow up reading comic books but at some point I came across the work of Joe Sacco and I’m a big fan of his stuff now. The literary graphic novel is an interesting way of telling a story and the form is largely unknown in Latin America so I wanted to expand the readership.

Do you have a particular audience in mind?

Originally I was going to work with an independent publisher. We were going to do a nice version to sell in Peru for the equivalent of ten dollars and then a very cheap version on newsprint to give away in schools. But the thing about the independent was that they couldn’t get things together and so instead I showed the proposal to my regular Spanish publishers, Alfaguara. They’ll publish it for, you know, ten dollars, and at that price in Peru it will be for college students, high school students, middle class people.

Because books are luxury, or at least middle class, items in Peru?

They are and that also means that there’s a huge pirating industry. Last year I went to give a talk at a prison, for instance, and everyone had copies of my book even though it hadn’t actually been published at that point. Piracy is the equivalent of the bestseller list in Peru: if a book is well-publicized and well-received and makes any kind of splash then the people who pirate books will take notice...

So in some sense it must be flattering to find that your books are being pirated?

Yes, I do see it like that but then I also have the luxury of not needing to get upset about the pirating because I don’t actually make money from Peru. I’ve never been paid for my work at Etiqueta Negra and the book advances one gets are minimal – certainly not enough to live on in the United States. I think that when Peru’s a middle class country we’ll have to re-evaluate the industry but the way things are now it’s natural that these luxury products are going to be copied. And of course it’s not just books that are pirated and it’s not just Peru. I remember walking round a market place in Ghana about ten or eleven years ago and getting totally lost and stumbling across a bunch of men stamping logos on to T-shirts using Nike swooshes that they'd carved out of wood... Just flabbergasting really.

With ‘The Bridge’, your short story in Granta 103, you return to the capital city of the unnamed Latin American country that provides the setting for Lost City Radio…

Yes, and that city is also where the novel I’m currently working on is set. In fact both ‘The Bridge’ and ‘The Idiot President’, a story that appeared in The New Yorker earlier this year, first started off life as parts of the new novel but then changed to take on this independent existence.

And in previous interviews you’ve said that this city is based on Lima, the action based on the civil war in Peru in the 1980s, so I wondered why you have been reluctant to actually name the place, to situate the events specifically in Peru?

My city is very much Lima but by not tying the fictional city to any specific place I could have more fun playing around, creating new details. When I was writing Lost City Radio I had a map of Lima in front of me that I drew all over, renaming the districts, marking on bus routes, making the environment more alarming, more vivid... Having said that, the strangest parts of a story are not necessarily the fictional elements. I mean the anecdote that forms the basis of the Granta story – the blind couple walking off a broken bridge – that’s completely true. One of my friends was the reporter who covered the story in Lima and he spoke to the blind couple who, in the real event, survived the fall. The whole thing sounds unbelievable and bizarre but the very basic kernel of the story did actually come from reality – I just built something else around it.

So having freed yourself from the restrictions of geography and history, were you able to draw usefully on the experiences of other nations and other conflicts? To create, perhaps, a more widely inclusive story about the nature of war?

Yes, I think that’s true, and I think that when you start studying conflicts in the developing world you discover a lot of overlaps. I certainly found Joe Sacco’s books on Bosnia and Palestine very helpful when I was writing the novel, and I read an amazing collection of Anna Politkovskaya’s work, A Small Corner of Hell. Chechnya and Grozny, from her descriptions, seem like Eighties Lima – but Eighties Lima on methamphetamine. Then, as another example, there’s something in the novel called tadek, which is described as a primitive form of justice carried out in jungle villages after, say, a theft…

This is where the village elders choose a young boy, stupefy him with an intoxicating tea, and let him wander the village until he picks out a culprit?

Yes, and then the ‘culprit’ has his or her hands cut off. This practice actually comes from a Kapuscinski book on Ethiopia (The Emperor) but I just thought that it fitted perfectly and allowed me to make a point about government justice in the novel actually working in a very similar way to that of tadek. At the time I was thinking also about Guantánamo and about racial profiling in the United States… Interestingly, when I was in Lima I found that people had just assumed that tadek was something I’d discovered during my research into the Peruvian jungle.

As someone who’s published both this novel and a collection of short stories, is there a literary form that you’re more drawn to?

I prefer to read novels. There’s something about the big canvas and the possibilities it allows that’s really exciting.

So do you see your short-story collection as a sort of apprenticeship?

It’s hard for me now to read those stories and not think that…they seem incomplete in certain ways. But then I don’t think that one is necessarily the best judge of one’s own work. I do think that those stories had to be stories and that every set of characters you encounter just seem to decide their own form.

And how do you actually start writing? I mean the physical process of getting the words on to the page?

I type everything directly on to a laptop and I take a lot of notes. Right now I’ve just finished the first section of my next novel so I’m taking a lot more notes as I gear up to write the second part.

Thinking about these ‘notes’, would you say that there’s quite a strong journalistic element to the way you work? In the acknowledgments at the end of Lost City Radio, for example, you talk about the ‘many people who have shared their stories of the war years with me’…

Absolutely. In terms of my fiction, I think it’s partly a reticence to write about my own life – not out of any kind of shyness but because I just find other people’s lives more interesting. Journalism is a form I’m definitely drawn to because it allows you to talk to other people and ask them questions that might otherwise sound stupid.

You’ve mentioned the work of Kapuscinski, Sacco and Politkovskaya in connection to your novel, but I wondered more generally which writers have influenced you?

Early on it was the Russians – Dostoyevsky specifically – and then when I was living in New York after college I was reading a lot of contemporary English language writers. That was when Zadie Smith came out, Arundhati Roy, Jonathan Safran Foer... And in Peru I read Latin American writers – Borges, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa – and a lot of Peruvian stuff. Then later, at school in Iowa, I was introduced to all these American writers - people that I really just hadn’t come across before. I never liked Carver all that much but I found John Cheever to be an absolute revelation, mostly because he talked about people I don’t really care about but then made me care. I don’t, politically can’t, worry too much about the problems of white, upper middle-class suburban professionals, but the way Cheever writes about them they just become life and death…

And what are you reading at the moment?

Right now I’m helping to put together a Zoetrope issue of Latin American writers so I’m reading a lot for that. There’s a great collection of short stories by this Cuban writer Ronaldo Menendez, for instance. I don’t think the book’s been translated yet though.

Are you frustrated by the lack of translated fiction that’s available in Britain and United States?

Yes, definitely, but it’s also something that I think I’m in a particular position to help change and I take that position seriously and with a great deal of humility.

And finally, why a graphic novel about clowns? They seem to be something of a recurring motif in your work – I’m thinking now of your short story ‘City of Clowns’ that appeared in The New Yorker debut fiction issue back in 2003…

Clowns have just had such historical, literary significance and symbolism over the years – Pagliacci and the sad clown, that sort of thing… When I was living in Lima where the graphic novel is set, one of the things I found most impressive (and I mean this in the real sense of the word in that it made an impression) was the cacophony, the visual spectacle, the dress up of the city compared to most places in North America. There was a lot of gathering in the plaza to see religious charlatans, sex gurus, magicians, amateur comedians, comic transvestites and, of course, clowns – there just really are a lot of clowns in Lima. I wrote very little while I was there because I was always out in the streets. And every time I’m not writing I feel just awful but now, looking back, that was exactly what I needed to do. I needed to see the clowns.

See also
Granta 97: ‘Best of Young American Novelists’
Granta 103: ‘The Rise of the British Jihad’