Patricio Pron

GRANTA 113: THE BEST OF YOUNG SPANISH-LANGUAGE NOVELISTS

The usual charges against meta-fiction might reasonably be levelled against ‘A Few Words On The Life Cycle of Frogs’: minimal ‘action’, discursive exposition, insidious self-absorption, distracting self-consciousness, and –deadliest of sins – the writer as subject. Here is a story about an ambitious provincial who moves to a large city and eventually publishes. Along the way, we must hear copiously about literature, the imagination and the act of writing. This is the sort of thing we might summarily dismiss as the work of a writer who, instead of telling a story, gazes at his navel and offers a report. Fine, there’s talent from sentence to sentence, and a charming sensibility worthy of our regard, but why does Pron put his assets to such use? What does Pron think he’s doing?

My sense is that he’s doing something to be admired. It’s difficult in the context of meta-fiction to render honest emotion, but in this Pron succeeds. Despite his high-wire distancing act, or perhaps because of it, he draws us to an unnamed protagonist who must endure the goad of overwhelming aspiration. Pron’s story isn’t missing; it’s latent and implied, and much the stronger for it. This is no mean feat, and it suggests a writer aware of the need for an artful synthesis in the production of fiction. In the case of ‘A Few Words On The Life Cycle of Frogs’, synthesis demands a convergence of anti-conventions skilfully chosen in service to the whole. The net effect is what we get from the best stories – an emotional reverberation from an instrument of truth, and the frisson of a balanced thematic finality. You have to like a writer who does this sort of thing and leaves you moved. – David Guterson, Best Young American Novelist 2007

Each of Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists answered a questionnaire on their influences and the role of the writer in public life. Here are Pron’s answers:

Name the five writers you most admire at the moment (any period, language or genre).

David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, W. G. Sebald, Roberto Bolaño.

Have you published literary criticism?

Yes.

Which languages do you read in?

Spanish, English, German, French, Portugese, Italian and Catalan.

Do you have your own web page?

Yes: I have my own blog, and a page of brief essays and reviews in the style of a reading diary, on the Spanish literary site El Boomeran.

Is your fiction your sole source of income? If not, what else do you live off?

No. I get most of my income from my work as a journalist and critic; the rest from my translations from German and my work as a lecturer in German literature. Which are all forms of writing.

Should writers play a role in public life beyond the publication of their work? If so, in what way?

Naturally, the writer has to take out the rubbish, bathe regularly and pay taxes: all activities that have a direct influence on public life. Beyond that, I’m not sure there are fixed rules on whether or not the writer should be politically engaged beyond the publication of their fiction. About that fiction, though, you can certainly say that it would be ideal if it were revolutionary - especially with regard to Latin America as it is at the moment - but also that we’d have to be satisfied if it were counterrevolutionary. Although the answer to this question is always personal and says something about the personal ethic of the author who proffers it, personally I’m much more interested in writers’ work than their opinions and their existence outside books.