The privilege of speech.(Books)(Latin American Writers at Work)(Book Review)

Latin American Writers at Work, edited by George Plimpton; Modern Library, 2003, $30.95.

THIS IS THE FOURTH book published in this series. The others are: Women Writers at Work, Beat Writers at Work, and Playwrights at Work. Each collection assembles interviews from different sources from the last fifty years, gives a short biography and description of each writer, and is introduced by someone who is almost (but not quite) of the literary movement themselves, in this case the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott.

Ten writers appear in this collection--nine men, one woman. All the big names are here: Borges, Neruda, Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa and so on. And there are also those who, while famous, are maybe less well known to the general reading public in the English-speaking world: writers like the Mexican Octavio Paz, the Argentine Julio Cortazar, and the Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante. (They have great names, these Latin Americans.)

There is something about the format of the interview that, if done well, can capture the essence of its subject--writer, politician, celebrity, sportsman, whatever. It works particularly well for writers. Writers' lives are made of words. When they speak, or are forced to, they almost can't help revealing themselves. If the ambition of every writer is to write as they talk, then the genuine Borges or the genuine Llosa could well be found in these interviews rather than their works.

What an interview does is to break someone down. The life of everyone--even "sophisticated" intellectuals--is nearly always based on a few basic ideas or attitudes. Think about your own friends and family. You can't sit down at lunch or dinner for thirty minutes before what always comes up comes up again: gossip, politics, their philosophy of life, that umpiring decision in the 1967 Grand Final. It's the same for the writers of this collection. In the forty pages of the interview with Borges for example, you get a complete summary of an intellectual universe which ranged from Plotinus to John Ford to Anglo-Saxon poetry to the tango. And since this is just a friendly conservation which has happened to be recorded, not a formal essay, everything is conveyed with the precise economy of verbal hint and suggestion. To understand Borges as a man, you could read the hundreds of pages of his collected nonfiction--or you could read this interview.

Simply, this is an extraordinary book. Each interview opens a whole world: wide, colourful, exciting. And everything overlaps. Each writer knows, reads, likes or despises the rest. The politics and culture of the twentieth century are everywhere.

The interviewer asks Pablo Neruda, who was at this time Marxist candidate for President of Chile, "What do you think about Borges' writing?" Neruda replies: