Alejandro Puyana

Alejandro Puyana and I bonded by playing pool. We met in Austin, TX, while attending the same MFA program. He struck me as incredibly kind and personable, which was an impression solidified by a birthday party invitation at a pool hall, where he had rented out a couple of tables. He’s a wicked shot, and I felt proud of myself just (barely) keeping pace on a tournament-size table, which I’d never played before. His game is quick and confident, but still carefully measured, and absolutely a kind of beauty to behold. I’m also talking about his debut novel, Freedom Is a Feast, obviously. It is a novel bursting with love for Venezuela, for its people and landscape and history. It’s got a breakneck pace that contains the multitudes of entire lives in its exploration of people caught in a revolutionary struggle and still just trying to get by.

Given especially what has been happening in Venezuela the last few weeks with Maduro undermining democracy by claiming an election he clearly did not win, it is also a prescient read that can help readers understand, as Ale put it online recently, “what we have been living through and why we are where we are right now.”

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Kyle Francis Williams: First books take a long time. How long were you working on this?

Alejandro Puyana: I started working on this around ten years ago. My brother was kidnapped in 2012; I probably started writing about the kidnapping in 2013 or 2014, mostly in nonfictional ways. I was only getting started in my writing life then, and investigating my connection to Venezuela through my writing. So I wrote an essay about my brother’s kidnapping, and then not long after that I wrote the scene fictionally. That scene, which is still in the book, really hasn’t changed much since I first wrote it a decade ago. But of course, I had no idea I was working on a novel; I wrote that scene almost as a exercise, trying to write from the point of view of the kidnapper, and then I filed it away. Later on, I was joining a workshop here in Austin, and I picked those pages up again and expanded it from there, the kidnapper becoming one of my main characters, Eloy, and then thinking about Eloy’s mother, who became a main character herself. Progressing in that direction, I discovered Stanislavo, too, who ended up being based on a good friend of my family’s, Teodoro Petkoff, who is a sort of mythical figure in our lives and in the life of Venezuela. Those three pieces, Stanislavo, María, and Eloy, gave me the novel’s three pillars: three generations to explore the life of the country through. 

It surprises me how long it takes to get to that scene of the kidnapping, especially now knowing that that’s where the book started for you. That incident really kicks off act three. Did you always know that was where it would occur in the book?

Not at all. When I started writing, the points of view switched off much more often, going back and forth in time throughout the book; I would get bored of a character and jump to the next one, and because that was how I was writing it, I thought that would be the shape of the book. But how you write through a story isn’t necessarily the best way for that story to be presented. It wasn’t until I could make out the three main time periods—being the revolutionary sixties, the coup against Chávez in 2002, and Eloy’s adulthood around 2012–2013—that I considered a chronological presentation. It was in a workshop at the Michener Center that I decided the book needed to start with Eloy’s shooting.

That prologue really does bring such an immediate and gripping pace, which is something I really admire about it about the entire book. It feels classically “unputdownable,” as a blurb might put it. It feels to me like you’re doing something special with the chapter, as a structure, for this book. They’re very short, and so there are a lot of them, over seventy by the end. From a craft perspective, I want to ask you, what are chapters for? 

I’m not a plotter, really. I discover the plot as I write. But I grew up reading comic books and playing D&D.

Hell yeah.

So I have a lot of love for cliffhangers, or other devices that just make you want to immediately read the next issue, or just to the next play session. I used to be a dungeon master, so every time I ended a session I wanted to end at a moment people would be excited to get back to. Because of that, I just naturally approach writing fiction that way. When writing chapters for this book, especially because I jumped around so much in the drafting, I wanted to leave the reader missing the character and their story whenever the book moved on to another. 

But then, the book also had maybe half the amount of chapters it does now, like, eight months ago. One of the conversations I had with my editor, Ben George, in the final draft was making sure each character occupied the book for a similar amount of time. This ended up making the chapters shorter, because I was writing so many new scenes, and cutting larger chunks into smaller chapters to accommodate the new work coming in—like Emiliana’s point of view, which didn’t exist in the book before that final draft a few months ago. And I loved that work of cutting things up, rearranging, because it allowed me to play so much more with the structure and add so much more propulsion. That was the most fun I had editing the book.

Were there any other major changes made in editing?

The book was not originally a family book. Stanislavo and María were not originally father and daughter. There was something important to me in the earlier drafts about them not being related, about his motivations for helping her going further than a man obligated to help his child. But my editor really wanted that connection, so I thought I would try it out, and see if the change spoke to me. In that change, I found Emiliana grew so much as a character. She played such a larger role in the narrative and allowed me speak about things I hadn’t before about Venezuela, about the dynamics between people in the leftist movement who are more privileged and ideologically driven, like Stanislavo, and the more grassroots necessity she represents.

So you started working on this book ten years ago. You moved to the US in 2006, when you were twenty-six. Did you write much before then, when you were still living in Venezuela?

I wrote a bit in college. I think I wrote my first short story when I was in my early twenties. I was reading a lot of Julio Cortazar back then, and particularly obsessed with his story “La autopista del sur,” which was the first short story I read that made me think, What is this sorcery? I didn’t know that was even possible in writing. I grew up more on fantasy, and discovering Cortazar made a really profound impact on me. So naturally my earliest stories were bad imitations of him. 

I studied sociology in university, and worked in advertising in Venezuela; when I first came to Austin, it was to get a master’s in advertising at UT. While here, I took an undergraduate fiction workshop as an elective, and I had a really wonderful experience with it. This would have been 2008, and these were the first stories I wrote in English. My readers were reading English, obviously, so it was a matter of necessity while living here that I would write in a language people could read, but also those were the first stories I wrote that I actually liked. It was after that elective that I started to take writing seriously, writing in my free time, joining a neighborhood workshop, and I kept writing in English in part because I could feel myself getting better as a writer in that language. 

Were you ever tempted to write in Spanish again?

I tried to write in Spanish again a few times, but it didn’t feel the same, for whatever reason. Frankly I don’t think I would write as well if I wrote in Spanish. There are different rhythms, different conventions—it’s a different vibe, and I feel more steeped in the tradition of English writing than Spanish writing these days. 

And then later on, after I had published a few stories, gotten into the MFA program, it became important to me to be writing in English for another reason. I felt I hadn’t seen Venezuela written in English yet. Of course there are beautiful books that have been translated, but I hadn’t found any that weren’t written in Spanish. That was kind of a lonely place, but I also thought it was an opportunity to expose people who wouldn’t have ordinarily sought it out to the Venezuelan story. It was frightening in a way, when I had my story “The Hands of Dirty Children” picked for the Best American Stories anthology, because I felt insecure about being the “right person” to be telling a Venezuelan story on such a platform. But I also felt a lot of pride and excitement showing people my story of my country. 

So I have a lot of questions about the place of Venezuelan history in the novel, which is obviously important to you. Maybe a good place to start would be with the coup, which is where the prologue starts and then takes up the novel’s second act. Over that section, it feels like we experience that day almost minute-by-minute. How did you go about reconstructing that?

Well, I lived through that day, for one thing. I was twenty-one then, and active in that political moment. I hadn’t gone to the march that morning, but I had to have been to over thirty others in the months prior. Of anything in the book, I felt like I had the most emotional access to that day. I knew what it felt like to be out there, and I could remember the chaos of that day.

Then, because the prologue operates on such an expansion of time, to an almost cinematic degree, I wanted the rest of that section to continue in that cadence. That political moment unfolded so quickly and so unexpectedly that pace made that most sense. I wanted the political drama of whether Chávez is coming back to mirror whether Eloy would make it, for those anxieties to feed into one another. And a lot had to be sacrificed for that pace to be maintained; a lot of political detail was left on the cutting room floor.

Like what?

Nothing too big. We thought about cutting the letter Chávez writes while kept prisoner at Turiamo, refusing to resign, but I fought to keep it. Originally, the party thrown at Miraflores by the man who took over from Chávez, Carmona Estanga, was much, much longer. There was more excess trimmed throughout.

When you’re writing your fictional characters through real history, or specific sociopolitical moments, what was your approach to, say, representing Hugo Chávez? Or, later in the book, there’s this wonderful moment with a letter written by Gabriel García Márquez to Stanislavo. How did you think about using real figures, and having your fictional characters interact with them? 

One of the things I love most about writing fiction is using the real world as a stage for my characters. Most of my writing comes from that place; I like the constraint of the real world, or of historical moments, and using them to explore character. In this novel, I had some unwritten rules. I didn’t feel I was ready to tackle real political figures as characters, for instance, which is part of why Chávez is never physically present in the book despite casting a shadow over the whole thing. There’s only that one moment with Carmona Estanga, who, you know, was only present for a very small amount of time. He exchanges a line or two with Stanislavo, which is such a brief encounter that I didn’t feel like I was appropriating him as a person or putting words in his mouth. But mostly I use history to my advantage as a force characters must live through and react to.

The thing with Gabriel García Márquez is a true story. Teodoro Petkoff was a good friend of his; they had this exchange, over letter, discussing a book Petkoff had written, El Socialismo como problema, Socialism as a Problem. This is back in the sixties; Petkoff had been involved in the socialist movement in Venezuela and wrote this book as a criticism of the USSR’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. This book was considered a smart criticism, even by those within the communist party. I mean, I had to use that. 

I do want to ask a bit about Teodoro Petkoff. While reading this book, I read a lot about him, because he really is such an interesting figure. I love the book’s dedication: “To Teodoro Petkoff, whose real story I couldn’t tell because no one would have believed it.” To start, when did you realize you wanted to fictionalize the life of this man? How did you come to the decision to use Stanislavo as a stand-in? 

Well, as I said before, the book really started with Eloy, and then grew to explore his mother María. But I couldn’t tell the story of María and Eloy without telling the story of the Venezuela they lived in, without telling the story of Chávez, and how the left grew in the country. And to tell that story, the figure that immediately came to mind was Teodoro. I had grown up hearing the stories of Teodoro; he’d been a presence in my world that was mythical, because of those stories, but also actual. He’d come to the house every once in a while; I went with my father to have lunch with him a few times, where I heard some of those stories from him. When I think of 1960s Venezuela, he is the person I think of. 

Then it became fun. He really is such an interesting person; his biography is so crazy. There was so much material there to explore. 

Did you have, like, moral anxieties about that? In using an analogue to a real person, were there things you felt you had to change or keep the same? 

Oh yeah. I had to decide how far or how close to the real Teodoro I was going to be. How he is as a character, for instance—his personality—is based a little on how I knew him, but I didn’t know him well. I decided his personality would be mine to play with, knowing his real personality only in broad strokes anyway. I wouldn’t be restrained by how I thought the real Teodoro would act or what he would think. 

In the biographical moments that I’m lifting from his life, I told myself that I would pick things that he was a part of but fictionalize most of it. I didn’t want to disrespect what Teodoro actually did, first of all, and I also didn’t want to be tied to what actually happened as a plot. I wanted to be free to go in different directions. One example of this is Cuartel San Carlon, which was a real political prison. Teodoro’s involvement in that is completely different from Stanislavo’s. In reality, Teodoro was a prisoner there, not the one digging the tunnel to free the prisoners like Stanislavo is. And that helped me with Stanislavo’s character, to be able to explore the guilt he was feeling because he escaped imprisonment with his friends, and to give him the very concrete goal of digging an escape tunnel to get them. People who actually know Teodoro as a figure will recognize these moments, will remember the story about Teodoro and the tunnel, or that Teodoro was friends with García Márquez. But I wanted it to be clear to those people that Stanislavo was a very different person. I’m not telling a true story about Teodoro Petkoff, but I’m using bits and pieces of his life. 

This book wears some of its literary influences on its sleeve. Characters quote poetry to each other, for instance. Can you tell me about some of the influences there?

Of course there are some big and maybe obvious influences there. The first one is Isabel Allende’s House of Spirits; the way that book tackles its political moment directly inspired this book, even if my book doesn’t have any magical realism in it. And the story of Isabel Allende writing that book was so meaningful to me: She wrote it from exile while living in Venezuela. At that moment, Venezuela was a bastion of freedom in Latin America, a place people could escape to and live more freely, in a similar way to how the United States, for all of its complications, can be viewed for somebody seeking asylum. So I felt a kindred experience in Isabel Allende while writing here in the United States but thinking about Venezuela and dealing with all these feelings about being apart from it—feelings of guilt, love, nostalgia for my home country that I knew I probably was never going to live in again. Knowing that Allende had been through feelings like that made me feel very close to her. 

Another one is José Roberto Duque, who is completely unknown outside of Venezuela, I don’t think even translated. He’s a character, divisive, I think, for his unfailing support for Chávez, but his book Salsa y Control is just amazing. The way he writes about Caracas is so visceral and so beautiful. There are so many others, like Brief History of Seven Killings or The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I wanted to write about Venezuela the way Marlon James wrote about Jamaica; I wanted to explore the history of my country the way Junot Diaz explored the history of the Dominican Republic. These are examples of books that are able to write about entire countries without losing the beauty of writing characters or plot.

Lastly, I want to ask you about the stakes of writing, of writing in politics, politics in writing. You have revolutionaries with guns in the jungle reading poetry to each other, which is such a beautiful moment. For you, what is the place of writing in revolutionary struggle?

The only way I could approach writing something that means this much to me was to find moments of beauty and hope and connection in a very hard and ugly history. Because I feel so removed from the everyday life of this country, I clung to those moments of connection, wherein characters find each other. At its core, this book is about a family dissolved by the forces inflicted on them by the history of the country. I’m trying to reconnect what’s been broken apart. 

Kyle Francis Williams is a writer living in Brooklyn. He is an Interviews Editor for Full Stop and a recent MFA graduate of the Michener Center. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Southern Humanities Review, Epiphany, Southampton Review, and Joyland. He is on Twitter and Instagram @kylefwill.