Agustín Fernández Mallo’s most recent novel, The Things We’ve Seen, is hard to describe. I don’t mean it’s indescribable or obtuse, or a novel that’s difficult to approach; in fact, the novel virtually begs the reader to immerse themselves in the countless stories that cross borders and oceans and sometimes leave the earth’s atmosphere. Yet, like the best of Sebald or Krasznahorkai, any attempt at summary feels like a disservice; there’s too much contained within its pages, too many digressions, both large and small. It’s a challenge to encapsulate a novel that bursting at the seams with such daring imagination.
The novel is divided into three substantial chapters (the first is over 200 pages) and each is told in first-person by a different character, one a writer, the second a retired astronaut, and the third an unnamed woman who’d had a relationship with the writer from the first chapter. The events unfold slowly. The stories accumulate until themes start to emerge: dreams, trap doors, ghosts, amnesia, political theater. Tangents abound: the dream of a character can suddenly take center stage and span thirty pages, yet all of it is fabulously readable, beguiling and strange in the best sense.
While reading The Things We’ve Seen my mind kept returning to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, not in the theme or feel, but the ambition and scope, a book excited to take the difficult or hidden paths in fiction. It also felt akin to Sergio De La Pava’s, A Naked Singularity. There’s also the relative ease with which Fernández Mallo takes the reader anywhere, in this instance San Simón (an island used as a prison camp during the Spanish Civil War) to Brooklyn to 1970’s San Francisco, not to mention Miami and Hollywood. This is a novel so awash with stories and ideas it almost seems unfair.
Agustín Fernández Mallo was kind enough to answer my questions about what, to me, is one of the best books of the year.
—Mark Haber
One of the major feelings I had after finishing your book is the idea that the dead or the ghosts of the dead are always with us, whether it’s immediate family or strangers from past wars. At one point, Kurt Montana’s father says: “We are our dead past, all the coffins that go before us.” This idea that the dead are always with us, whether it’s the Spanish Civil War or 9/11. Could you talk a little about that?
For that, I really need to talk about how this whole piece of writing began. I was invited to a conference, on the island of San Simón in northwest Spain, which had to do with the internet. What was unusual was that instead of an audience being present, the conference was going to be broadcast live around the world on various platforms, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Ironically, given the subject, for three days the fifteen of us were going to be completely cut off from the world on that small island. It was like we were taking ourselves off into Plato’s cave. What’s more, this island has a very dramatic past. It was a refuge for pirates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then, in 1937, used as an internment camp in the Spanish Civil War. I happened to have a book, Aillados [Galician for “isolated”], which had photos of the men captured in the civil war and held on the island, and I put it in my suitcase for the trip. And then, the moment I set foot on the island, I felt the weight of all the bones and other objects below, a sensation intensified by the fact that the wings of the internment camp were still standing and they were where our rooms were going to be. Then I started with a kind of action, which to begin with was nothing but a game: I went looking for the places where the photos in Aillados had been taken and, using my smartphone, took photos of those places as they are today. When I put the first of these photos alongside the respective one in the book, there was the feeling of a kind of chasm between the two: my one, this sun-kissed image, could almost have been something out of a tourist brochure, and next to it you had the 1937 photo, with prisoners looking back at the camera, smiling. Some of those men would go on to be executed by firing squad. And there was this feeling that though I was treading the same ground they had walked upon, this chasm separated us. It was as though an immense historical, narrative, and political gap lay between the two photos, a gap that I wanted to cross in that moment, and couldn’t. It was then that I felt that the dead are never completely dead and that those of us who are alive are never completely alive, we live with them inside a single social network, which is the biggest network that has ever existed and that will ever exist: the one that joins the living and the dead. And I set to work writing something having no idea what it was or about its eventual scope. The narration itself led me to other places around the world and to other wars, so that, after six years, I saw that I had the 500 pages of The Things We’ve Seen in my hands.
What is it about war that interests you?
This brings us onto the vision of every living person—via this “social network”—being connected to someone who’s died in war. This is the reason the line by Spanish poet Carlos Oroza—“it’s a mistake to take the things we’ve seen as a given”—repeats throughout the book (which was called Trilogía de la Guerra, The War Trilogy, in Spanish). And its importance lies in applying it specifically to the dead, to show that it’s a mistake to think that the dead are ever completely dead. More generally, the book is about what we could call the “Side B” of wars, the small echoes and mysterious resonances that war and conflict produce in our daily lives. For example, I’m interested in thinking about why, when it comes to armed conflict, there’s a separation between wars (which are legal), and terrorism (which is illegal), as well as the way in which war has changed guise throughout history: for example, with the economic conflicts that arise today when northern and southern European models come into conflict, I believe these are nothing but a contemporary playing out of the eternal war between the Protestantism of the north and the Catholicism of the south: they originate, like almost everything, in the religions on which various civilizations are based.
Much of The Things We’ve Seen takes place in the United States (Florida, Montana, New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles). The impression of these places and characters felt very authentic and yet that’s perhaps not very important to you. Did you research or live in any of these locations or was it mostly an act of the imagination? Is getting an accurate feel for a real setting important to you?
In my opinion, for an artist, and particularly for a writer of fiction, the documentation of real facts is a hindrance, a dead weight that will sink the artist or writer—it’s like a gigantic piece of cement being attached to your feet, dragging you to the bottom of the sea and stopping you from taking flight—it destroys the imagination. I think that, yes, you’ve got to have some notion of things, you can’t do without certain details, but the difficult part is then taking them to another place. And, of course, once this literary operation is complete, that the invented parts seem credible within the story itself. I’m talking about what we might call the “pact of verisimilitude” between the book and the reader, because a piece of fiction is never true or false, these terms aren’t applicable to the ambit of fiction. What fiction can have is verisimilitude. This is the way that all great novels have been built. In my case, and to answer your question more directly, I have been to almost all of the places you mention, I know the U.S. a little because I’ve driven around the country, but most of the things in my novel are invented in the moment when I’m typing, abiding only by creative and poetic—never historical-scientific—criteria. I even sometimes quote other authors and—after Borges—modify these quotations slightly, in order to create certain narrative-poetic effects. Which is all to say, what’s important about any real place you include in a novel is precisely what you don’t know about that place, what you’re obliged to invent in order to make it yours and yours alone. To be an artist is to create autonomous worlds of one’s own.
There’s this wonderful juxtaposition in your novel: the ideas, the themes, the different strands of the story are extremely complex, yet the writing is very approachable, almost conversational as if someone were sitting beside you telling the reader a story. Was this intentional? Do you see the writing of the book this way?
I’m flattered, I like that you put it that way. There are two things that have led me to it, the first being years of a style maturing. I come from the sciences, from physics, and in science everything has to be very synthesized: you have to say as much as possible with as little as possible. But I also come from poetry (in fact, I consider my novels to be poems disguised as novels, and I even think my essays are poems disguised as essays), and, as you know, in poetry, as in science, one has to get across the maximum meaning with the fewest words: one has to be crystalline, not obscure. The other thing is that you have to make things complex, but not complicated. Complex and complicated are not only different, but opposed terms. That which is complex is harmonious (for example the human body), but it is never difficult or complicated to understand. Complicated things are, by their nature, obscure (for example, a hieroglyph). Writers with a complicated prose style don’t interest me, because they put themselves above the reader, they want to show they’re more intelligent than them, and that to me seems like an abuse, a hangover, even, from patriarchal modes: “I’ve got the key to decipher this text, this hieroglyph, and I’ll give it to you when I please.” I try to do the opposite: the writer has to get out of the way, and the true value of a piece of writing, the real talent, lies in making the reader see they’re more intelligent than the writer. You just need to accompany the reader on their way, let them discover things for themselves, never put yourself above them.
The use of photographs in your novel is very effective (not only does it bring W.G. Sebald to mind, but you discuss Sebald in the book!). Many of these places and objects are real and for me it reinforced the idea of the past and the present colliding. Did you have a specific intention by including photographs? Besides being practical for the story, do you see the photographs as an aesthetic choice?
No, I had no aesthetic intention in particular. Simply, there are times when photography seems more powerful to me than the written word. I know that photography is traditionally prohibited in fiction, and that it’s a heresy to include it, but I believe that a creator has to stick to their own rules—as long as there is coherence to them. We shouldn’t write under the yoke of aesthetic prejudice. What’s important is that the photographs and the prose don’t render one another pointless, that is, that what one says you don’t repeat with the other. Then again, photography is something that works very well in the case I’ve mentioned of the photographs of the prisoners on San Simón, which is something you really have to see to get the desired effect. The same elsewhere in the book, in the part where I retrace Nietzsche’s steps in Turin when he famously threw his arms around the horse’s neck and whispered, “Mother, I am stupid,” after which he spoke not another word until his death in 1900. That’s a real anecdote.
Were there any specific books or writers or films that influenced you while writing The Things We’ve Seen?
Well, it’s a book that I spent many years over, and it brings together hundreds of different influences in my life, it would be impossible to pull out just a few. They come not only from high literature and the sciences, but, as can be appreciated in the book, from consumer society in general. My writing consists of creating a network, that is, as with poetry, connecting concepts or characters via unexpected links that nonetheless aren’t arbitrary; they function at the level of metaphor and poetry. Perhaps my greatest influence isn’t any person in particular, but a way of approaching storytelling, a way that’s part of my own life: writing from a paradigm of complex networks and systemic thought, and not from the paradigm of tree-like, hierarchical structures, which rely on the usual schema of conflict/build up/denouement. What I will say is that the writings of Salvador Dalí—which I think are immense—and Sebald’s books and the films of David Lynch were in my head a lot, as atmospheres.
Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead
Agustín Fernández Mallo was born in La Coruña, Spain in 1967. Before devoting himself full-time to his fiction and poetry, he worked for many years as an experimental physicist. His collected poems were published in Spain in 2012. He is the author of the Nocilla Trilogy (Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Lab, Nocilla Experience), Limbo, and Antibiotico.
Mark Haber’s collection of stories, Deathbed Conversions, was translated into Spanish in a bilingual edition as Melville’s Beard by Editorial Argonáutica. His debut novel, Reinhardt’s Garden (Coffee House Press), was longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award. His second novel, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, will be published by Coffee House Press in 2022. He is the operations manager and a bookseller at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas.
Thomas Bunstead has translated some of the leading Spanish-language writers working today, including Bernardo Atxaga, Maria Gainza and Enrique Vila-Matas, and his own writing has appeared in publications such as Brixton Review of Books, LitHub and The White Review. Twice a winner of PEN Translates Awards, he is currently a Royal Literary Fellow, teaching at Aberystwyth University (2021-2023). He was born in London and now lives in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
Banner image courtesy Agustín Fernández Mallo