Valeria Luiselli for BOMB magazine

“For me, it’s about reading the city in terms of its absences, but it’s also about capturing a sense of fragility and political negligence, and questioning literature’s role in all that. ... Of course, all cities are palimpsests—one can read into the layers of their histories—but many cities also do a very good job of wiping out their past.” This is one of Valeria Luiselli's responses when I interviewed her for BOMB.

I love both her writing her take on cities and language, ghosts and haunting. BOMB I love for it unflagging commitment to art and experimental writing and for the magazine’s take on the interview, process and ideas... It was an honor to interview Valeria for them. Here’s my introduction to the interview and you can read the full introduction here:

Cities haunted by ghosts, ghosts that are a metaphor for language in their haunting doubling and mistranslations, language that’s full of holes, while the holes themselves are suggestive of abandoned places and writing that fails to describe anything accurately enough—this is Valeria Luiselli’s terrain. She explores it in her novel Faces in the Crowd (whose title is taken from a poem by Pound) and her essay collection Sidewalks . Faces in the Crowd is the story of a young translator in Harlem who becomes obsessed with the nearly unknown Mexican poet Gilberto Owen. She follows in his footsteps, conjuring his ghost back to life; meanwhile, Owen’s voice enters the narrative, and he starts seeing a woman who is quite possibly the narrator. In its telling, Luiselli’s debut is daring and funny and a major rethink of what might be the urban gothic now—not to mention cities and language and how the city itself should/could/might shape a novel’s structure.

I happened on her writing last autumn while living briefly in South London and feeling haunted by its history. Here was a woman tangling with language and urbanism in a way that undid the Baudelaire / Benjamin trope so common in essays on cities. Instead, she writes a “Manifesto A Velo” that begins: “Apologists for walking have elevated ambulating to the height of an activity with literary overtones.” Not Luiselli. She’s a new version of the urban philosopher—one who rides bikes and lives through earthquakes—and takes on the bourgeois flâneur with all his time for strolling slowly with a transcendent gaze. She brings urgency to bear on her landscape, and her city, Mexico City, gets torn up, concreted over, excavated, and cracked open with fissures. There is violence at the heart of her collection. The single-page (single-paragraph, in fact) essay “Cement” describes a murder that took place steps from her door; it makes me think of the one-page murder in Brixton that’s at the center of Geoff Dyer’s The Colour of Memory . Apt perhaps, as Brixton is where I first read her, and Dyer, with his downbeat meditations on the city, seems her forebear.

This summer Luiselli and I met in her Harlem apartment, near where her own narrator conjured a dead poet and inhabited his life. Here at her dining room table we talked about cities, cycling, road trips, and the novel versus the essay.

Polaroid by Valeria Luiselli