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WORK TITLE: Pink Slime
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CITY: Bogota
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COUNTRY: Colombia
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PERSONAL
Born 1976, in Montevideo, Uruguay.
EDUCATION:New York University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and translator. Universidad Nacional, Bogotá, Colombia, writing instructor. Has held numerous writing residencies around the world; has also worked as a copyeditor and translator for publishers.
AWARDS:BankBoston Foundation Prize for National Culture, 2006; SEGIB-Eñe-Casa de Velázquez Prize, 2017; Uruguay’s National Literature Prize, 2020, and Premio Bartolomé Hidalgo and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prizes, both 2021, all for Mugre rosa.
WRITINGS
Her works have been translated into German, French, Hebrew, Italian, and English.
SIDELIGHTS
Fernanda Trías is a Uruguayan writer and translator. She has published several novels, a chapbook, and a short story collection in Spanish. Her writings have been translated into German, French, Hebrew, Italian, and English. Trías has held numerous writing residencies around the world. in an interview in Latin American Literature Today, Trías talked about how growing up during Uruguay’s dictatorship influenced her writing. She admitted that “it is present in my writing in the way it was present in my life, in an underlying, subliminal way. I lived under the dictatorship for the first eight years of my life, but it was not something that was talked about. Each person lived it in their own way, and in my case it was a question of a silence that was interspersed with murmurings, whispers.”
Trías published the novel Mugre rosa, which was translated by Heather Cleary as Pink Slime, in 2020. The novel won Uruguay’s National Literature Prize in 2020. The following year, the novel won the Premio Bartolomé Hidalgo and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prizes. The novel is centered around the destruction of a town by an epidemic.
In Pink Slime, an unnamed narrator living in an ambiguous port town relates how an algae bloom is killing all life in the region. Everything was in a state of developing rot, as rust covered metal and mold seeped deep into wood. The massive-scale of the death of fish and sea life first alerted residents of the dangers. This was enhanced when the divers sent to investigate the fish deaths also died after their skin began peeling off their bodies. While many residents left, some remained behind and were forced to deal with food shortages and frequent power outages. A so-called “pink slime” food source known as Meatrite was the most abundant food product available. The narrator constantly argues with her mother and copes with her ex-husband, Max, who is dying from an extreme case of the mystery epidemic. She also looks after a young boy named Mauro, who has a medical condition that renders him constantly hungry. The narrator understands her situation is bleak and feels trapped by the few who remain in her life.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked that “this is a stunningly dark novel, but a beautiful one.” The critic admitted that ‘Trías’ prose and Cleary’s translation perfectly capture what it feels like to live in an epidemic.” The Kirkus Reviews contributor labeled Pink Slime “a knockout of a story.” In a review in Times Literary Supplement, Nicole Jashapara commented that “if you flee the place and people that made you, Trías seems to be asking, what ultimately will be left of you? In Heather Cleary’s thoughtful, poetic translation, it is through exploring the connections between people, places and things that Pink Slime is at its best.”
Writing in New York Times Book Review, Lydia Millet observed that the novel’s protagonist “cannot leave, she confesses, because she’s unable to imagine a life untethered to her anchors. Only the absence of these tragic boy-men may allow her to have some agency at last.” Millet reasoned that “Trías’s protagonist is the shadow in all of us—the passive subject, suspended in the limbo of indecision, who cannot act to save herself.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2024, review of Pink Slime.
New York Times, June 29, 2024, Lydia Millet, review of Pink Slime.
Times Literary Supplement, January 26, 2024, Nicole Jashapara, review of Pink Slime, p. 24.
ONLINE
Indent Literary Agency website, https://www.indentagency.com/ (August 10, 2024), author profile.
Latin American Literature Today, https://latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/ (February 1, 2022), Adam Critchley, “Beauty Can Be Found in Everything.”
Short Story Project, https://shortstoryproject.com/ (August 10, 2024), author profile.
Southwest Review, https://southwestreview.com/ (November 23, 2021), Annie McDermott, “At the Edge of Realism.”
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fernanda Trías
LiteratureXchange Festival Aarhus
(Denmark 2023)
Photo Hreinn Gudlaugsson
Born 1976
Montevideo, Uruguay
Nationality Uruguay
Occupation(s) writer, translator
Awards Premio Bartolomé Hidalgo
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize
Fernanda Trías (Uruguay, 1976) is a Uruguayan author and translator.
Her novels include ‘’La Azotea’’ (The Rooftop), ‘’La ciudad invencible’’ (The Invincible City), and ‘’Mugre rosa’’ (Pink Slime), as well as the short story collection ‘’No soñarás Flores’’ and the chapbook ‘’El regreso’’.
Her work has also been included in anthologies in Germany, Colombia, Peru, Spain, Uruguay, the US, and the UK, including 20/40 and Palabras Errantes. Her work has been translated into German, French, Hebrew, English, and Italian so far. La azotea was selected as one of the best books of the year by El País Cultural and was awarded the third prize of the National Uruguayan Literature in 2002. In 2006, she received the BankBoston Foundation Prize for National Culture. She was a friend and student of the Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero[1] and participated in the creation of De los flexes terpines, a collection directed by Levrero that published fifteen titles, almost all by new writers.[2] In the fifth volume of that collection, Trías published her first novella, Cuaderno para solo un ojo.
In 2004, she won the Unesco-Aschberg scholarship for writers and went to France, where she lived for five years. In 2010, She moved to Buenos Aires, where she worked as a translator, reader, and copyeditor for multiple publishing houses. In 2012, she won a scholarship to pursue an MFA in creative writing at New York University. In 2017, she won the first SEGIB-Eñe-Casa de Velázquez Prize and residency in Madrid for her project Mugre rosa.[3] She lives in Bogotá, Colombia, where she has taught at the Universidad Nacional’s creative writing MFA. In 2019, she was selected for the writer-in-residence program at the Universidad de los Andes, where she currently lives and writes. In 2020 she was awarded the national literature prize for Mugre rosa, followed in 2021 by the Premio Bartolomé Hidalgo and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize.[4]
Fernanda Trías is an Uruguayan writer. She was born in Montevideo in 1976. She is the author of three novels and two short story collections. In 2004 she won a Unesco scholarship to write in Camac, an artists’ residence in Marnay-sur-Seine. She lived for five years in the medieval village of Provins and a few months in London. She spent one year in Berlin and two years in Buenos Aires. Tríase earned a master’s degree in creative writing from New York University and was disciple of the Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero. She integrated anthologies of new narrative in Colombia, the United States, Uruguay, Peru, Germany (Neues vom Fluss: Junge Literatur aus Argentinien, Uruguay und Paraguay, 2010) and England (Uruguayan Women Writers, 2012). Her novel La azotea (2001) was selected among the best books of the year by the El País Cultural Supplement, and won the third prize of edited narrative of the Uruguayan National Literature Prize (2002). In 2006 she received the BankBoston Foundation Prize for National Culture.
“Beauty Can Be Found in Everything”: An Interview with Fernanda Trías
by Adam Critchley
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February, 2022
With her 2020 novel Mugre rosa, (to be published in English by Scribe as Pink Slime, translated by Heather Cleary), Uruguayan author Fernanda Trías (Montevideo, 1976) won the 2021 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, which has been awarded annually since 1993 to a novel written by a female author in Spanish, and which in previous years has been won by the likes of Argentina’s Camila Sosa Villada, Colombia’s Laura Restrepo, and Mexico’s Ana García Bergua, Margo Glantz, and—on two occasions—Cristina Rivera Garza. Mugre rosa also won the Bartolomé Hidalgo Prize in 2021, awarded by Uruguay’s Publishing Chamber, in the narrative category.
Mugre rosa tells an unsettling story that is nevertheless all too familiar to us all, of an epidemic that descends upon humanity in the form of contaminated air, provoking the appearance of a strange and at the same time curiously beautiful pink algae and threatening the coastal city inhabited by the characters in Trías’ novel: a woman who is separated from her husband, whom she visits in hospital; her mother; and the small child whom she cares for, who suffers from a malaise that leaves him perpetually insatiable. A dystopian novel written prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Mugre rosa is perhaps even more unsettling for its portrayal of a reality that closely resembles the experience humanity has been enduring over the past two years, and the global feeling of uncertainty, fear, and tension that gives the work an ineludible relevance.
The Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz prize was awarded to Trías at the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) in December, at a ceremony in which the FIL’s director Marisol Schulz described the novel as “a necessary, intense, and pertinent book”. For her part, Trías took advantage of her acceptance speech to talk about the themes the book deals with and the threat humanity faces through climate change. “People have already told me I predicted the pandemic. If each generation imagines an apocalypse, I belong to the generation that is living through climate terror. The story has something of the fantastical to it, but in the double meaning of the word, and if it felt fantastical it was precisely because it was real,” she said. “The question therefore should not be, ‘why write a climate dystopia,’ but why not write one?” And she revealed that the creative process of Mugre rosa began with a recurring and terrifying dream.
She also used her speech to bemoan the recurring question in numerous conversations and panel discussions about whether there currently exists a boom in literature written by women in Latin America. “I could say that in every discussion I have participated in, that question was never lacking. Never in the history of literature, or in the history of humanity, have women writers been as visible, and we are still invited to participate in panels at which a phenomenon is discussed that is without a doubt extra-literary. And the question is insistent because it appears to be looking for an answer in the wrong place, ‘something is happening with the quality of their work,’ they seem to say, unless we are talking about a brilliant, exceptional generation. The story of this award proves that this is not so,” she said.
And she also took advantage of being in Mexico to thank the country for the solidarity shown to her compatriots, “because I am Uruguayan, because I was born in a dictatorship, and Mexico and its embassy in Montevideo stretched out their hands to hundreds of the persecuted, victims of state terrorism. I hope we never again have to resort to your solidarity.”
Trías sat down to talk with Latin American Literature Today in Guadalajara about her novel, her trajectory, and her writing, which she describes as both “super Uruguayan” and as a kind of hybrid work that reflects the influences that have permeated after having lived for more than a decade and a half outside her home country, in several Latin American cities in addition to Europe and the United States.
Adam Critchley: You were born in Uruguay during the dictatorship (1973-1985), and your novels The Rooftop and Mugre rosa describe a certain fear or disquietude in your characters, either due to a tangible threat, such as an epidemic, or to an invisible or underlying threat, as in The Rooftop. How much has your experience of the dictatorship influenced your writing?
Fernanda Trías: I think it is present in my writing in the way it was present in my life, in an underlying, subliminal way. I lived under the dictatorship for the first eight years of my life, but it was not something that was talked about. Each person lived it in their own way, and in my case it was a question of a silence that was interspersed with murmurings, whispers. As a child I knew that there was something going on, but I didn’t understand it completely. I have some memories of tense moments, for example at school, people were taken away, there were soldiers, and so there are certain memories that remain, like a fog. And there have been a lot of narratives since the return of democracy about that dark time, and when I began to write I felt that it was a theme that had been dealt with, but it is not a theme that is exhausted. There are still crimes that remain in impunity, there are people who remain in impunity, there are many people who remain missing, and the theme is not closed, but rather it is still there, there are open wounds. And so there is always the question of how to write about those things, and there are references, such as that sensation of living with that fear, with that tension, with a certain hostility toward the other, when one didn’t know if the other person was one who could inform on you. I grew up with that sensation. And a silence, the sense that you couldn’t talk about all of those things. I inevitably absorbed all of that and it is present in my writing.
A.C.: In Mugre rosa you create tension that provokes a question in the reader of what is going to happen, an atmosphere that makes one wonder what it would be like to live under a dictatorship.
F.T.: It has a lot to do with that tension. What terrifies me the most is when you know that, at any moment, something could happen, but when it doesn’t happen it creates more tension, a psychological terror that begins to weigh on people’s psyche. In my poetics there is always a tense silence, something latent.
A.C.: Some critics have called this novel “science fiction,” but I see it more as speculative fiction, a term British author J.G. Ballard preferred to use when his works were classified as science fiction, although all fiction is speculative by nature, of course. Are you interested in science fiction as a genre, or do you seek to recreate reality but somehow stranger?
F.T.: That was precisely my intention. I wanted to work on reality gone awry, and that awryness I think is enhanced when the dystopia resembles the real world more closely, when difference is just by degrees, which is more unsettling than creating a futuristic world, set on a space station in 2050, for example. I like the term speculative fiction—it’s sometimes used to separate a text from the science fiction genre, which is sometimes considered a minor genre, but I don’t have a problem with Mugre rosa being called science fiction. Argentine author Juan José Saer said that his novels were speculative anthropology because what he was doing was an x-ray of human life, and I identify with that a lot. When I write I don’t care about genre, those have more to do with the critics, who put texts in certain categories. I have always worked a lot on the construction of characters, and I wanted to do what I have always been doing, which is to write a novel of characters, very psychological, but in a very dystopian context, and with that mixture of focusing on the conflicts of people within an environment in which a dystopian conflict has occurred. In the end I think it’s very interesting to find a way of mixing everything, and it’s not so important if it’s realism or science fiction, which have to do with marketing.
A.C.: There is also a melancholic mood that permeates Mugre rosa, which has to do with the situation the characters are experiencing, but I also feel that it goes beyond that, that in your writing there is a certain melancholy per se. Do you see it like that?
F.T.: I have always written melancholic characters, all of my characters are melancholic, and that is something that is very Uruguayan. There is a personality trait, from tango, from that enjoyment of sadness, our music, our literature, with Juan Carlos Onetti, for example, there is always some melancholy, something a little dark, and that is part of me, I can’t avoid it.
A.C.: However, you have been living outside of your home country for many years—do you still consider yourself a Uruguayan writer? Roberto Bolaño said, for example, that rather than considering himself a Chilean writer, he saw himself as a Latin American writer.
F.T.: In terms of writing I still have a strong link to that literary tradition in Uruguay, which I like a lot: Onetti, Mario Levrero, Cristina Peri Rossi, Felisberto Hernández, who are all very different, but it’s a tradition that I feel very close to. Now I have influences from other places and that has opened me up a little more, and I like that, I have always liked that mixture and hybridization of genres, and I like opening myself up to other, very different influences so that the mixture that emerges is very personal. And now that it’s been 16 years since I left Uruguay, even my accent, which is obviously still River Plate but now has certain Colombian inflections, now nobody can work out where I come from, and now I think to myself that “now that this mix has happened you can’t do anything about it, so you better just join in with it, and let that mix happen, and let’s do something that reflects that diversity.” I do feel like that, a Latin American writer, but I also understand that that could also bother some Latin American writers who see the importance of defending a “national” literature, so that, above all in the U.S. and Europe, we are not just read as one mass, and I do understand the importance of highlighting that Latin America is not just a bloc, that there are very different literatures and very rich regionalisms, and that diversity needs to be reflected. When I lived in New York you could feel a very Latin American spirit, there were people from all the countries of Latin America, and we were all talking to each other and we were all learning words from other countries, and that is part of the spirit of that city. And then when I lived in Europe for five years I started to think about the concept of Latin America, and I also lived in Chile, in Argentina, Colombia, and I feel closer now to that idea of “Latin American.”
A.C.: But there is also a tendency, from outside the region, to group all Latin American writers together, as if it were a homogeneous region.
F.T.: In the country I live in, Colombia, and here in Mexico, and in many other Latin American countries, there is the problem of violence, and those are problems that mark writers a lot, but in Uruguay there is none of that. If we talk about narratives of Latin America being narratives of violence, Uruguay has no place in that. I have influences from all over, although I also understand the importance of defending “national” literature. For example, Mugre rosa is a Uruguayan novel, and in it I worked on a reconstruction of the streets and Uruguayans know which streets I am talking about, and so on the one hand it is super Uruguayan, but on the other hand I can also see the Colombian influences—for example, things that have to do with a certain state violence, the state being very violent in its controls, with its impositions, its very tangled bureaucracy, and I realize those are influences from my time in Colombia.
A.C.: Perhaps you had to leave your home country, artistically, to let yourself be influenced.
F.T.: You have to let yourself get contaminated, and perhaps not try to defend yourself too much from that contamination, maybe the solution is to open yourself to the other and discover that the other is not a threat. But artistically, that movement toward the outside, toward the other, has been to become contaminated, you have to let yourself become contaminated.
A.C.: There is a lapse of 15 years between the publication of The Rooftop and Mugre rosa, and at the presentation of the former book at the FIL you talked about the process of revision you undertook prior to the book’s publication in 2021 by Mexican publisher Dharma Books. When you undertake a task like that, revising an older text, how do you see the evolution of your own writing through the years, which led you to write Mugre rosa?
F.T.: I very much see the connection and the road between the two books, which was a long and winding road. Although they are quite different books, they have many things in common. The fear that is present, the nostalgia, those lost affections are present in both; oppression, confinement, all of those things the two books have in common. What I feel is the life that occurred between those two books, those 15 years, allowed me as a person to develop the vital maturity to go much deeper into the characters, into those human conflicts, those tensions between mother and daughter, for example. These have been years of searching and stylistic experimentation, and they allowed me to search with language, which is more poetic now, and to go further, to carry out a more poetic search in which I experiment more with language, and I feel that during this time I have been able to continue with the same, repeating themes. And I also wrote other things in which I was also searching. I wanted to take my work with language further. In The Rooftop the narrative machinery had to be very controlled and well thought out, I was still very young, and in Mugre rosa there is more freedom, but it is also very thought out, as if I were moving like a fish in water.
A.C.: The story in Mugre rosa is punctuated by short dialogues, without the reader knowing who is speaking, which appear to tell a parallel story, a more hidden story, but one that also contributes to creating that tension, that sense of disquietude.
F.T.: That was precisely my intention, not to reveal who is speaking, and therefore open the possibilities and generate the impression that everything is floating, up in the air.
A.C.: As you describe the pollution, the effect of that epidemic on the environment, you create beautiful landscapes. It’s interesting that the “grime” is pink—it reminds me of those effects we see as a result of the environmental damage we have wreaked, which are sometimes beautiful, like a sunset seen through the smog. The effects are devastating, tragic, but at the same time produce a beauty that is often extraordinary, and which is something the aforementioned J.G. Ballard worked in very well.
F.T.: Beauty can be found in everything. It seems to me that humans are programmed to find beauty in everything, even in ugly things. There are moments of happiness in everything, even though they are very small, even within pain, and that is what makes for human complexity and all that we are experiencing. Humans are not horrendous monsters. That is the problem—if not, the decision would be easy.
A.C.: After writing this novel about an epidemic and its publication coinciding with the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020, how did you feel? Did it make you shiver?
F.T.: At the time I was so engrossed in the story of the book that, when the pandemic was declared, and I had delivered the manuscript to the publisher, I didn’t realize the novel was becoming reality. In my mind I was still thinking about the algae. It was other people who made me see it, and that’s when I began to see that there were all these coincidences, the masks, the hospitals, the health controls, and how the Health Ministry suddenly became an authority and gained control, and was on the TV news every day and everybody started to follow it on Twitter. It took me some time to realize that reality was beginning to resemble the novel.
A.C.: And reading it during the pandemic, the novel becomes even more chilling, like some kind of chronicle foretold.
F.T.: We are never going to know how it would have been to read the novel without the pandemic; evidently that world would have appeared much stranger, more unlikely.
A.C.: You are also a professor of creative writing at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. How does that process of working on texts with your students in a literary workshop provide you with feedback?
F.T.: I take things from it. Sometimes there are very interesting texts that make me think about things I hadn’t thought of, for example, but also the fact that I am thinking about all the possibilities of a text makes me focus my eye a lot, and I acquire a sense of how a text can be worked so that it takes on the form it needs—the way of structuring a story, for example, if there is a great story but the way of telling it is not working. That has very often challenged me, how I have to think differently, and often, with the contribution of all the students, we get somewhere. I really enjoy the learning process, of language, of history, it’s very enriching.
Translated by Adam Critchley
Fernanda Trías (Montevideo, 1976) is the author of four novels, of which the most recent is Mugre rosa (2020), and a short story collection. Her works have been translated into English, French, German, Hebrew, and Italian. She is a professor of creative writing at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, the city where she resides.
Fernanda Trías
Fernanda Trías (Uruguay, 1976) is the author of novels La Azotea (The Rooftop), La ciudad invencible (The Invincible City), and Mugre rosa (Pink Slime), as well as the short story collection No soñarás flores and the chapbook El regreso. Her work has also been included in anthologies in Germany, Colombia, Peru, Spain, Uruguay, the US, and the UK, including 20/40 and Palabras Errantes. Her work has been translated into German, French, Hebrew, English, and Italian so far. La azotea was selected as one of the best books of the year by El País Cultural and was awarded the National Uruguayan Literature Prize. In 2006, she received the BankBoston Foundation Prize for National Culture. She was a friend and student of the Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero and participated in the creation of De los flexes terpines, a collection directed by Levrero that published fifteen titles, almost all by new writers. In the fifth volume of that collection, Trías published her first novella, Cuaderno para solo un ojo.
In 2004, she won the Unesco-Aschberg scholarship for writers and went to France, where she lived for five years. In 2010, She moved to Buenos Aires, where she worked as a translator, reader, and copyeditor for multiple publishing houses. In 2012, she won a scholarship to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing at New York University. In 2017, she won the first SEGIB-Eñe-Casa de Velázquez Prize and residency in Madrid for her project Mugre rosa. She lives in Bogotá, Colombia, where she has taught at the Universidad Nacional’s Creative Writing MFA. In 2019, she was selected for the “Writer-in-Residence” program at the Universidad de los Andes, where she currently lives and writes.
At the Edge of Realism | An Interview with Fernanda Trías
INTERVIEWSNovember 23, 2021
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At the Edge of Realism | An Interview with Fernanda Trías
By Annie McDermott
The setting: a dingy apartment in a down-at-the-heels coastal city. The characters: a woman, her father, her daughter, and a canary. Clara, the woman, has moved in with her newly widowed father to look after him, and gradually looking after him becomes an obsession. Increasingly paranoid about the dangers lurking outside, Clara turns the apartment into a kind of fortress, which soon becomes a prison—a human-size version of the canary’s cage.
Fernanda Trías’s The Rooftop is a novel about love and fear, about the darkness underpinning our protective instincts and the claustrophobia of human relationships. It’s also written in some of the sharpest, cleanest, and most beautiful prose I’ve ever had the pleasure of translating, and I was delighted to be able to discuss all these things with Fernanda in this interview.
Annie McDermott: You wrote The Rooftop so young, at just twenty-two, and I’m curious about what the process was like. Did you know when you started writing that it was going to be a novel? Did you have a sense of how the plot would develop before you began, or did it surprise you?
Fernanda Trías: I knew it was going to be a novel, because for years that had been all I could think about: writing (from the beginning I was writing novellas, and only much later did I write my first short story). I lived for it, breathed for it, and I imagine that’s how it has to be, because without an extreme passion I don’t think you can get anywhere with the quixotic business of writing . . . especially if you’re a woman and you come from a small country in Latin America (I exist on many margins). But I didn’t know exactly how the plot would develop. I had the initial images: the bird, the gloomy apartment, and the sick, defeated man. I also had the narrator’s tone of voice, which I could hear inside my head, but I didn’t have the details. The details of the plot developed bit by bit, as I felt my way through the writing. It was dizzying, but I let my intuition guide me. After all, I was only aspiring to “fail better.”
AM: It’s a deeply disturbing, even harrowing novel. Did that make it difficult to write? It definitely made it difficult to translate—there were some scenes, like when Clara surprises her dad with the fish tank, that I practically had to cover my eyes as I worked on. Mostly in the early drafts, though; after that, I was focused more on the words than on the events being described, and your perfect sentences were what got me through.
FT: Yes, the process involved a lot of angst, but at the same time it was a way of escaping a greater angst: the existential angst of youth. There was something pleasurable about escaping my reality and immersing myself in another that was unsettling, dark, ominous. A bit like the pleasure you get from muscle pain the day after exercising. What’s more, I was almost “hypnotised.” I wanted to keep going to find out how the story would progress. I wrote the first draft in two sittings of about a month and a half each (with a pause in the middle during which I felt stuck and had to wait for the story to become clear). But then I spent another six months just working on the phrases, reading out loud, editing.
AM: That doesn’t surprise me at all—every word in the book lands exactly right, and the sparse, precise prose is what gives the novel so much power. One of my favorite parts of the translation process was talking about my English version with you and realizing we both cared enough about things like commas and repeated words and awkward internal rhymes to discuss them late into the night. Which makes me wonder—as a writer who normally has such control over her words, what was it like to read them back in someone else’s translation?
FT: I think it’s every author’s dream to find a translator who understands that words aren’t just a vehicle for telling a story but a substance in their own right—that phrases can be music, rhythm and sound. And, conversely, any author’s worst nightmare is ending up with a “deaf” translator. (Although there are plenty of “deaf” authors, ha ha.) So it was a real joy to know that I was speaking “the same language” as you. I could tell you that something sounded off and I didn’t need to explain much more; you understood right away and suggested solutions. I honestly think that literary translation is a work of “co-authoring,” of rewriting. I’ve seen books ruined and made unreadable by bad translations. At the same time, I know there are books where the plot is good but the prose is poor, and a good translator can improve the prose and improve the book.
Reading the translation of The Rooftop was an exciting experience. I had a very strong feeling of estrangement and kept asking myself: did I write this? It’s a great privilege to be able to read the translation and talk to the translator and both benefit from each other. Unfortunately, I can only do this in English and French. The other translations of La azotea and Mugre rosa (Pink Slime) that are underway—into Danish, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, and Greek—will always be a world that’s inaccessible to me.
AM: While translating the book, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to portray the accent of Carmen, Clara’s neighbour, an immigrant from what Clara dismissively describes as “some European country.” It’s an almost cartoonish version of her accent—“I von’t say a vord”— because we see her through Clara’s eyes, and Clara sees her as almost cartoonishly grotesque. And Flor, Clara’s daughter, has a lisp. She’s always begging to go and “thee the birdieth” outside the flat. What made you include these distorted voices in the novel? What role did you want them to play?
FT: For the narrator, everything that’s outside herself and the one-way street of her relationship with her father is incomprehensible, grotesque, almost obscene. As if the world outside the two of them were nothing but an affront. And so, in her eyes, everything is distorted, and because it seems other and threatening it becomes repulsive. Carmen’s foreign accent turns her into a symbol of otherness—of that other which, because it’s a mystery, will always be a threat. We’re all frightened of things we don’t understand, of things that seem different, which is why we live in a world divided by hatred, xenophobia, transphobia, etc. (These prejudices are all really just extreme forms of fear, which is why literature can be an important weapon in the fight against hate: because it brings us closer together; because it builds bridges of empathy.) Carmen, as a foreigner, sets off Clara’s fear of the outside world. But it’s not only Carmen. It’s also the women in the shop and the staff at the court. It’s just that Carmen contains it all within herself and becomes the symbol of “the other,” which threatens to destroy the safe nuclear family.
Meanwhile, Flor, the girl, is a late developer because she receives no education or stimulation. Clara, although she’s shut up in the apartment all the time, is an absent mother, lost in her own obsessions, her paranoia, daydreaming and always wanting to be elsewhere (on the rooftop). I think the daughter is the great victim of this whole story, as children usually are in dysfunctional families.
AM: Montevideo is never mentioned by name in the novel, but it makes its presence felt: the rambla where Clara’s dad is desperate to go for a seaside stroll; the apartment blocks with flat roofs and courtyards where people hang out their laundry; the cold winters and hot summers; even the soldiers that Clara remembers from her childhood during the military dictatorship. How important is Montevideo to the novel?
FT: I like working with unnamed spaces: cities that could be any city, that could be anywhere. It’s a kind of Kafkaesque legacy, which is also typical of the Uruguayan literary tradition. Onetti, Levrero, and Marosa di Giorgio all invented their own worlds. Also, the lack of a name gives the story a slightly “dreamlike” quality, places it at the edge of realism.
But there’s still that essence of Montevideo in the novel: grey, shabby, in decline. I’m thinking of the Montevideo of the 1980s, when I was a girl and we’d just emerged from the military dictatorship. The city has changed a lot in the past fifteen years, but I was no longer living there by that point. Maybe because of the oppression you could feel in the air as a result of the dictatorship, I grew up feeling “trapped” inside my city—a city which, I felt, lacked diversity. There were no different ethnicities, different cultures, different foods, different accents. And I desperately wanted all that. From a very young age, I felt the need to get away. I felt overwhelmed by the homogeneity, and that heightened my sense of not belonging, of being different. I think lots of people who grew up in small towns and cities feel the same. In my case, when I was a teenager, I travelled to New York, where I have family, and spent some months there. That completely changed my outlook on the world and made me feel all the more claustrophobic in my city. As a result, the city of Montevideo finds its way into many of my texts, and it’s always an oppressive, malign, suffocating city for the protagonists.
AM: There’s something very pleasing about The Rooftop coming out in English so soon after the translations of The Luminous Novel and Empty Words by the late, great Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero, who you’ve described as your mentor. I definitely see similarities between The Rooftop and his work: the importance of images and dreams, the way the reader is kept almost hypnotised, a kind of directness in the prose, the odd touch of absurd humor. I’d be so curious to hear what you have to say about that—whether you think Levrero has influenced your writing, and if so, how.
FT: I’m really happy you can see those similarities. I think only a very sharp reader would notice them, and most of all someone who’s practically studied the books (we could talk for a long time about how a literary translator reads). Because, in a superficial, obvious sense, ours are very different tones, very different voices. Our imagined worlds are different as well. However, I think those points you mention are all key to the “Levrerian” influence or teachings. And also because Levrero and I share one fundamental influence: Kafka. In Levrero, the Kafkaesque is mixed with fantastical and dreamlike elements; in my case, with everyday reality and family conflicts. I don’t know if you choose your teacher and the influence arises from that, or if it’s the other way round: that the resemblance is already there and the teacher chooses you as a result. What I mean is that Levrero always talked about “telling stories through images.” He talked about the world of dreams as a world much more real than “reality.” But when I analysed my early, unpublished texts, the ones I wrote before meeting and reading Levrero, those elements were already there. I’m very sensory, my thinking is very concrete, and I wrote in that way almost intuitively from day one. What’s more, if Levrero and I were able to be such good friends, it was because we shared a particular kind of humor—sometimes dark, sometimes absurd, sometimes childish and playful, his much more laugh-out-loud funny than mine—and we also shared certain nightmares. So, to answer your question, I think that “when I woke up, the influence was already there” (ha ha). [Translator’s note: this is an allusion to the famous one-sentence short story by Augusto Monterroso: “When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.”]
AM: The Rooftop has been such a sensation in the Spanish-speaking world, and has been published so many times, in so many different countries, that I shudder to think how many interviews you’ve already had to do about it! Still, after all those interviews, is there anything you wish people would ask you that they never do? Is there anything you wish people talked about more?
FT: By this point, I think I’ve been asked all possible things, and even some impossible things. But what I do find interesting and striking is how the book is read in such different ways depending on the country and the culture. In some countries, there’s been a lot of emphasis on the topic of incest. So far, no one’s mentioned it to me in the English-speaking world, perhaps because they’re less Catholic countries and women there have been writing and publishing for longer, so it doesn’t seem as shocking for a woman writer to approach a taboo subject. In other countries, we’ve talked more about fear and the family as the setting where the very worst things can (and do) happen. In Mexico, where the book came out during the pandemic, there was more talk of confinement and of the invisible, threatening “other” that could be read as the virus, and so on. The great thing about books is that they can be read differently as the world changes around them. I’m curious to see how the book will be read in cultures I’m not familiar with—in Turkey or Greece, for example. But what matters is that books open up spaces for dialogue, bringing us together, and, most of all, helping us learn to listen to each other.
In Fernanda Trías’s novel “Pink Slime,” one woman holds out in her town after an environmental disaster, trapped in a limbo of indecision.
PINK SLIME, by Fernanda Trías. Translated by Heather Cleary.
The Uruguayan writer Fernanda Trías’s second novel to be published in English, “Pink Slime” — which was the winner of several literary awards in Uruguay and is elegantly translated here by Heather Cleary — is a well-imagined, often poetically beautiful plague story.
The tale takes place in a small coastal city where an environmental disaster has unspooled. An algal bloom in the ocean that has turned the waters red has become airborne, growing into a toxic wind that appears regularly and obliterates all living creatures in its path. In the grim, semi-derelict town that’s left, even the birds have disappeared. Despite the tragedy, our narrator, an unnamed woman, stubbornly remains one of the few holdouts who stay in town after most of the populace flees to the relative safety of the country’s interior.
For some time, even before the bloom, the town’s locals have based their diets on an extruded meat product laced with ammonia, a profile U.S. readers may recognize from a real-life controversy in 2012. This pink slime, branded as “Meatrite” in the novel, has long been manufactured for the people’s consumption, first in an old, nearby factory and then in a newer, better replacement plant, much touted by the government. Though it’s never stated, a possible causal connection between the processing of animals into pink slime and the appearance of the red tide hovers in the background.
When she’s not foraging for food, the narrator occupies herself by taking care of Mauro, a boy with a rare chromosomal disorder (presumably Prader-Willi syndrome, though it’s never named) — which, along with permanently stunting his cognitive development, keeps him so ravenous that he eats compulsively. She alternates her caregiving with visits to her suicidal, vaguely sadistic ex-husband, Max, to whom she’s drawn as if “by an elastic band” that constantly pulls her back into his cold embrace. Having deliberately walked into the toxic wind, Max languishes in the chronic ward of a nearby clinic, neither exactly terminal nor fit to be released. Meanwhile, the narrator’s irritating mother has also chosen to linger in the area, renting an abandoned mansion in a tony part of the city inconveniently distant from the narrator’s modest apartment.
In her dedication to the chaotic boy and stultified man, the narrator — who once made her living writing cheery propaganda for a nebulous “agency” — appears to be choosing her own imprisonment, risking her survival daily for the sake of sick males who can’t or won’t return her devotion. For Mauro and Max are symbolic bookends. Mauro, whose rich parents leave him with the narrator for long periods of time, eats anything he can get his hands on, including potentially lethal items that bear no resemblance to food. Max, on the other hand, has a penchant for starving and harming himself and others. Where the man is willfully arrogant and destructive, the boy is innocent in his repulsiveness. As Mauro gobbles up everything in sight, growing more and more obese, he functions as a proxy for heedless consumerism; as Max withholds and suffers, he stands in for masochistic self-deprivation.
On either side of the caregiving woman stands a damaged and damaging male, one with power and one without. Yet inertia, too, is at the root of her paralysis — she cannot leave, she confesses, because she’s unable to imagine a life untethered to her anchors. Only the absence of these tragic boy-men may allow her to have some agency at last.
Trías’s protagonist is the shadow in all of us — the passive subject, suspended in the limbo of indecision, who cannot act to save herself.
PINK SLIME | By Fernanda Trías | Translated by Heather Cleary | Scribner | 222 pp. | $24
PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/
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Millet, Lydia. "The Water Has Turned Red, the Wind Is Toxic, but She Won’t Leave." New York Times [Digital Edition], 29 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799683658/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2351ac1a. Accessed 12 July 2024.
PINK SLIME
FERNANDA TRIAS
Translated by Heather Cleary
224pp. Scribe. Paperback, 12.99 [pounds sterling].
Fernanda Trias's latest novel takes its title from a cheap "nutritious" meat product marketed in response to food shortages: pulverized animal flesh that no one would usually eat, sprayed with ammonia, which "helped bind the dregs that, by natural instinct, refused to agglutinate". It smells like congealed blood and cleaning liquid. The people christen it "pink slime".
Set in a dystopian port city in which the fish have died and birds have gone extinct, Trias's novel is textured by sharp, bloodied images. The city is governed by the ebb and flow of the "red wind", an apocalyptic environmental phenomenon that causes people's skin to peel off. The unnamed protagonist's gums bleed inexplicably and, as she barricades herself against the wind in her flat, the cramped space and even her skin feel permeated by the stench of meat product. This is a vividly claustrophobic world, stuffed with strong smells, tastes and pressing hunger. Trias is Uruguayan--Pink Slime, originally published as Mugre rosa (2020), won the Uruguayan National Literature Prize for Fiction --and her dystopia speaks to futures that seem increasingly likely for cities in the Global South.
Rather than the environment's slow, entropic collapse, however, Pink Slime's real interest is in the human relationships that this devastation shapes. The protagonist is consumed by the people closest to her, their bonds contorted by the ecological context. Her best friend from childhood and now ex-husband, Max, has been infected by the wind, but is still alive, trapped in hospital. Her relationship with her mother is an "eternal skirmish", heightened by the latter's insistence that she leave their ruined city. And then there is Mauro, the child of a faceless businesswoman, whom she looks after for weeks at a time in return for cash. Mauro suffers from a syndrome that means he can never feel full; his defining feature is hunger. He constantly battles for food, his appetite a gaping, living presence that threatens their lives in the face of increased scarcity.
It is the bond with Mauro that takes centre stage. Although the relationship is initially born from economic necessity, the slow-growing comfort and intimacy of caregiving becomes an essential anchor for the protagonist. It was her own nanny, Delfa, that she called "mother" as a child, in defiance of her biological parent. Trias explores how easily motherhood can be untethered from biology, and how caregiving is fundamentally reciprocal.
But if this novel is about care, it is also about home, and the protagonist's refusal to leave her city in the face of disaster. If you flee the place and people that made you, Trias seems to be asking, what ultimately will be left of you? In Heather Cleary's thoughtful, poetic translation, it is through exploring the connections between people, places and things that Pink Slime is at its best.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Jashapara, Nicole. "PINK SLIME." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6304, 26 Jan. 2024, p. 24. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A784164388/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3a897cf6. Accessed 12 July 2024.
Trías, Fernanda PINK SLIME Scribner (Fiction None) $24.00 7, 2 ISBN: 9781668049778
A town is decimated by a horrifying epidemic in this dark novel.
The second novel by Uruguayan author Trías to be translated into English--following The Rooftop (2021)--begins with a suffocating sense of doom and doesn't let up from there. The unnamed narrator, living in a port town in an unnamed country, describes the aftermath of a destructive algae bloom that's choking the life out of the area: "Under each unbroken surface, mold cleaved silent through wood, rust bored into metal. Everything was rotting. We were, too." She recounts the early moments of the epidemic, when a massive fish kill gave an indication that something was wrong; the divers dispatched to investigate the cause all lost their lives to the disease, which causes its victims' skin to peel from their bodies. The townspeople who have chosen to remain are forced to endure power outages and food shortages, with many only able to eat a processed food called "Meatrite"--the "pink slime" of the title. The narrator has regular contact with only three people: her mother, with whom she is engaged in an "eternal skirmish"; Max, her ex-husband, hospitalized and suffering from a chronic case of the disease; and Mauro, the boy she babysits, who has a syndrome that causes him to always be hungry. The narrator knows the situation isn't going to improve anytime soon, and Trías captures her resigned dread perfectly. This is a stunningly dark novel, but a beautiful one; Trías' prose and Cleary's translation perfectly capture what it feels like to live in an epidemic: "It's hard for me to describe time in confinement, because if anything characterized those periods it was the sensation of existing in a kind of non-time. We lived in a constant state of anticipation, but we weren't waiting for anything in particular." This is a knockout of a story.
Stunning writing makes this a startlingly powerful novel.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Trias, Fernanda: PINK SLIME." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A797463097/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9e3be10c. Accessed 12 July 2024.