Ae Hee Lee Interviews Valerie Mejer Caso at Letras Latinas
On the Letras Latinas blog, Ae Hee Lee interviews Valerie Mejer Caso, author of This Blue Novel (trans. Michelle Gil-Montero). According to Lee, Caso's collection is "a poetic narrative of weaving loss and hope, past and future. One that surpasses 'the logic of the world." Her responses "like the blue in this book, a water lamp that illuminated every word and memory, drowning it and saving it at the same time." From Lee and Caso's conversation:
To large extent This Blue Novel is described as autobiographic. And we notice several family members of different nationalities (German, Spanish, etc.) making an appearance. To start this interview off, could you tell us more about your heritage and how you were inspired you, or maybe even drove you, to write this book?
I still have the notes I wrote down before writing the book. I did this for three books, I drew or outlined them beforehand, thought about their systems. This Blue Novel was also created this way. Zurita has repeatedly told me in many occasions an incredible phrase by Pacheco: “The past is a foreign country, the people there do strange things.” Now if to this we add that these people are not only foreign because they exist in the past but because in fact they were... they become doubly foreign to my understanding, as they were figures I had known in their old age and of whose past splendor I was aware of, “but I did not know them.”
Look, this is what I wrote on my notes: “the purpose of this book of poetry titled This Blue Novel is very simple: tell my story, the story of my mother, the story of my father and their respective genealogies. Tell what happened in the three houses of my childhood: my house, the house of the mother of my father, and the house of the mother of my mother.
When you are a child, the events have a phenomenological halo, that is, you see them pass by you and you don’t understand them. This book, then, has the intention of revealing the events of my childhood, of connecting this amorphous phenomena, beautiful, tragic; of tracing between them invisible strings that in their togetherness make a novel, using a poetic point of view, the mythology of this family of immigrants.
When I was a child and I would see my German grandfather eat a raw egg at 4 a.m., destine a gigantic room to set a collection of ships; when I would see my grandmother from my mother’s side (Luz) copy paintings by Goya everyday from 5 to 7, these actions were the phenomena, because they did not belong to the logic of the world, but to a poetic universe.
On the other hand, there were the stories I would listen to as a child: one day, after 8 months of being married, my grand uncle and aunt were returning from mass when they were caught in a shootout related to the Cristero War, which he had been involved with. My grand uncle fell onto my grand aunt’s lap, she moved the body and ran to the home she lived in with her ten siblings, she shoved her hand into the coat to take out the keys, and took out instead her husband’s eye. That eye occupied a central place in the imaginary map of my childhood: how did it slip into the pocket, how did the eye transform into the key, that is, in all these stories I found a poetic dimension to those phenomena without logic. My family, these people I did not know, the things they did, the inexplicable part of their lives and actions, are the crucial ingredients that will construct the plot of this book.”
If you're craving a sample from This Blue Novel, head to Propeller to read a few poems, with Michelle Gil-Montero's translations. Gil-Montero's own poetry is also featured and should not be missed!