The most curious thing about this book is that when I was writing it, I thought I was talking about a dystopia and at the end I realized I’d written a utopia. It begins with a hopefulness that can’t really be justified, a hope that you will get to that image but so often you don’t, or you do, but the image comes to you in a way that doesn’t work, or it’s there but you don’t even realize it.

In general, as you say, the shape of the road is the road. Cormac McCarthy says in The Crossing that “the shape of the road is the road”: the form of the novel is the novel, and the novel is a road to an image, the scaffolding that takes the reader to something, something the reader sees through the gaze of imagination, something that serves as a talisman for the author.Īndrés Barba: I think that all novelists-I’m sure that you’ve had the same experience-we live with this contradiction, where we talk about our novels as if they’re a “closed circuit” when in reality the natural experience of writing a novel is open-ended, ambiguous, disconcerting. I don’t know if I’m being esoteric and I certainly don’t want to sound like a French professor, but the moment when the reader discovers, at the end of your book, that A Luminous Republic isn’t a concept but a place-a small, beautiful republic of light-in every sense of the word, it’s a dazzling ending. It’s an image that maybe the author doesn’t fully understand, but one he feels it’s crucial to depict, as if a novel were an investigation of that image. Álvaro Enrigue: Increasingly in the past few years, it’s seemed to me that every, or almost every narrative device begins with the ending so many stories and novels are one big elaboration on how a single image unfurls.

Luminous beings are we latin