A brief talk with Paco Ignacio Taibo II - happy - Latin America: Private Eyes & Time Travelers - Interview

Before you, the Mexican detective novel didn't subscribe to the dirty realism of Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ernest Hemingway. How come? Why this new affiliation?

In reality, I subscribe to the Ugly-Dirty-Fucking Realism of Chester Himes and Jim Thomson, in the worst sense of the word--that of storytellers. I have added to this black humor and a Kafka-style twist in morality. I feel identified with a generation of narrators who wrote in the same years as I and see literature as subversive subversion: Manuel Vasquez Montalban, Jerome Charyn, J.P. Manchette, Jean Francois Vilar, Juan Carlos Martelli, Alberto Sperati, Per Wahloo, Robert Littell, Martin Cruz-Smith; likewise, with a current trend of writers of nonfiction testimonies: Rodolfo Walsh, Miguel Bonasso, Joseph Wambaugh, and Guillermo Thorndyke.

Do you consider Maria Elvira Bermudez, Antonio Helu, Pepe Martinez de la Vega, and Rafael Solana your Mexican precursors, all writers who wrote detective stories from the thirties to the fifties south of the Rio Grande, although in a very different way? What do you think of Rafael Bernal's The Mongol Plot (Joaquin Mortiz, 1982)?

I don't think of them as precursors. I don't owe them anything, nor do I want to maintain relations with a generation of parodists and imitators. Their books interest me little and their approximation of style is spineless. The only work that attracts me is Bernal, which has been unfairly forgotten and which my generation has somehow revived.

What do you think of Jorge Ibarguengoitia's The Dead and Vicente Lenero's 1967 novel Los albaniles, the works of two writers who reinvigorated detective fiction without ever considering themselves practitioners?

They interest me as precursors to the nouveau detectives in Mexico and the Southern hemisphere in general. You're right: what is curious is that both authors never consider themselves part of this style.

Talk to me about Carlos Fuentes's The Hydra Head. Also, more than your detective, talk to me about Mexico City, which was also Fuentes's protagonist in Where the Air is Clear.

I feel an affinity toward Fuentes, although not to The Hydra Head. I like his novels dealing with this monstrous metropolis, a city that manages to obsess me. The city produces more stories in one day than Balzac would have been able to tell in numerous lifetimes. There is in this a perverse condensation of schizophrenia and horror, adorned in a mountain of myths, an incredible fountain of inspiration. Frankly, this place is shaky and full of bad vibrations and aloneness. It is surrounded by catastrophe, and people protest every day the miserable way of life they are forced to live in. But they don't leave. This place makes me sick: I can't manage to grasp its essence.

What is there in you of Julio Cortazar? What influence if any did the Latin-American literary boom writers have on your work--Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Jose Donoso?

I like Cortazar but I don't know ... Something in him bothers me and keeps me away. About the rest, nothing. The first five novels of Vargas Llosa attracted me, but the rest are a bore. In fact, I feel very influenced by Antonio Skarmeta, Oswaldo Soriano, Eduardo Galeano, Jesus Diaz, writers of another generation in whose novels the need to locate a story in a historical context is essential.