What is the first thing you like to tell students in your creative writing classes?
It changes from semester to semester. I like to teach contemporary work—or what I’m currently excited by. There’s a freedom with creative writing courses in that the texts can be modeled after one’s own (shifting) artistic practice. Something that I’ve used in the past to start the course and want to repeat is Sister Corita Kent’s Rules, which are part art object/part list. The Rules are easily available online and often misattributed to John Cage—who was the more famous male in the equation. They are a simple list that she posted outside of her art classes: how to be an artist/student/teacher. The Rules focus on work, on messing up, on a sort of uncreative push that feels very catholic (little c) to me. They make creative work more possible without removing its mystery.
How much resonance do you see between the upheaval Mosca and her friends faced compared to the political unrest in the world today?
Writing about Spain in the 1970s was definitely a way for me to write slant about several different histories as well as my own present. In a way, Mosca’s generation is similar to my own. There’s a deep sense of betrayal and mistrust—that those who were supposed to be leading us were in fact destroying any hopes of a livable future. I wrote the first draft of The Sleeping World alongside the Arab Spring and Occupy movements and as I kept writing, the abuse of power by our political and police forces (whether by kidnapping Mexican students or murdering black citizens across the U.S.) became ever more visible. I think of this as an American book, as it is informed by the injustices and struggles happening in the U.S. and Latin America. This all sounds generalizing, which is why I write fiction. With fiction, with a novel, I can speak specifically and deeply about a certain place and time, and, like a case study, as Chris Kraus writes, my writing can be used as a paradigm for the reader. What the reader applies the case study to is her own choice.
The last few pages of the book are ambiguous, almost surreal, filled with poetry and symbolism. Were you influenced by the magical realism of Latin American writers? What other writers have inspired you?
For me, those final pages are absolutely real. All through the book, Mosca has been running from the reality of her past, refusing to recognize the truth of her haunting. Then she finally stops and yes, everything falls apart, including the language, but it was absolutely necessary. A sort of sense had to break down to express her emotional reality and for her to continue in the world of the living. I’m definitely influenced by Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges but for me, magical realism is a mistranslation that never quite fit those writers and doesn’t fit me. I believe in mystery on many levels: I make these events real in my writing; I need them to accurately express lived experience and emotions; and, most important, I know they were real long before me and will continue to be long after me.
Toni Morrison—in both her critical writing and her novels—has shaped me more than perhaps any other single writer. She is the greatest, but of course needs none of my praise. In terms of other influences, for The Sleeping World I drew on many books, especially: Kazim Ali’s Bright Felon, Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban, Laird Hunt’s Ray of the Star, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Selah Saterstrom’s The Meat and Spirit Plan, and of course, Federico García Lorca’s plays and poems and Carmen Laforet’s Nada. Music and film were extremely important: Pedro Almodovar’s films, especially his early ones; Albert Camus’s Black Orpheus; the Clash; the Ramones; Patti Smith; and I doubt this particular book would exist without many repeated revolutions of the National’s High Violet.
As a debut novelist, what advice would you give to other aspiring writers?
Read extensively and strangely. Read books from before you were born by people different from you. I love Tove Jansson, Tarjei Vesaas, Halldór Laxness, Sei Shōnagon. Find people whose writing/thinking/spirit you respect and see if you can trick them into reading your work. Find people who write and make art and figure out how they do it. And spend just so much time writing. Writing isn’t conceptual; it’s only possible in its own practice. Only in the actual writing will you find out what you believe and what kind of writer you are, which is, of course, the only writer you can possibly be.
Enhance Your Book Club
1.Do some research with your group about Spain in 1977. How does Fuentes bring the time and place to life? How much did you know about this time period before reading the book, and what did you learn while reading that surprised you?
2.Create a playlist based on the songs mentioned throughout the novel and listen to it during your discussion. How does the music affect you when you think about the political atmosphere of Mosca’s time?
About the Author
© Brittainy Lauback
Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes received her BA in literary arts from Brown University, her MFA from the University of Colorado-Boulder, and is currently pursuing a PhD in English and creative writing at the University of Georgia. She has lived in Spain and France and now lives in Athens, Georgia.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes
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First Touchstone hardcover edition September 2016
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Interior design by Kyle Kabel
Jacket design by Jarrod Taylor
Jacket photograph © François Le Diascorn/Contributor/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fuentes, Gabrielle Lucille, author.
Title: The sleeping world : a novel / Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes.
Description: First Touchstone hardcover edition. | New York: Touchstone, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015039564
Subjects: LCSH: College student—Spain—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—
Fiction. | Missing persons—Fiction. | Protest movements—Fiction | Spain—
Politics and government—1975–1982—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION/Literary. | FICTION / Political. | FICTION | Coming of Age.
Classification: LCC PS3606.U37 S57 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/201
5039564
ISBN 978-1-5011-3167-7
ISBN 978-1-5011-3169-1 (ebook)
The Sleeping World Page 25