Your story on this week’s situation, “Alvin,” is narrated by an unnamed man, a Dane dwelling in Spain, who meets the eponymous Alvin after he’s travelled to Copenhagen to work on a financial institution’s software program—its inner working system—and finds the financial institution in rubble, its having simply collapsed. Were Alvin and the fallen financial institution each components of the story while you began fascinated about it?
This story got here to me fairly intuitively and unplanned for—beginning solely with the primary sentence, which for me establishes the final environment of the story, of one thing directly fictitious and very corporeal. So each Alvin and the fallen financial institution type of arose out of that. Though the latter was most likely additionally a manifestation of one thing I already had in me, this sense that hegemonic establishments, particularly monetary ones, can seemingly collapse however nonetheless dwell on in new, nearly zombie-like states.
Alvin, it seems, is a derivatives dealer. “I don’t speculate about the future,” he says. “I trade it.” Why did you select derivatives for him? Was it difficult to determine methods to clarify derivatives buying and selling in a brief story?
Understanding monetary phenomena is all the time troublesome for me, as for most individuals, I suppose, which is perhaps a part of the triumph of economics: the truth that it appears so inaccessible, as if withdrawn into this hazy, nearly mystical world. But, as soon as I understood derivatives buying and selling, explaining it was fairly easy. I like placing concepts and phenomena into my tales in direct methods, additionally to make it clear to the reader that that’s what’s taking place. But, extra essential, I need to additionally let the underlying logic of those phenomena bleed out into the characters, the relationships, and the fabric world of the story. In this case, the way in which that derivatives buying and selling detaches worth from any type of concrete materiality, although nonetheless being dependent on it, in a ghostly manner. That goes for a lot of each Alvin’s and the narrator’s lives, too. They type of exist in a void, struggling to attach their wishes and their unhappiness to the world round them.
The narrator turns into a type of buying and selling accomplice with Alvin, usually serving to to offer the phantasm of demand (in a silver mine’s shares, for instance), however the bodily relationship they’ve appears extra essential to him. Do you suppose he’s fascinated about the longer term or current purely within the current when he’s with Alvin?
He’s within the current, I feel. That’s what the collapse of the financial institution permits, no less than: this surprising, typically awkward, typically playful relationship between these two individuals of very totally different ages and personalities. There’s positively a number of repressed homosexual need in each of them, and a number of typical male estrangement from their very own emotions, too, however typically, momentarily, intimacy or tenderness or enjoyable occurs. And this complete choreography between the 2 of them is simply as essential as all of the monetary stuff.
The financial institution, in a crater of laptop servers and shattered marble, continues to be one way or the other functioning. The narrator believes that the identical subterranean intelligence that caused its collapse has resulted in its staff’ contorting themselves to work on this new incarnation. Should we really feel {that a} monetary market will all the time triumph, nevertheless distorted it might be?
I hope not. Or I positively need to insist on an unattainable hope, a hope in defiance. And that we must always nonetheless attempt to construct the collective energy needed to actually make the horror of this world finish. At the identical time, after the disaster of ’08 and the defeat of actions like Occupy, I feel we have to notice that disaster is now not this essential or decisive second ripe for a radical reassessment of issues. Rather, as The Invisible Committee places it someplace, it’s a mode of presidency, actively reinforcing already current energy buildings. So, not directly, we have to go away the temporality of the disaster.
“Alvin” seems in your assortment of tales, “After the Sun,” which shall be printed within the U.S. (by Riverhead Books) and within the U.Okay. (by Lolli Editions) this summer time. The tales have been written in Danish. How did you discover the method of translation? Did the tales change for you in any respect while you learn them in English?
It positively made the guide much more unfamiliar to me than it already was. Having thought a lot concerning the sound and rhythm of every sentence, I discovered that there’s something inherently unusual about seeing it in one other language and realizing that it may possibly exist like that. When it involves writing, I’m type of a management freak, so it was additionally a strategy of accepting that it turned one thing in its personal proper. Luckily, I had an excellent collaboration with Sherilyn Hellberg, the translator, who managed to duplicate a lot of the fashion and rhythm of the tales. I all the time attempt to work a refined strangeness, and even ineptitude, into my writing, even when it’s fairly literary, and Sherilyn picked up on that.
As with “Alvin,” the opposite tales within the assortment happen in comparatively acquainted locations—Cancún, Nevada, London—however the occasions that unfold have a equally surreal high quality. Is the logic underpinning your tales clear to you from the outset? Are you ever shocked by the place a narrative may take you?
In some sense, I began scripting this guide eager to be shocked by it. Starting from a spot of exhaustion—which was each literary and bodily, due to many alternative circumstances—I needed to write in an intuitive and open manner, planning as little as doable. Most of the tales began with simply an concept of 1 or two sentences, or perhaps a picture or glimpse of a scene, and then the environment and the narrative arose from that. But alongside the way in which I additionally discovered that the tales may choose up and include lots of the emotions and concepts I used to be already strolling round with—and a lot of my inspirations, too. It’s additionally a guide that’s in dialogue with many different writers and thinkers who’re essential to me.
