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Q & A | Andrés Neuman: A musical childhood in Argentina

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Sarah Moreno is a reporter for the Galería section of El Nuevo Herald. She asked this question of Andrés Neuman, the Spanish-Argentine novelist and poet whose most recent work is ``El viajero del siglo'' (Traveler of the Century) (Santillana U.S.A., $19.99), which has won the prestigious Alfaguara Award. At present he has a column in the literary supplement of the daily national newspapers ABC (Spain) and Clarín (Argentina).

Q: What was the origin of ``Traveler of the Century''?

A: I had a very special fondness for the songs of Schubert, particularly for [the 24-song cycle] ``Winter's Journey.'' The reason was accidental. In my home, we often listened to that cycle of songs.

I grew up in a family of musicians. Both my mother and my father -- and, of course, now my brother -- are professional musicians.

It was like my childhood's soundtrack, and it seemed to me very moving that, as children and perhaps as grownups, we fell in love with songs whose literary content we didn't know.

Those songs spoke to me, but I didn't know why because they're in German. Later, it occurred to me to try to find out what they said. I saw that some of them had been translated into Spanish, but those translations left much to be desired.

I did a little research and came across the tale of a traveler who leaves his house for no good reason and walks without knowing where. In other words, he begins to walk in order to invent a future for himself.

He lets nothing stop him and he's never at ease until the end, when he sees a street musician turning the handle of a street organ, a ``hurdy-gurdy,'' conveying to him the sensation that he has found his place in the world, that he is where he should be.

So, this traveler, this permanent nomad, asks himself how the little old man managed to find his place without leaving the public square. After the tune ends, the traveler asks himself whether he shouldn't stay and sing along with the organ-grinder.

With that song, Schubert's songs end, and I wondered whether the encounter between a mysterious nomad and a kindly, sedentary old man, both of whom have opposite views of life, wouldn't be a lovely way to start a novel.

Q: ``The Traveler'' is a very [Alejo] Carpentier-like novel, not because of its form but for some similarities with ``The Century of Lights,'' from the name of the character and her nature [Sophie] to the importance that your novel attributes to the picture of the traveler in Sophie's house.

A: It's very similar to the importance of the picture in Carpentier's novel, which provides the name for the novel's English-language version, ``Explosion in the Cathedral.''

Q: Has anyone commented on those similarities with Carpentier?

A.: It's been mentioned more than once. For example, in a review in ABC Cultural.

Q: I very much like Carpentier, ``The Century of Lights,'' and the tradition among Latin American authors of abandoning the complex of being autochthonous or self-allusive and appropriating the entire Western tradition. I say Western because to appropriate the Buddhist or Shintoist tradition requires a little more knowledge.

I refer to why we believe that a French writer talks about the world, while a Latin American writer talks about his country. Through what reductive mechanism have we convinced ourselves that our own territory for fiction is we ourselves?

A: This becomes intensely complicated in a case like mine. I emigrated with my family to Europe. [Neuman grew up in Granada, Spain.] But I'm thinking about others who didn't do that and felt they had the right to read other traditions. I'm thinking about Lezama Lima, who would be something like the Caribbean Kant.

Kant summarized the entire Western philosophy. It was a feat that we still haven't deciphered. And all that without leaving his town, a small city that didn't and doesn't have anything interesting, other than the fact that Kant was born there.

• 3:45 p.m. Saturday in Room 3313-3314. With Edmundo Paz Soldán, whose latest book is ``Los vivos y Los Muertos''.

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