An Interview with Carlos Montemayor

Abstract

^^^B Carlos Montemayor was ^^^B born in the city of Pa^^^^B rral, Chihuahua, in 1947. ^^^^B When he was in his early ^^^^B twenties, Montemayor ^^^B published his first collec^^^^B tion of stories, Las Haves ^^^B de Urgell (1971), which ^^^^B won the prestigious ^^^^^B Xavier Villaurrutia Prize. ^^^^H He received the award ^^^^H a few years after mov^H^JH ing from Chihuahua to ^^^^B Mexico City, where he ^^^B was supported and ^^■■PP influenced by a communrtyof writers and scholars that ^^^ncluaedRosario Castellanos, Ruben Bonifaz Nuno, Salvador Elizondo, AK Chumacero, and Juan Rulfo. Montemayor thus began a very successful career as a novelist, essayist, poet, short-story writer, literary critic, and translator. A member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua Espanola since 1 985, Montemayor has earned a number of additional prizes and distinctions over the course of his prolific career, including the Alfonso X Prize for translation in 1989 and, most recently, the Giuseppe Acerbi Prize (2004) for his novel Los informes secretos. Currently, he is finishing a sequel to Las armas del alba that will continue his portrayal of armed conflict in his home state of Chihuahua. Montemayor's writing, fiction and nonfiction alike, addresses a broad range of topics, from the personal sensations and experiences of growing up in rural Mexico to moments of tremendous collective import, like the Tlatelolco massacre of October 1968 and the current conflict in Chiapas. His literarycritical essays also attest to his remarkably eclectic interests, including ancient Greek tragedy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's narrative fiction, and the poetry of Ezra Pound, Vicente Huidobro, and Efrain Huerta. A very active public intellectual, Montemayor has taught courses at a number of universities and given lectures at conferences around the world. He currently lives in Mexico City. Montemayor's most recent novelsGuerra en el paraiso (1991), Los informes secretos (1999), and Las armas del alba (2003)do not shy away from portraying events from the 1960s and 1970s that the Mexican establishment would prefer to forget: namely, armed resistance (la guerrilla) and the government's corresponding counterinsurgency campaigns. These texts exemplify Montemayor's malleable, descriptive prose and his mastery of complex narrative structures, while they also expose abuses of state power and shed light on the manifold causes of popular resistance. When I had the pleasure of speaking with Montemayor in his Mexico City home in spring 2005, our conversation moved easily between the aesthetic and the political, much as Montemayor's writing does. We discussed the sociopolitical character of his work and his essays on Tlatelolco and Chiapas, entitled Rehacer la historia (2000) and Chiapas: La rebelion indigena de Mexico (1998). We also talked about how influential classical literature has been on his entire career, about the strong connections between nature and his formation as a writer, and about his latest poems, which are an homage to the ancient Chinese poets Montemayor studies and admires. Ry n Long What motivates you to write fiction inspired by political and social topics?