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 nathan englander interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.The next Great American Novelist takes a trip to Argentina. “People say ‘write what you know’,” says Nathan Englander, aware that a thirty-something New Yorker from an Orthodox Jewish background isn’t the likeliest candidate to write a novel about Argentina’s Dirty War. “But everything I’ve ever written has been based on ‘write what you don’t know’.” Englander was at work on The Ministry Of Special Cases even as he won universal acclaim for his 1999 debut collection, For The Relief Of Unbearable Urges. Originally spanning the 20th Century and culminating with the military coup against Martínez de Péron in 1976, the finished novel, a compelling meditation on family, identity and the nature of narrative, focuses on just three months. But he is sanguine about reams of material going unpublished. “All the stuff that gets written is what I can fold back in to pressurise the story. I have to believe that enriches it, that’s what makes things live. Just a moment when [a character] sits down on the bed and zips her boot: that’s enriched by all the things that you don’t see.” Englander’s labours haven’t been in vain given the heft of the real that underpins his novel, even when the events it describes seem anything but. “People say: they didn’t really grab innocent college kids off the street, torture them, drug them and throw them naked from airplanes,” he says. “But that’s exactly what they did. The things you think I made up in this novel are what’s straight out of the historical record, and what seems straight out of the historical record is what I made up.”  While the absurd is a constant throughout the novel - from its protagonist Kaddish, a lowly member of the Buenos Aires Jewish community, employed to chip names off gravestones so that the upwardly mobile can conceal their being descended from pimps and prostitutes, to the ludicrous bureaucracy attempting to lend respectability to state-sponsored slaughter – Englander was aware of his chosen territory’s literary pedigree. “In terms of magic realism I was hyper-aware that I was writing my own Buenos Aires. I’m not Borges, I’m not Cortázar and I’m not Márquez. Nobody will float, nobody will fly, no angels will turn up in the backyard. To me this world is hyperrealistic, in the sense that it’s an absurd world. It’s literally insane what was visited on those people.” But Englander sews the horror with humour. It clearly comes naturally to him, and its presence deepens the novel’s impact. “If you took this book and removed the humour and gave it to people to read they’d bleed from their eyes. I don’t think it would be readable.” And if he sees humour as being essential to the book’s structure, that’s only because it’s an essential part of daily life, however bleak. “When going to their death people make a joke, and that’s how we keep our sanity. I think the world does balance that way.” Publisher’s woes are immaterial next to the atrocities of the Dirty War, but Englander nevertheless reinforces the point about humour and tragedy when asked how he replied to anxious questions about the next novel. “I’ve been promising six weeks,” he says. “A big movie car chase, big sex scene, car crash, then I’m out.”
Chris Power
The Ministry Of Special Cases by Nathan Englander, out now published by Faber.
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