Joshua Doležal: I’m Joshua Doležal and this is The Recovering Academic. My guest today is
.Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: We know, we feel it. You feel it when you've written something that means something to you, and it's kind of beyond... I always think of this quote by Rilke, which is, “Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and there is nothing so useless as criticism. Only love can be fair to them.” Now, I don't think we shouldn't listen to critics occasionally or take advice when people give us advice, but I think the point of this quote is that we know when we're putting our love and our purpose into a work that once it's out of us, it's out of us.
Joshua Doležal: Samuél is a Spanish-American novelist who was born in a theater commune in the south of France and was raised in Chapel Hill and Durham, North Carolina. He first lived in Paris in 2008 as a student and has called Paris home ever since. Samuél teaches creative writing at the Sorbonne and hosts the Paris Writers' Salon with author
. In 2022, Samuél bought back the rights to his debut novel, Slim and The Beast (Inkshares, 2015) and recently published The Requisitions (Kingdom Anywhere, 2024), a historical metafiction set during the Nazi Occupation of Poland.You can find his author page here. I also encourage you to subscribe to his Substack –
– where he shares essays, interviews, and original music.Our conversation today follows two strands – what it means to reclaim our artistic lives from relentless production and promotion, and how Samuél has accomplished that with The Requisitions. We talk about his work with an artisan printer in Paris, crunch the numbers of self-publishing versus traditional publishing, and take a deep dive into his book.
One of life’s great pleasures, for me, is losing track of time while talking with friends. I invite you to take Samuél and me with you on a long walk or drive, where you don’t feel distracted or hurried, where you might even imagine that we’re all sitting on a terrace in Paris, warmed by the afternoon sun.
Recovery Means Reclaiming Your Creative Life
Joshua Doležal: So Samuél, thanks so much for joining me today. And you're tuning in from Paris. It's afternoon there, right?
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: I am, yeah, it's a finally beautiful sunny day. It's taken a while for the spring to show its face, but the terraces are now open officially. I'm gonna actually go and sit on one after our call.
Joshua Doležal: So you take advantage of the sidewalk culture there in Paris.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Oh yeah you know, there's an old Hemingway line in A Movable Feast, when the spring came, even the false spring, the only problem was where to be happiest. And when the sun is out in Paris, it's just a matter of finding the terrace that has the right amount of sun and shade and the right people watching spot, not too many cars.
I mean, the whole city wakes up. It's really night and day from a long winter. It was actually the darkest winter in about 60 years, according to all the meteorologists, it was a very gray March and February, not much sunshine. So the vitamin D is basking upon us now.
Joshua Doležal: We're going to probably follow a fairly postmodern arc here, but I was struck by how your query letter for your novel, The Requisitions, which we'll talk about soon, begins with a kind of fracture in your life. Kind of a cliche now, the pandemic did that to everyone, but you trace the genesis of this project to that loss of your teaching gig, your traveling musician gigs, and also your work as a tour guide in the Latin Quarter. And so I wonder if you can take us to that moment and explain how your life looks on the other side of it. Is it true that that's the origin point for this novel?
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah. That is definitely the origin point for this rendition of this novel. So earlier versions of this book, the characters remain the same, structure was very different in the narrative style. Go back to 20, really 2012, 2013. But the version that I have now put out into the world that I feel like is my best effort on that page for this specific story really did emerge with the pandemic, because when I lost all of my work, thankfully the French state helped subsidize everyone really, but especially freelancers who had lost a lot of money compared to the previous years. The French state had a program to assist people like me who had no income all of a sudden. And I kind of told myself, looking at my MFA during which I had put this book to the side thinking it was kind of dead in the water. And then I see the ripples emerge around it and I say, well, if I'm going to give this book a shot this is the chance I have. I don't know how many months at the time of lockdown in my apartment. There's nothing else going on in my life, nor can there be – what a better opportunity than to really rethink why I spent so many years on this book and this subject about the Nazi occupation of Europe and Poland specifically.
And so it really just became in some sense a form of self-discipline, which was that I can't just play video games and drink red wine every day by myself for three months because I will become very depressed and unhealthy if I do that. And the other realization was that it in some ways had taken a real kind of jarring shift in my perspective about myself and the world to really hone in on what the point of this book is, which is – it's a culmination of really going through a master's in Holocaust Studies having been an academic in that sense, which it's one of the things that first connected me to your work and just the idea of being a recovering academic.
I had learned a lot of important things that I felt were far too obtuse or inaccessible to the rest of the world. And this novel had always been an attempt to kind of make those ideas, not so much more accessible, but just more interesting and applicable to a contemporary world instead of dusty bin of history.
Joshua Doležal: I was struck by something I hope to return to a little later, you know, that you have a narrator. He's the boy at the bookshelf at the beginning and his relationship with his mother and the conversation between them, it was kind of the impetus for the story, but he can't resist sharing a lot of his research at times. So there is a scholarly bent that's at war with – at times seems to be somewhat at war with – the more creative mode of storytelling that the novel, the fictional mode that the novel normally embraces. So I don't know if you still feel like there's that tension within yourself when you think of yourself as a recovering academic; since that phrase seemed to resonate with you, what does that mean?
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Well, it's very perceptive of you because there is certainly that tension and that, if anyone knows anything about recovery, it is a lifelong act, right? I mean, to be in recovery, from what I know, a lot of my friends have been to it or going through it is that it's a daily battle.
And especially when you've been in an academic setting for so many years, I still very much on the research end require a lot of time to digest what I'm learning before I can put it into words that are my own. And that's something that, of course, to your point in the novel, there is still this tension because on the one hand, history is something that can be known to a certain extent. And I believe in that and also believe in it being taught and studied in a way that is responsible. And so one of the aspects of the book I decided was I have to give some historical background here that isn't just in a fictional universe, because it's important to recognize these numbers or statistics or political kind of statements I'm making in a, well, they're not really my politics, but the politics of the era.
But a recovering academic to me in my literary mind means someone who is always writing the story first and foremost, and then remembering that the research comes second, versus as an academic thinking that the research came first, and then the writing came second.
As a fiction writer, story is what has always inspired me. And that's kind of what in the novel – it's about this little boy who, it's the story that was inspiring from the outset and continues to be independent of anything that was learned about the story, it's the narrative itself that I find most compelling.
Joshua Doležal: But you do need to have a kind of backbone of research to avoid veering into alternative facts or those more nefarious forms that truth seems to take in our world.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: I'm a literary tour guide, historical guide at small groups and kind of niche subjects. Nazi occupation of Paris is one of my primary ones. And to your point, I often have clients who say, Oh, I love reading about the war. I say, yeah, okay, that's great. What do you read? And they say, well, I mostly read historical fiction.
That's great. What kind of historical fiction? Without naming any specific names of famous books or less famous books. A lot of the questions I get are predicated on the stories that people read that never made any attempt to say this didn't actually happen. And that was part of why writing a book about history, I had to admit to myself and to the reader from the outset, there are things that happen and things that didn't happen in this history. Because I think people, especially with the way technology works now, and you know, All the Light We Cannot See has a TV show now where the protagonist, who's supposed to be a young blind girl, seems to be strangely attractive, as well as her German counterpart, and sexualized in a way that the book has no, at any point, really, connotation of that.
And I get why that's done for television, but the fact that so many people now think the story is about this quasi romance versus what is a much deeper story in the novel is something I wanted to avoid when writing a novel about history. Because I don't call it historical fiction. If I were an academic, I would call it historiographic metafiction.
Way too clunky. I prefer historical metafiction insofar as it's somewhat approachable, but it really is historiography insofar as I'm trying to understand while we're telling the story of history, the stories we tell ourselves about history and why we tell ourselves these stories. And that happened to just come to fruition and be finished at a time, of course, in history where we're dealing with major conflicts across the world and a lot of the old ghosts that we thought we were done with, we've all seen it before.
And that's for me kind of the main… I wanted to put a book out in the world that just is what I learned from studying a very brutal time in human history and how I think it still is applicable today.
Joshua Doležal: Your narrator says something about history being the study of our deception or the study of how we've been deceived. So yeah, I do want to circle back to that.
Just to fill in some of the gaps here. So it sounds to me like from this book and also what you've written elsewhere, you're in some ways a recovering artist too, because you say this on the alumni page at the MFA program at Vermont, that I'm quoting here, “Paris has taught me to take my time. We live in an era of quarterly reports and student loans, of questions about book sales and literary agents, and the pedigree of where we received our MFA. Most writers are told to start a blog to produce more, more, more, to put themselves out there before ever having something real and honest to say.”
And then you say in Paris, there's less noise than other places. But it's different also because, and I'm returning to the quote again, “As Americans, we're told to pursue a successful career. But in Paris, I've learned what it means to pursue a successful life.” So to me, part of the story of this novel is you reclaiming your life as an artist and trying to get out of that industrialist mode of perpetual production and personal branding and all of that noise. Is that fair?
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: That is very fair and part of the desire to publish it the way I did which is starting a imprint with my wife,
, was to retain control and also remind myself of what I'm doing this for, which is that even if I believed in the literary agent and traditional model, which I don't, it would still not guarantee me anything other than an inflated ego to be able to say I have an agent and a traditional publisher.I know the numbers in so far as I saw a bit of that with my first novel and I have friends who had great successes and that doesn't translate to anything monetary really. My experience as a musician with the music label also informed that decision, which was to your point, a recovering artist.
We know, we feel it. You feel it when you've written something that means something to you, and it's kind of beyond. I always think of this quote by Rilke, which is, “Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and there is nothing so useless as criticism. Only love can be fair to them.” Now, I don't think we shouldn't listen to critics occasionally or take advice when people give us advice, but I think the point of this quote is that we know when we're putting our love and our purpose into a work that once it's out of us, it's out of us.
So whatever happens to it is great, but then that becomes a question of PR and business management and all the rest of it. And historically with the art I'd been making, it felt like the creation really was secondary to the promotion of it. And that that was whittling down my artistic soul. So that was an easy choice for me to choose how to print the book, to pick the paper myself, to sit with an artisan printer in Paris who told me about the bindings.
And I learned about what a book is made of and how it is made. And now when I hold that book, it's such a different experience than if I had sent it off somewhere, which I may do in the future, but at least I have now the first object that is mine that I can be proud of and to have people like you who still are able to read it and pick it up and that's the whole goal of any writer is to be on a bookshelf, whether it's one or 1000.
I kind of think that's not up to us, you know?
Joshua Doležal: Well, you're reminding me of a conversation I had with Brian Mealer, who wrote what to me seemed like a fantastically successful bestseller, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, about William Kamkwamba, who created windmills out of junk parts in Africa and found his way to Dartmouth. I haven't checked in to see where William is now,1 but when I was still a professor, that was our common read one year.
I taught it in the first-year seminar that I was directing. It was a fantastic text for a liberal arts approach. You could come at it from history, from science, from any of the creative arts, you know, it was very fertile, really an ideal book for that purpose. And I was talking to Brian before his visiting lecture, and he was just despondent about his life as an author.
And I was thinking, one of my colleagues had been in Poland that summer and had seen The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind on billboards in Poland. And I was thinking, how could you do better than that? But, you know, it had to do with the advance that he earned, which was not commensurate with the hours and the years that had gone into writing the book.
And he just told me, this life isn't sustainable.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Wow. And was it primarily because of that, just that the lack of financial stability that he thought would have been guaranteed?
Joshua Doležal: Well, I think he got maybe a six-figure advance for the book. And I would have to assume that he earned it back, but I think it was just hours of immersive time with William and his family doing interviews. It was a work of journalism, but it was also a bit of a biography and, and so just the labor required was much more than a year and the expense, you know, for travel, none of that was borne by the publisher either.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Of course not. Maybe some ham sandwiches at the airport if you're lucky.
Joshua Doležal: Yeah, yeah, so I mean it just struck me that as you're saying that the goal for professional academics is perpetual production for minimal consumption, you have a handful of, I won't even tell you the numbers of how many people have cited my peer-reviewed articles. It's not as bad as it could be, but it's also nothing like my Substack numbers. The same thing for professional writers is that the goal is to just churn this stuff out and it's not the one book, it's the one after that. And the one after that. You really do have to just be relentless to make it sustainable.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah, and I think that's a choice and that's a business choice. There are writers who are capable and willing to do that. And one of the benefits I've always had as I was raised by two theater professors, a playwright and director and actors. So the financial stability that comes with art or lack thereof was never really a concern for me.
It's not that I didn't believe I could make a living from my art, because my parents were professors in theater, but I always knew I would have to make a living in a way that allowed me to make art. And I do think there's a distinction there that in academia isn't afforded, because you're told, at least I was told, through multiple master's degrees, get this degree, it will allow you to get better jobs, i.e. more money. And that's just plainly not true. We know that, obviously, across the board in any discipline now, but because I pursued these degrees knowing that it probably wasn't gonna work out financially, I've never felt the stress of needing to write to pay my rent because I've worked a whole lot of jobs in my life and I continue to do that in order to write, but I don't write to do the payment of the rent.
I figure out how to pay my rent so that I can write – that at least philosophically or psychologically has helped me. I mean, it took me a decade to write my second novel and publish it. And I published it independently with my wife after years of deciding whether or not I should get an agent, all the rest of it.
So it was a process and a meditation on what am I really doing this for? And I'm fortunate that I can work in a way that is simple, but also gives me time to write. And that in the similar sense of COVID, it's like, if you create this time and I don't use it to write. Maybe I'll play piano, or maybe I'll read a book, but otherwise, what have I built this life for? And writing is always kind of the cornerstone answer there. It comes in different ways, you know?
Joshua Doležal: Well, Substack really as a platform is both supportive of and antagonistic to that kind of life because it perpetually dangles this fantasy of monetization and growth and scale. And that's the core messaging. I guess as a startup, it's somewhat inevitable, but they trot out success stories perpetually that are hard to distance yourself from.
So I found that it's taken me, you know, two years of some success and failure in resisting that. And I have to remain vigilant in reminding myself of why I'm producing content. And it's not for money. I would love to call it a primary livelihood, but there really does have to be a deeper "why" to stick with it, to believe in it, to have a kind of long-term commitment.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: I really do believe as soon as the purpose of the creation is for monetary gain, it changes. Something deep within that creation, not in a bad way necessarily, but fundamentally, because then it is a job and you treat it like a job and all of the benefits and problems that come with that arise.
So that's to your point, you know, even this week, I was like, I should, I've been working and I'm revamping an old essay I worked on about fascism. And I wanted to look at it for myself because I reminded myself I've written a lot that I haven't ever looked at since I was in school and why should I be paying off my student loans and no one ever see these, what I consider to be valuable insights into some ideas. But even then, I was thinking I have to put this next one out this week. It's been two weeks. I said, next week, I'm going to put it out. What if I waited 10 days, two weeks, nothing's going to happen.
And that at least remind myself why I'm doing it versus…cause it's not like I'm charging for it. So am I hoping that it's good enough that someone will then start paying me? And do I really care if they do? I'd love if they did, but that's not why I started Substack.
Joshua Doležal: Well, you're making me think about all kinds of possibilities for my own work. Part of what's drawn me to this conversation is I have an unpublished novel. We're somewhat similar in that I followed a traditional publishing route from my memoir, which was placed at a solid university press, University of Iowa Press.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah, that's more than solid. That's the top of the line for writing, right?
Joshua Doležal: So, that was – at the time I thought of it as a real win, but it really was only for those status reasons because to this day I've only made $50 in royalties. So a nonprofit press, you know, they have different margins for justifying, for covering their costs, right? So it didn't take them a lot of sales to cover and for them to feel like it accomplished what they wanted to.
And it accomplished what I wanted to more or less at the time, which was just to have a book in the world and have it read as you're saying. But I've really been thinking differently about this novel and weighing an offer from University of Nevada Press—with revisions they might consider publishing this novel and I'm thinking, how much work do I want to put into contorting myself into their –
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Are there other visions that you agree with?
Joshua Doležal: Some of them, no, I think it would change, it would change the work. So there's the premise, the main character is in his mid 20s. He's not sure what to do with his life. He's living in Iowa working as a bicycle mechanic and he's left his family behind in Idaho... This is a mistake, writing about two places that New York publishers don't care about: Idaho and Iowa.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: They're coming. They're gonna come. New Zeitgeist. Idaho and Iowa.
Joshua Doležal: That’s right. That's right. But his uncle goes missing and is found dead in an Idaho wilderness, so he has to travel back home to the funeral. And his cousin, who is much younger than him, has no dialogue, no quoted lines. And so one of the reviewers was commenting on this as a flaw. But it was completely intentional, you know –
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Right. Lo and behold, the author of this novel had chosen this for a reason.
Joshua Doležal: So yeah, I've been weighing that. As a former academic, it's really hard to let go of those benchmarks of success and the American –
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Well, and that's also, I mean, no offense to that reviewer, who is that reviewer? And even if they're a really famous reviewer, you know, famous, was it Michiko Kakutani, who's the infamous New York Times reviewer, that if you get in her good side, you're great. And if not, you're also kind of great because that just means you pissed her off.
It's for me, that's it's been a nice long process of like, I am sure you know at least a hundred people in the world who would want to read your new novel. And I am sure you have a Substack following of which a percentage would also want to. And that's what I recognized with printing, especially having been in the game, so to speak, of at least knowing people within those games.
Do you know good editors that are friends or people you respect? And arguably moreso than some random editor who was working for the offshoot press that is associated with this press that is actually connected to Penguin. It's like, what about this professor of mine, this editor, whoever it is?
If you have editors, if you have illustrators, you have a printer, you have a layout, I mean, that's the book. And that's publishers, I realize are just usually outsourcing that work anyway somewhere else because of the way the structure is going. So my friend who does cover illustrations at Penguin said I'd love to help you with a book cover.
My editor in Paris, former editor at FSG for my first novel – happy to help you edit. And yeah, you pay out of pocket, but you get 100 percent of the profits, which means you can cover your costs very quickly. Again, what's the point of it? If you want 10,000 distributions, sure. Then it's not what's going to happen, but you know, I printed 300 first editions and there are 79 left.
I'm going to do some book events in the spring, summer, hopefully sell the rest of those. I made more money selling 70 books myself than I did selling 1,300 through a small publisher that actually gave me a good deal.
So all these MFA programs and professionals telling us, you really should, you have to go through the traditional model. It doesn't, it's a lie. I mean, there's no business reason that I can tell unless you don't have any context or willingness to make them to outsource everything to someone else at the expense of 88 percent or whatever that is of wholesale.
Joshua Doležal: I want to hear a little bit more about Slim and the Beast, your debut novel. I think Publishers Weekly describes it as a “bromance set in North Carolina,” which I assume is not how you would put it prefer to characterize it.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah, they had a fun little single paragraph. That's what you get for Publishers Weekly, you know. I mean, it is a, yeah, I don't know what bromance means. I know what people think it means, and during that era, certainly. It is about a war veteran and a UNC basketball player, and it's about their friendship.
I was missing my twin brother a lot at the time, and so I wrote a book very quickly about male intimacy and the connection between men. I was 23, 24, working through that for the first time in my life, so it's certainly a young novel in the sense of I was young when I wrote it. But yes, it is a bromance to the extent it's about men who love each other.
And a lot of it takes place through dialogue. It's narrated by a bartender who has these two guys come into his bar and they're waiting out a hurricane. And so that's kind of the pitch. They are heading towards somewhere in the future, but the past is also chasing them through an antagonist and they find reprieve in this bar outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, talking about where they've come from.
And it really was just a story that came to me and classic never thought anyone would ever look at it. And I think I queried a couple agents and, you know, polite rejections. And then I heard about this small publisher out in San Francisco and they said, we don't do novels, but we'll try yours. We like the manuscript. You're going to be our flagship. So raise 10 grand in three months. And I emailed everyone I ever knew and said, would you like to buy my novel? If you do, you're going to also be the person who helps make it a reality. And then that worked out. Got to go on a little book tour and read at McNally Jackson's in New York and do the thing I thought I really wanted to do, and it was awesome.
And then I came back to Paris and had to find a job, another job, and start writing another novel.
Joshua Doležal: So that's interesting. It's not really that you followed a traditional publishing route. It was somewhat adjacent to self-publishing because there was some startup involved and I think Inkshares is described as a crowdfunded publishing house.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah, it's like a hybrid crowdfunded model where they essentially just put the risk on the readers. They say, if you believe your book should be read, you should get enough readers to guarantee a print run, which I didn't use Instagram at that point or Twitter. I had no social, I mean, I used Facebook, you know, but that is one thing – writers, if we believe in ourselves, it's also because we believe in our communities. If you want your book to be read, presumably there are people in your mind that you want to read it. And that's the key, I think, is being able to interact with those communities in an authentic way.
That Substack is great for, as well. I mean, this conversation is proof of that, right? We just get to speak to people that we feel comfortable with. And I just heard too many stories. I had friends who were represented by huge agents. Years went by with their book being agented, but no publisher picked it up.
And then a publisher picked it up, but it was a year and a half later where the book would be printed. And then to your point, royalties were just shocking. I mean, not even shocking, just kind of like made you question what the whole point was, which oftentimes is ego. And that's great. And then you can get past the ego part and rethink it for the next one.
I don't mean to besmirch the entire publishing industry. I just think it's a broken model that doesn't…it is a for profit model, which means that the books generally speaking that are selling the most are the ones that were written to sell the most. Now there are exceptions to that, but to your revisions, I would never have written a book of historiographic metafiction if I had an agent, maybe because they would have said this doesn't work and you have to change this and that, and maybe for the right reasons or not.
Joshua Doležal: Well, help me, Samuél, help me understand why the Inkshares experience was, I mean, it sounded like, at the time, you felt like it was a win, and you don't have huge regrets on it looking back. You purchased the rights to Slim and the Beast, so you have complete control over it now, but what about that left you feeling like you wanted something else for your next project?
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Part of it was the constant need for self-promotion from the crowdfunding standpoint of selling myself before… I didn't want to go back to people saying, well, you pre-order this cause I need your help to publish the book. I wanted to say the book is out and if you want it, you can buy it.
That was just kind of a psychological desire for me so that I didn't have to ask for money in that sense. And the other aspect of it was just simply that I saw the numbers. I mean, even Inkshares gave me a 50/50 split on royalties based on wholesale, and I was making around, I think, you know, $2.50 per sale, which, cool, you know, great, you sell 1,300 books.
And I'm candid about it because I think authors should be, and especially the ones who are making good money because everyone is kind of looking up to them in the sky as if they've reached the pinnacle. And I think a lot of them have better stories than that. You know, I made around $2,700 and I bought back the rights for $1,000, so I had made total $1,700 on 1,300 sales, and I was like, if I consider myself a professional, and the definition of a professional is making money off your craft, right, then surely there's a better way to make money off of books than selling them for the equivalent of like $1.40 or whatever it is. So from a strict financial standpoint, I was tired of seeing a book sale on Amazon where I didn't get anything. You know, I wanted to be able to say, this is my book, here it is, now you give me a $20 bill or whatever it is. Just that simple interaction.
No author can do that for the most part. Even great big authors cannot sell you a book themselves. They can give it to you, but they say, go to this bookstore, go to this website. And I don't think in the future that model will exist in the same way because I do think you need a lot fewer readers if you're making 100 percent of profits than if you're making 7-12 percent before the agent takes the 15 percent and all the other numbers, you know.
Joshua Doležal: I wonder if some of it is, as you're saying, cultivating a sensibility as a professional and reaching a point where you trust your sensibility, you're confident in it. You don't feel like you need to be molded by an agent or by an editor. I don't know if that involves a certain amount of hubris because I know many writers have expressed appreciation for their editors, you know, Kurt Vonnegut and Stephen King both have written about that – that their work was improved by that partnership with an editor, but –
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Well, and I, to be clear, I do think every writer needs a good editor. It's just a matter of you paying for that editor yourself, instead of a publisher covering that cost, and then you taking the cut, you know?
Joshua Doležal: But part of the confidence required to just take ownership of the whole production yourself is you trust your sensibility. You trust that the metafiction idea that you have in mind has a certain integrity and that it's going to hold up and that even if it's not trendy, even if it's more niche, you are going to double down on that.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Right. Yeah, and that's again, I had no illusions about getting onto a bestseller list for novels specifically, but like any book can get on the bestseller list. I didn't think of it as worse than any other one, but I knew that I wanted it to write it in the way that I wanted. And really, honestly, more than anything else, once I finished it in last year, and I thought of the prospect of doing what you need to do when you query agents, which is anywhere from what, 20 to 100. And wait those six-month windows to hear back from them and some say 10 pages and then another two weeks, three weeks, okay, 20 pages, the whole process, right?
And then they say, okay, we're going to represent you. Congratulations. Publishers now. Another year, two, three years. For me, philosophically and psychologically, not moving on from this book, whether that meant having to think about the PR in the future or still talking about it because it's new to everyone else…I needed to move on. That's why after 10 years writing it, I was very happy to decide to do it myself. It took a year to find the editors and the cover designers, all the rest of it, and then really move on again, because I didn't count on it to pay my rent.
Joshua Doležal: Let me ask quickly how much you sort of invested in the production and so on. And also why you chose to absorb the risk of inventory rather than going with a print on demand service like Amazon's KDP.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Sure. So I invested in total for print costs were just over two grand for 300 copies. So about $7 a copy and then editorial and illustration, you can add another say a thousand, $1200. I think total, I spent around $3,200-3,300 dollars. And if you do the math, obviously, if you're selling 300 books at 20 bucks. You can still make a decent profit on that.
I knew from what I'd heard that print on demand, while valuable for large scale distribution, the quality of the print and the paper is just not the same, and that was something I also knew for myself. I mean, it's worth stating, I do live in Paris, in a city where a lot of Anglophone authors in the 1920s, including the Hemingways and Joyces of the world, were printed by either micropresses or really, I mean, Sylvia Beach was the owner of a bookstore and printed and published Ulysses.
So it was self published by James Joyce. Who got Sylvia to help and he had editors, including Samuel Beckett, but you know, that's just friends in the community. I don't think I have the level of choice nor friends like Samuel Beckett. That was done in Paris before. Hemingway's first short story collections were just printed small scale, less than a hundred out.
And I like that idea of just having an object for myself that I could be proud enough of to not really be worried – if no one ever read the book again, my community will have it. And I did believe that I could sell 300 books between the people I know here and Substack.
Slow and steady, you know, I started in late December and there's 79 books left. Walking clients occasionally will buy it. It's a trickle, but I definitely made back what I invested and made profit on that. And if nothing else, I made more than I did on my last book, which from a rudimentary business standpoint is progress. Now what I have to do with this book is go to maybe KDP or IngramSpark, have American distribution, so that your friends in Iowa can go online and click it. And while they won't be getting an email from me directly with a signed book and saying this is one of 300 books, I don't also have to do that anymore.
I can send 300 books by mail. I don't think I can send a thousand. If I sold a thousand with this American edition that I'll be putting out in the summer, great. But if I didn't make any sales, I would have already achieved my goal, which is to move on from this book and be proud. And I'm proud of it.
Joshua Doležal: So imagine, we're having a drink in Paris, and you're telling me about this book. What would you say it's about, or what's your elevator pitch for it? Sidewalk pitch. I mean, the sidewalk pitch, since we're in Paris.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Sidewalk pitch is it's a novel primarily set in Nazi occupied Poland, and it's about trying to understand how to move on from the past while also acknowledging its effect on the present. I mean, that's the philosophical pitch. It's really, the narrator is a son moving or going back home to help his mother move out of her, their childhood home, and he recognizes her inability to move on from an important part of her life. And his memory is really attached to when he was a child and his obsession with another part of history that we cannot really move on from, and it is the Second World War. I think we can't move on for good and bad reasons, but it is a subject that continues to inspire me.
And befuddle, really. I mean, people still don't understand how that happened, the entire history of it, not just the Holocaust, but also the war and the atomic bomb and the effects of post-World War Two on the human consciousness. So how do we get past that moment when we seem to be creeping back towards a similar scenario again?
It's kind of a central theme of that book. And I don't know if I answer that question.
Joshua Doležal: Yeah, that was another question I had is, I mean, perhaps no historical moment has had more ink spilled about it than World War II, and because I'm an Americanist, and am somewhat more fascinated by the 19th century and earlier periods, I sort of wonder, I mean, you've got Schindler's List, you've got The Pianist, you've got, I mean, how many works, those are just films, but how many works devoted to this subject, and the narrator and his mother aren't Jewish either, so there's another layer of the “why” question – why return so often to this moment out of all other historical moments?
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah. It's a good question. So one of the big aspects of this is it's set in a city that very few people are familiar with in the history of that war, which is Łódź in Poland, and it is unique because it was both where the Nazis wanted to build their frontier city – they thought of it as a Nazi utopian city, and they really called it the city of the future – as you see in the book is a is a real term for that city.
In the same city that was of the Nazi totally deranged idea. They had a hermetically sealed ghetto within it. So it was really a living concentration camp. And the juxtaposition I think of modernity and what we think of or thought of modernity up until that point. I think there was no better example then and very few people know about it.
And one of the reasons I think that is also true is because of the extremely complex history of the Jewish councils, which existed specifically in ghettos in Poland to supposedly manage everything within the ghettos. But the Nazis, of course, used the Jewish councils to their own destructive ends. So it blurs the lines and asks a lot of really challenging questions about human behavior and how humans react and adapt to extreme violent and cruel scenarios.
And I was always surprised in reading anything that you mentioned, Schindler's List or even The Zone of Interest just came out – Auschwitz is the primary theme. There's so many parts of that history that no one talks about, and Łódź especially was for me just kind of one that during my studies, and that is the academic in me, I don't think I would have studied Łódź that long if I hadn't been an academic in that sense. I just don't think it's a part of that history that anyone knows about and for me that is the kind of the point of returning to even the most written about subject in history, is a lot of people that I didn't know about. This let alone mobile German killing units going behind enemy lines.
I mean, this is why I'm a tour guide. I could write 10 more novels on it, if I wanted to, I don't want to, but this is the danger of academia. There's always something else that is just a world unto itself. So I wanted to give a different lens to a very known story, or at least thought of to be known story. Because I do think it confronts some questions that are uncomfortable.
Joshua Doležal: Well, and the same could be said about layers of historical narrative that are waiting to be discovered in, you know, the boarding school history for indigenous people in North America or industrial mining camps across the West. I mean, all of those have their own troubled histories and discoverability, but your personal connection to this through your studies seems to be significant.
And you've kind of answered one of my questions. So the narrator is having this conversation with his mother early in the narrative in the section “the boy at the bookshelf.” And she says, “Son, be careful what you decide to forget. Getting it back isn't as easy as you might think.” So I was planning to ask what you might expect to have been forgotten or what might've been in danger of being forgotten without this book? And it sounds like that particular community, what it represented, the lack of understanding of that city in Poland, is part of the reason.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah. And you know, the Polish people in general…I'm not Polish. The setting of the book is Nazi-occupied Łódź, Poland, but that's not the theme of the book. That just happens to be where the story plays out. And the story from a fictional standpoint really is about three characters trying to survive in that scenario.
So from what in Holocaust Studies you would call the perpetrator, victim, and bystander positions and it's a number I often tell people – there were 11 million people killed in the Holocaust, 6 million of them were Jewish. This is not to say that the 5 million other people were just as important or not as important, it's just a historical fact that most people forget. There's 11 million people.
The Polish people were annihilated very similarly to the Jewish people in the early days, not in the same systematic way. But this is a subject we don't talk about. Russians as well, of course, millions of Russians were killed systematically. It is not to take away from the importance of the Jewish aspect of the Holocaust. It is just to remind ourselves that if we think of it as just a Jewish thing, which is the classic trope of antisemitism, which I think in some ways is one of the great nefarious horrors that the Nazis continued to influence our thinking, is that…as if it were a Jewish thing. And as long as we're not talking about Jews, it was okay, right? That's shocking to me. We don't think very clearly about what happened to 11 million people, 6 million of whom were Jewish, because it's much easier to just think of the Holocaust as a Jewish thing, and Nazism as a kind of caricature of itself. It was popular with a lot of people, and that's what's scary.
And I do think in this era of populism, we're never as far away from sliding back towards a situation where genocide seems to be a solution to something. I have a lot of faith in humans. And I also, because I have that faith, I want people to remember that people had faith in humans in 1939 and 1940. There were things that could have been done and weren't done.
That's where I'm a fiction writer, not a historian, because counterfactual history is anathema to any historical discussion.
Joshua Doležal: Well your reminder of the statistics, which is a callous way of putting it – the number of people who were killed, the number of casualties, reminds me of some of my own travels in the Czech Republic two years ago. And I'd never visited any World War II sites, so one of them was the city of Lidice, which was not a Jewish community per se, but was just annihilated out of revenge for the assassination of one of the German officers.
And the river that ran through was redirected just out of spite. A school was bombed. The statues there are just really arresting. And there's a monument at Lidice. There's a giant rose garden, which is very moving. And near it, there's this monument of all the cities in World War Two that were bombed. And just thinking about how many cities across how many countries had this awful thing in common was a different way of thinking about it. Because I grew up learning about World War II largely through the Jewish experience, the Jewish tragedy of the Holocaust.
And so this has been something, a truth, I suppose, that has been kind of suppressed in history. The second site that we visited was Terezín, which was one of the concentration camps and home to a lot of artists. There was even an artistic life there. It was leveraged heavily for propaganda as, you know, things aren't so bad or, look at this community –sporting events and musical performances and things.
And so that was also moving, but to see it as part of a bigger, more nuanced, story and not just as the genocide, it changed the way that I thought about it.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: That's a huge part of the book. I don't go anywhere near the camps. They are rumors just in the way that historically they were rumors because I didn't feel comfortable nor capable of explaining that experience and I was very clear in my timeline, the book starts in 1939 with the arrival of the German army, and it ends in the fall of 1942, which for the Łódź ghetto was really the end for a majority of that population.
And I chose that – it took a while to figure out the timeline in that sense, but part of that desire was also to acknowledge that there are certain aspects we'll never understand in the sense that unless you've lived through it. And that's part of why I also had to have this metafictional narrator to speak of the diary of Calel Perechodnik, who was a Jewish policeman in a ghetto, or Dawid Sierakowiak, other people, diarists, who I don't, I don't think anyone really hears about.
And I wanted to have a vehicle to at least remind people there are stories about this place that exist in the real world that are far better than mine. Because how could I possibly write about life in the Łódź ghetto? For me, it's a portal towards a different realm, but that realm exists in everyone's head themselves.
Joshua Doležal: Well, so your narrator wonders later in the narrative, this is at the beginning of your fourth section, which is titled "identity." He wonders what gives him the right to invent historical characters in hopes of approximating personal truth. And I wonder, because you're not Jewish, or your narrator is not bringing that personal connection to the story, have you answered that question for yourself? Are you still struggling with it? Do you have a sense of what the personal truth is that the book's trying to approximate?
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: For better and for worse, that question, it was the first years of writing this where I really struggled with should I even think about writing a book that is written from a non-Jewish perspective. But of course, in the novel, the character is called Jewish by the authorities, even though he doesn't define himself as Jewish.
And so that allowed me to recognize as well that we are labeled always by other people and even in an extreme scenario like the Holocaust not everyone who was killed because they were Jewish thought of themselves as Jewish, so it was easier for me to put myself in the mindset from a fictional standpoint of someone who was called Jewish because it happens to me all the time. My dad is from Madrid and our name was changed during the Inquisition so it is possible that we have Jewish roots going back to the Sephardic peoples that we can't locate that because the historical record doesn't show it.
And part of that comes out, and I think the narrator's voice is this question: if I find out in two years from now that I actually have quote unquote Jewish blood, which again brings up this very problematic idea of to what extent is someone Jewish from a DNA standpoint versus a chosen identity, what would happen?
Would that book then be much more valuable, much less valuable? It's an interesting question, right? So I've thought about that a lot because I live in the Jewish neighborhood in Paris, and I'm often asked if I am Jewish, I give Nazi occupation tours, I've always been interested in the history. For me, that personal truth is to decide for yourself what your identity is independent of the external.
And that's a very existentialist argument, obviously. I am a Parisian, after all. I do believe, down to the core, we must have the freedom to choose how we identify ourselves. And to write about what we want to write about. I don't feel any responsibility to write or not write about certain characters. I just do it and make sure I do it due diligence to the extent that I can. But of course I'm a flawed fiction writer, like every other fiction writer. So that personal truth is that it's trying to figure it out for who are we independently.
I mean, Viktor is the fallen from grace academic, both in his own mind and then he's stripped of all his titles the second the Nazis arrived. So what remains of Viktor, this esteemed academic, once all the lights are off and the diplomas are ripped off the walls? For me, that can even permeate questions of ethno identity, ethnic identity, as well as religious philosophical identity. Who are we really individually?
I mean, it's an open question. I don't have the answer to that. I'd like to think Viktor has an idea who he is when he gets to the end of the book, but...
Joshua Doležal: So you refer to yourself as a Parisian. And I wonder if your exploration of identity somewhat independent from or in defiance of identity politics is influenced by your Parisian environment, because in America, certainly in the United States, if you invent a character from a different ethnic background or racial community from your own, questions of privilege, questions of power, historical, inherited trauma, all these things come to bear, and there are certain lines that a lot of American artists will not cross. And it sounds like you don't believe in those lines. But they do come with consequences, right? How much of that is just your individual perspective? How much of that has been shaped by your Parisian influences?
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah, of course. That's a good question. I do believe in those lines to a certain extent. Clearly with this novel, that line is not someone defined as Jewish by the Nazis, because that's the character. But Jewishness isn't really much of a question in this book in part because I don't, the characters that are experiencing the trauma that is, you know, committed upon the entire community are trying to deal with it independent of their own idea of who they are because Viktor is confused about who he is, right?
I do think there is one of the great benefits of writing or art in general is exploring different peoples and ideas of different cultures and if white authors from North Carolina only wrote about white guys from North Carolina then A, I'd have a very boring book. B, I would presumably be criticized for not writing white women, and by extension, any number of other characters, and that would make for a very boring story.
So I do kind of think it's absurd to not write about people that don't look like you or don't have their background as your background explicitly because you can learn a lot about other people through writing them. I do think there's a responsibility writing diverse characters insofar as you have to investigate that diversity and that cultural background, but I am in kind of a, to your point of the Parisian sense – identity politics is not the same question here. There's not the same preoccupation with ethnic, cultural, and religious heritage as there is in the U. S. And I think part of that is because America is such a diverse country of immigrants that the desire to find an individual identity is at a fever pitch now because we are so fractured as a society.
And so you have the benefits of identity politics, but also the dangers, which is, you know, white nationalism is a form of identity politics. It is on the other side of that spectrum. I don't think identity politics should not exist because there's white nationalists, but I do think we should recognize white nationalism is a part of identity politics.
And that's what's scary to me about about the era we live in. And why I wrote a book about Nazis is because when you convince people that your type of person and your group is different and different in X, Y, or Z ways, and especially if it's different in a better way, then you've created a divide that…that has been created and that division tends to only get larger.
My father is a gay man. He grew up in an era in fascist Spain where to be gay, of course, was extremely dangerous at least to be openly gay. And I've always admired him because while he is a gay man, in the same way that I am a straight man, his identity isn't defined by his gayness either.
And he knows that because he's also a theater professor and a dancer and a great cook, and he likes to read Levi Strauss and he's, that's part of the identity, but that's not the entirety. And I do think in this era the preoccupation with specific aspects of identity has created a situation where we feel alienated from each other and also from ourselves.
I do believe there is a certain responsibility, yes, in writing characters of any background, but I feel like writers who are gonna take that risk at least will learn something about themselves and about the people that they are writing about.
My next book might be about a Vietnamese baker living in Paris. I could, that's what kind of makes me curious as a writer, is I could do all the research, I could spend years speaking to Vietnamese bakers in Paris. I could also just, it could be a guy who's from Vietnam who's a baker, and that's not the entirety of his identity, and also, he also likes to play piano, and that's where actually I find a much more connection to him, and in the same way my Spanishness isn't really a huge marker of how I define myself, maybe this Vietnamese guy is also like, yeah, I'm Vietnamese, but that's not the extent of my identity, you know.
Joshua Doležal: I want to nudge us a little bit toward one of the uncomfortable backdrops, I suppose, of The Requisitions and your production of it and your release of it. So I kind of feel like we have to talk about October 7th and the ongoing Israel Hamas war in Gaza.
So you'd completed The Requisitions before the October 7th attack, and you went on to publish your open query letter to the Substack community that December.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: I did.
Joshua Doležal: And maybe I'm missing this, but I don't think you made any mention of Israel in your query or in any of your content since then.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: I did not.
Joshua Doležal: So I don't know if it's a stretch to say this, but I feel like The Requisitions and the Israel Hamas war have to be read together. And I don't know if you've made those choices deliberately, but wouldn't reading your book in isolation from its echoes in the Middle East right now require a different kind of forgetting?
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: 100%. And it, the synchronicity of it happened. It was, again, I'm a novelist, so I don't believe there's really such a thing as coincidence. It wasn't deliberate to the extent that, you know, up until October of 2023, I knew this book was at the finalized draft with my copy editor and then a secondary copy editor, and I wanted it out before Christmas.
And then of course, the events transpired after October 7th and following. So I specifically didn't mention anything in my query letter because this politicization of everything is already, I think caused a lot of people to categorically dismiss very important stories from one side or the other because they think they have a moral stance on that.
And the Israeli Palestinian conflict, going back to its very inception, and I do think this is from a historical standpoint, a fascinating moment in history, that after the greatest genocide, greatest in the negative sense, largest genocide in human history, a state was…Zionism had existed before, of course, World War II, but the state of Israel was created after the Holocaust.
I don't think you can talk about the creation of Israel without understanding the history of the Holocaust specifically. And I do think witnessing over the next 70 years what amounts to one of the largest occupied ghettos in the history of the world, whether or not you agree with the reasons for that occupation, is a real illustration of the complexity of human trauma and human experience and our ability to forget very quickly how we've been treated and how we treat other people.
Again, from a political standpoint, I didn't feel it necessary to mention that for the query of my novel. I think it's so fresh and so raw for a lot of people, whether Israeli or Palestinian or Jewish or Arab. What scares me, of course, is the conflation between all those terms and then many more. And it seems to me more in the U.S., at least from afar, that there is a clear division between people who are one side or the other. And then there's lack of understanding of a lot of the language around it.
I mean, I have a friend in New York who is a Jewish man, who's secular Jewish, and he’s studied that history more than most people. And there was a "From the river to the sea" sign across the way in New York. And it was his neighbor who, he's a super cool neighbor. And he spoke to them and had a great conversation where he said, this is why it makes me uncomfortable. I know you're not advocating for Hamas terrorists killing innocent civilians, but this is how I feel sometimes when I see this way it's been coopted.
That dialogue is essential, and I'm not convinced that making this book about that would benefit the dialogue, because I think you can read this story, which is about an occupation, and understand independently. It's very different types of occupations, very different types of scenarios and histories. But we're still talking about groups of people who fundamentally think the other ones shouldn't exist in one form or the other. And for me, that is the through line, that whether it's Israel and Gaza, whether it's Russia and Ukraine, whether it's some people's rhetoric about Mexicans or Native Americans, I mean, this is constant.
And I think that's the fundamental import, is that it is a conversation that people should be having without yelling at each other because we all are human and nobody likes seeing humans killing other humans en masse. Once you get into the numbers and people start comparing types of atrocities and traumas, then we've lost the humanity of it.
Joshua Doležal: And of course school shootings, you know mass shootings the number of deaths to gun violence are…people are exposed to it, but it's sort of not acknowledged or not dealt with. I heard someone say once, I'm losing the source, but… America is perpetually losing its innocence. And it's sort of this willful denial of certain realities that I think is part of that.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: As an American, there's a whole lot of guilt that we deal with, especially as white Americans and as a puritanical nation, guilt has been a very powerful force. And I think a lot of people try and sublimate their guilt through political movements very quickly and that becomes…once the politicization of an internal challenge that needs to be confronted by oneself and looked at and understood.
I think it's very easy during moments of crisis to become kind of a flag holder for a certain cause to ignore some of the deeper kind of psychological issues we as Americans have about our own sense of identity and white identity specifically and the generational trauma that so many people with skin slightly darker than yours and mine continue to face in white…
America is still segregated. I mean, when I go back to North Carolina or Vermont or LA, there are diverse communities, but oftentimes those are still segregated from each other. And that's something you don't have in the same way in Europe just because of the different history. A lot of white Americans especially will say that outwardly, but then you ask them how many people of color do you hang out with or what types of communities you interact with on a weekly basis and it becomes almost like a competition, it's a cliche of the token person of color friend.
That still exists today, especially in the States. We should be reading more James Baldwin about this perpetual idea we have of skin color in America. We're far from innocent in that sense, and I think it's hard to confront that. So it's easier to take one side when it seems like innocent people are being hurt, because we want to also be innocent, but we're not. Americans are not innocent, and individually we're not innocent, and that's what Baldwin teaches us, is we have to actually accept that and understand that. Otherwise, we perpetuate that system, you know.
Joshua Doležal: Well, two more questions for you about The Requisitions. I think these two flow naturally from that point about Baldwin. So you mentioned this earlier, there are three types that you studied in your Holocaust studies, the perpetuator, the victim, and the bystander. And so that helps me understand a little bit – I was curious why you created a love triangle of sorts between a professor, Viktor Bauman, a German woman, Elsa Dietrich, who returns Viktor's affection, and Elsa's estranged fiancé, Carl Becker, who is an SS soldier. What effect did you hope to achieve or what truth did you hope to eliminate by creating that rivalry or by placing those three characters in tension?
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: I love that you said “perpetuator.” It's perpetrator, but perpetuator is also a very interesting and apt idea. So perpetrator or perpetuator, victim and bystander. What, just one thing to mention here, this is an idea by Raul Hilberg, who's a great political scientist and historian, but one of the important things about this is that you can inhabit roles within each of these three during the process of destruction.
So it's not necessarily you are one and then not the other. It's a cycle. The first reason that I wrote these three characters is very simple. I was finishing my master's thesis and I was studying three thinkers who had three distinct ideas about the human condition. So I thought, oh, what better way for me to make sense of these three ideas than to create three characters. A character who pursues pleasure and avoids suffering at all costs, which Carl is that basic idea. There is then the character who pursues power. And that's the idea that we all want to achieve greatness and something of ourselves. That was at the beginning, Elsa. And then there is Purpose, and that's a character who believes in finding a meaning in life is what we should be doing, independent of if it hurts us or if we are weak because of it or whatever. And that would be Viktor.
Now, all of those characters evolved from that. It's not as static as Pleasure, Power, and Purpose, but I did see the story that way. I mean, it's quite simple in the sense that if I spend 10 years on a book, it's because it's an idea I just can't stop thinking about.
And the idea was this guy sees this woman across the terrace and it's the moment of possibility on the precipice of one of the most destructive moments in human history. What would happen if I saw a woman across the terrace that I was really intrigued by hours before the world started to crumble? So that was the initial vision. And of course the past comes back to haunt us and Elsa's fiancé, as well as Viktor's in a different side story, their past relationships are also representative of the trauma of history and whether or not we can move on from it certainly with Elsa, but even Viktor too.
The first was the vision and then it worked for me. I will tell you, it was a pain in the ass to write that narrative style, because I'm writing a limited third person on each of them, which means that it took me a while to get it right. And so far as I like the idea of three people in the same scenario, seeing the situation very differently.
As you know, in the book, the lines approach each other, but the rule of three always has been interesting to me. I saw it in my head. I said, there's this narrator, and then there's these three interwoven narratives, but they also, of course, represent, these schools of thought that I thought were important and I think they're so interesting.
I don't know if I subscribe to that holy trinity anymore. Perpetrator, victim and bystander. I certainly saw myself in each of them.
I could see Carl as an ordinary policeman who's based on a book called Ordinary Men. How does someone who's relatively ordinary become a mass murderer? I mean, that's the question of Ordinary Men and without spoilers needing to be stated, it's a book about murder. So things happen in the book, but I have to accept and acknowledge that I could be any one of those three. I want to better understand how that happens. So Carl allowed me to delve into a really dark aspect of the human psyche that I am afraid of and hence wanted to look at in, in him and in myself and in us in general.
Because if I thought he was just a monster, then I could have written a monstrous character. But if he's monstrous, it's just exactly because he's human. I don't believe in monsters in that sense.
Joshua Doležal: It's helpful to think about how we plan and design a narrative and sometimes something like the rule of threes as abstract as it sounds, it plays a role, right? It shapes the story. So I have a kind of related stylistic question.
And I don't, I don't mean it to be glib and I don't think it is, but I feel like this would have been the kind of thing that an agent or editor would have killed. And it's your penchant for including strikethrough text. And you do this on Substack posts. Sometimes just a word here or there.
You'll show a word and then you'll have the strikethrough through it, and then you'll show right after it the word that you chose. And so there's something very postmodern about, you know, the first draft and the later version. But in The Requisitions, you have a longer example, so you have an epigraph from Kasper Hauser at the beginning of one section where you strike that through and replace it with one from Rilke, but then you begin telling Hauser's story at the beginning of that chapter, only to cross out that entire first paragraph. So this seems to be a kind of signature stylistic pattern. Why not just make the deletion? What do you want to show by juxtaposing deleted text with the words that you settled on?
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah great question. And it's definitely a technique. I actually just started using it on Substack because I felt like it, I would write a word that wasn't actually as good as the next word. And then I thought, well, sometimes it's valuable to see where the thought came from, especially from a linguistic standpoint.
The main function of that in the book is because there's street names that are changed. So I cross out this Polish street and replace them with the German, but I didn't want to just put German street names because they used to be Polish. So I wanted to show that in a way that history, in fact, can be changed very easily.
I mean, with a simple deletion, if it's not in the book, it's not a fact anymore. Kaspar Hauser's story specifically, it was at a late draft. I decided to cross that out because Kaspar Hauser, just for those not familiar, was a character in Germany, a boy that was found around seven years old and did not speak any language we could understand, but was studied by a philosopher or a linguist and was studied as this kind of feral child in an attempt to understand kind of where our baseline subconscious or psyche is. And Kaspar could never tell his own story because he never had the language to do it with.
And so part of the desire to cross out Kaspar's aside from the obvious – this is an author crossing out a text. Remember, you're reading a book, which is part of the book. I'm okay with that. In this era, I don't think anyone ever really forgets they're reading a book, which is a bummer, but that's just a nod to the reality of the world we live in.
It was also to show how quickly we can just, I think, it depends, but I think a reader who sees that paragraph may just not read it. And I find that interesting, right? That it's crossed out, therefore it's not important, or that it shouldn't be considered as important. What about history have we crossed out?
An agent shouldn't or editor that wasn't my editor certainly would have crossed it out or said, Why don't you just delete this? But I like it. I think it shows the unfinished nature of history. The unfinished nature of writing and also the relationship between reader and writer. It's a dialogue.
Joshua Doležal: It shows your earlier point about studying history is studying how we've been deceived. And, you know, at some point there is no amount of research that's going to get you any closer to the truth and you have to sort of decide what story you're going to tell, find the core of its integrity, and tell it and make some of those choices.
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes: Yeah, I didn't want it to become like a gimmick. There were, it really is street names and there's scenes with the president of the Jewish council Chaim Rumkowski, who's an infamous character in the history of the Łódź ghetto.
And in the process of writing this book, I really wanted it to be clear that when I was quoting Rumkowski, these were direct quotes. But in a fiction novel, unless if you could do a footnote, you could cite it, but then that would require footnotes, which is way too academic. There were a lot of strategies… How do I get the reader to understand that this guy actually said this, even though this is a fictional scene, these are the real words coming from this guy's mouth? So the only other time there are words crossed out is "he really said this" and I cross it out because I didn't actually want to add that in.
But again, the facade, the fourth wall is broken.
Joshua Doležal: It's a kind of seasoning. Without it, the narrative would taste different.
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Joshua Doležal: Thanks for listening. If you’d like to thank Samuél for sharing his story, please check out his Substack –
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I hope you’ll join me this Friday for the next installment of my Willa Cather Read Along. I’m hosting conversations on My Ántonia every Friday through the end of May. You can find the reading schedule and updates at
.William founded a nonprofit, Moving Windmills, which supports innovation in Malawi.
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