Your story in this week’s issue, “Alvin,” is narrated by an unnamed man, a Dane living in Spain, who meets the eponymous Alvin after he’s travelled to Copenhagen to work on a bank’s software—its internal operating system—and finds the bank in rubble, its having just collapsed. Were Alvin and the fallen bank both elements of the story when you started thinking about it?
This story came to me quite intuitively and unplanned for—starting only with the first sentence, which for me establishes the general atmosphere of the story, of something at once fictitious and very corporeal. So both Alvin and the fallen bank kind of arose out of that. Though the latter was probably also a manifestation of something I already had in me, this feeling that hegemonic institutions, especially financial ones, can seemingly collapse but still live on in new, almost zombie-like states.
Alvin, it turns out, is a derivatives trader. “I don’t speculate about the future,” he says. “I trade it.” Why did you choose derivatives for him? Was it challenging to figure out how to explain derivatives trading in a short story?
Understanding financial phenomena is always difficult for me, as for most people, I guess, which is maybe part of the triumph of economics: the fact that it seems so inaccessible, as if withdrawn into this hazy, almost mystical world. But, once I understood derivatives trading, explaining it was quite straightforward. I like putting ideas and phenomena into my stories in direct ways, also to make it transparent to the reader that that’s what’s happening. But, more important, I want to also let the underlying logic of these phenomena bleed out into the characters, the relationships, and the material world of the story. In this case, the way that derivatives trading detaches value from any kind of concrete materiality, though still being dependent on it, in a ghostly way. That goes for much of both Alvin’s and the narrator’s lives, too. They kind of exist in a void, struggling to connect their desires and their sadness to the world around them.
The narrator becomes a kind of trading partner with Alvin, often helping to provide the illusion of demand (in a silver mine’s stocks, for example), but the physical relationship they have seems more important to him. Do you think he’s thinking about the future or existing purely in the present when he’s with Alvin?
He’s in the present, I think. That’s what the collapse of the bank enables, at least: this unexpected, sometimes awkward, sometimes playful relationship between these two people of very different ages and personalities. There’s definitely a lot of repressed gay desire in both of them, and a lot of typical male estrangement from their own feelings, too, but sometimes, momentarily, intimacy or tenderness or fun happens. And this whole choreography between the two of them is just as important as all the financial stuff.
The bank, in a crater of computer servers and shattered marble, is still somehow functioning. The narrator believes that the same subterranean intelligence that brought about its collapse has resulted in its employees’ contorting themselves to work in this new incarnation. Should we feel that a financial market will always triumph, however distorted it may be?
I hope not. Or I definitely want to insist on an impossible hope, a hope in defiance. And that we should still try to build the collective power necessary to really make the horror of this world end. At the same time, after the crisis of ’08 and the defeat of movements like Occupy, I think we need to realize that crisis is no longer this critical or decisive moment ripe for a radical reassessment of things. Rather, as The Invisible Committee puts it somewhere, it’s a mode of government, actively reinforcing already existing power structures. So, in some way, we need to leave the temporality of the crisis.
“Alvin” appears in your collection of stories, “After the Sun,” which will be published in the U.S. (by Riverhead Books) and in the U.K. (by Lolli Editions) this summer. The stories were written in Danish. How did you find the process of translation? Did the stories change for you at all when you read them in English?
It definitely made the book even more unfamiliar to me than it already was. Having thought so much about the sound and rhythm of each sentence, I found that there is something inherently strange about seeing it in another language and realizing that it can exist like that. When it comes to writing, I’m kind of a control freak, so it was also a process of accepting that it became something in its own right. Luckily, I had a good collaboration with Sherilyn Hellberg, the translator, who managed to replicate much of the style and rhythm of the stories. I always try to work a subtle strangeness, or even ineptitude, into my writing, even when it’s quite literary, and Sherilyn picked up on that.
As with “Alvin,” the other stories in the collection take place in relatively familiar places—Cancún, Nevada, London—but the events that unfold have a similarly surreal quality. Is the logic underpinning your stories clear to you from the outset? Are you ever surprised by where a story might take you?
In some sense, I started writing this book wanting to be surprised by it. Starting from a place of exhaustion—which was both literary and bodily, because of many different circumstances—I had to write in an intuitive and open way, planning as little as possible. Most of the stories started with just an idea of one or two sentences, or maybe an image or glimpse of a scene, and then the surroundings and the narrative arose from that. But along the way I also found that the stories could pick up and contain many of the feelings and ideas I was already walking around with—and many of my inspirations, too. It’s also a book that’s in dialogue with many other writers and thinkers who are important to me.
