// A conversation with Guillermo Martínez

A CONVERSATION WITH GUILLERMO MARTÍNEZ

You have a Ph.D. in mathematical logic. What made you decide to become a writer?

   I was always a writer. Math came much later in my life. My father was a writer (although he never bothered to publish), my mother was a literature professor, and books were all over my house as a part of the landscape of my childhood. I finished my first book of short stories before I was nineteen. In fact, math was the strange accident of my life. During my life as a mathematician I never gave up writing and I wrote my seven books in a kind of parallel life. I quit the university and my mathematics career three years ago and now I am totally devoted to writing novels.

Are there similarities between mathematics and writing fiction?

   There are some. I wrote a whole book about the influence of mathematical ideas in some of Borges’s short fiction. There are also more obvious connections in Lewis Carroll, Robert Musil, Raymond Queneau, Philip K. Dick. There is also an analogy in the way that mathematicians discover regularities, patterns, and figures and codify them in a written sequential text called a proof and the way that writers find plots, voices, and characters and codify them in a written sequential text called a novel or short story. Both mathematics and literature have aesthetic appeal for me, but I feel more at home with writing. I think I have more interesting literary ideas than the few really original insights I had in math.

Who is your favorite mathematician and why?

   Kurt Gödel because of the discovery of the essential incompleteness of arithmetic and the limits of proof methods based in axioms. He is the perfect example of how close math can be to philosophy.

Who are your literary influences? The novel’s narrator mentions Max Beerbohm, Henry James, Italo Calvino, and Oliver Sachs among others.

   I admire Henry James, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Witold Gombrowicz, Truman Capote, E. L. Doctorow, Patricia Highsmith, and Dino Buzzati among others.

There are echoes of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Was this an influence?

   I was not conscious of this as an influence, but I have seen most of Hitchcock’s films and I do admire his way of handling suspense. I have probably absorbed one or two lessons from him without even noticing. I am aware of his influence in one of the scenes in my previous novel The Oxford Murders: the scene at the concert.

What are the primary differences between Argentinean and American mystery writing and what do you like and dislike about each?

   I would say that American writers are more careful in respecting “reality” and they are more comfortable within the limits of the genre. They tend to research small details and they try to be accurate and to show off how much they know about technical subtleties like forensic practices and professional jargon. Argentinean writers tend to dismiss this kind of realism and go for a stylized version of reality. The result is more imaginative, daring fiction even if it cannot be completely supported by documented facts. Also, in general, Argentinean writers are not satisfied if they don’t try some kind of rupture of the genre along the way.

Kloster seems to have elements of both Thomas Pynchon and Stephen King. Is there a “real” Kloster?

   There is no “real” Kloster, although I have imagined some kind of male variant of Patricia Highsmith for one or two of his features.

Do you believe that all authors have a literary giant whose intimidating presence looms over them? Do you—like Enoch Soames—write for immortality or is there something else that drives you?

   The giant can be different at different steps of your career. Borges, for instance, is still an intimidating shadow for many writers in my country and they have developed all sorts of strategies and theories to overcome him. I don’t write for immortality, but I do try to write according to some kind of inner truth of the story that emerges along the way while you are working. For me, this abstract form, this elusive figure to chase, is something of the same order of an ideal mathematical thread. It guides me and many times it rules me. So even when I don’t have any expectations about the longevity of my work, I do have hopes about the permanence of these inner harmonies for those in the future that might open my book.

In both The Oxford Murders and The Book of Murder the narrator is neither a policeman nor a detective but rather an innocent who becomes embroiled in the events. What do you prefer about using an amateur investigator?

   It is a way of avoiding the stereotypes of crime writing. It provides a different insight, some freshness to a literary field full of clichés and commonplaces.