Interview With Daniel Olivas

Any time you can get your hands on a novel that’s set in your old hometown, hey, it’s all right by me. A paean to the concrete jungles and restless people of Los Angeles, The Book of Want by Daniel Olivas will have you salivating for carne asada tacos at Grand Central Market on South Broadway, scampering across campus at UCLA, cutting through thick traffic on the 405, even visiting witches in Jalisco, Mexico. Beyond setting, though, I love Want for being a novel that takes risks with form, point-of-view, and characterization. I love that the character Moises levitates and that his co-character Conchita gets turned on by it. I love that Manuel and Carmen prefer Sam Adams beer. Carefully crafted and provocative, The Book of Want is nothing less than a celebration of human desire in all its forms.

Daniel Olivas was kind enough to answer a few questions about writing his first novel, his influences, and his experimentations with form. So sit back, relax, get to know him. And like the novel suggests when dating a flying Mexican: “Do not forget to breathe.”

Dark Sky Magazine: My favorite aspect of The Book of Want is that it offers a mix of writing styles. The reader gets everything from lists to chat transcripts to interviews. The ‘Epilogue,’ even reminds me of Melville’s prose/drama structure used at different intervals in Moby Dick.What authors have influenced your writing through the years? What contributed to your novel’s vignette structure? Also, how difficult was it to create a cohesive whole that ultimately you were proud of?

Daniel Olivas: My literary influences run the gamut from Ernest Hemingway to Luis Alberto Urrea, Albert Camus to Jonathan Safran Foer, Sandra Cisneros to Virginia Woolf, Somerset Maugham to Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie to Aimee Bender. So many wonderful writers have crept into my brain and set up shop. I think that these and other favorite authors all have something in common: they experimented with and expanded their art. That’s how I approached the writing of The Book of Want: I wanted to push myself in terms of storytelling technique. Once I settled on the basic concept of the novel (each chapter is inspired by one of the Ten Commandments), it became both a challenge and a delight to write. Along the way to publication, I did take a few suggestions from others in terms of order of the chapters as well as certain sections I needed to smooth out, but I wouldn’t call the process difficult. In truth, I love writing as well as the editing process. I’m kind of a nerd in that respect.

DSM: I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles called South Gate. I even worked at Saint Thomas the Apostle Elementary for some time. The latter is mentioned in the novel, of course. How important is setting in Want? What does it mean to your characters to exist in Los Angeles? What does it mean to you as an author writing, as Larry Fondation puts it, “in the midst of [L.A.’s] discontinuous incidents and syncopated rhythms?”

DO: I attended Saint Thomas the Apostle Elementary for eight years (as did my four siblings), and then spent four years at Loyola High School right next door (also mentioned in the novel). These and other landmarks that made it into my novel are important to me as a writer. They create the space within which my characters live and, because I know these places, my characters are that much more real to me. In that way, I believe Los Angeles — with all its “discontinuous incidents and syncopated rhythms” — has given birth to and sustained my characters. Indeed, since my main characters are immigrants from Mexico who were looking for a better life (as did my grandparents), Los Angeles — that former Mexican pueblo — offered a future that was simultaneously new and familiar.

DSM: The Book of Want revolves around human desire. The novel treats us to characters driven by a Lacanian restlessness for identity. How did you get interested in this aspect of the human condition?

DO: All great stories are about desire, no? Whether it be a desire for love or sex or money or finding the promised land or killing that damn white whale, our favorite narratives spring from desire. And that desire becomes the protagonist’s identity in a very real sense. Once I looked to the Ten Commandments as my overarching theme, I realized that human desire (or “want”) was the true heart of my novel.

DSM: Sexuality abounds in your novel. Each of your characters, that is, in one way or another, covets flesh. Max yearns to make love to Julieta. Sofia’s abduction and rape show the other extreme of this type of craving. Beyond the obvious dimension of carnality, what else should readers take away about human sexuality after reading The Book of Want?

DO: I suspect that readers will see that my characters represent the many faces of human sexuality. Straight and gay, young and old, sincere and evil. I promise you that this was not intentional. I simply wanted to populate my novel with different types of people, which naturally led to different types of sexual desires.

DSM: Let’s talk ghosts and levitations. In your novel, dead mothers and uncles visit the living in their dreams; and Conchita falls head over heels for Moisés, the guru and levitation artist. Like all good magical realism, your images mean so much more than their textual representations. How does this blend of spirituality (or the lack thereof) and metaphysics add to the element of desire in Want? How difficult was it to craft these into your novel?

DO: I attended twelve years of Catholic school. I am also the grandson of Mexican immigrants. So, with that kind of mixture, the magical and spiritual elements of my novel came very naturally. In 1988, I converted to Judaism which has added a whole different (and I hope interesting) dimension to my fictional approach to the non-physical world. I don’t know if there’s a human soul, an afterlife, or anything else beyond our physical world, but the supernatural, the miraculous, the hard-to-explain, are all natural elements of my storytelling. I think this blending of the real and magical brings my novel to life and gives it a cultural flavor that feels right to me. I only hope that readers will feel the same way.

DSM: Want’s final chapter, ‘Want: A Symphony,’ is a unique piece of work. I specifically like the way you handle authorial intrusion via the fictional female bent on interviewing La Queenie and Moisés. The novel at this point morphs into an anthropological study of sorts. Did this idea come from your work as a lawyer? And why a female interviewer? Finally, why did you choose not to include interviews of Conchita, Max, or Julieta, all of which seem much more central characters?

DO: That last chapter was so fun to write. Since the novel really consists of interconnecting short stories, I wanted the final chapter to bring together all of the various threads of the preceding nine chapters. How was I going to do this while having fun at the same time? Well, I decided to use whatever form came to me at the time. Though I am a lawyer by day, I must admit that the interview format came to me after reading the brilliant and disturbing short-story collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. But unlike Wallace’s unnamed and mute interviewer (you never see the questions, just the answers), I wanted my interviewer to be a young, driven woman who is hired by my publisher to interview a couple of my characters about how it felt to be in the novel. Yes, it’s a meta-fiction device, but I think the interviews feel real . . .  my characters, once created, can only say and do things that are “within character.”

I know this must sound a bit crazy, but I suspect many other writers feel the same way about their characters. As for why I chose less-central characters to be interviewed, that was just a gut decision based on how I sometimes feel about novel or short stories that I read where I wish I knew more about ancillary characters. I’m not quite certain why I chose to make the interviewer a woman. That’s one of those creative mysteries I can’t explain.

DSM: What’s in the bag for the future? Any other projects we can look forward to?

DO: I have a poetry collection entitled Crossing the Border making the rounds. A publisher has asked to read another manuscript I’ve completed which is a collection of stories, essays and author interviews entitled, Things We Do Not Talk About. I’ve collaborated on an adult picture book with the artist Gronk entitled, The Last Dream of Pánfilo Velasco, which will be hard to place because of the unusualness of the concept, but I have hope! I’ve also started a new novel and I’d like to start writing plays. I write occasional kids’ stories for the Los Angeles Times and one of those is now being read by a publisher. I’m having fun!
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Want a free copy of The Book of Want? First person to give us the name of one of Daniel’s high school English teachers (you can find the name by following a link in the interview) gets a free copy. Comment below! Good Luck!

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Daniel Olivas is the author of six books including his first full-length novel, The Book of Want, which will be published by the University of Arizona Press in March 2011. He is also the editor of Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, which collects sixty years of Los Angeles fiction from Latino/a writers. More information can be found at www.danielolivas.com. Look for Daniel’s short fiction in the March issue of Dark Sky Magazine.