Volunteer Désirée Jung talks with the issue #230 contributor about the short story she translated from Italian to English, Olga Campofreda's “Mercedes.”
DJ: One of the most brilliant aspects of this story for me is the condensation and intersection of multiple time occurrences, moving us from the past into the present, and back to current time smoothly. I also really enjoyed how the story aims to convey a “truth”—I killed my husband—that is presented in many versions, offering the reader the possibility to disagree. How relevant is this story to the world we live in today and the narratives we create, as well as the narratives that create us?
JP:
My first reaction to “Mercedes” was puzzlement. It didn’t seem to add up. There’s no way the narrator believes she actually killed her husband, no way she believes in “manifesting”—even the teenagers who explain it to her know enough to giggle about it. But what resonated with me was the way she’d gradually shut herself down, without even really being aware of it, into the person Sergio had defined her as—and how her urge to buy and wear that string of pearls meant there was still something inside her that had resisted this process. I trust my ex-husband isn’t reading this, but I know what it feels like to shut down parts of yourself because they don’t fit someone else’s idea of you. Same goes for the line about a hyper-critical man shrinking down a couple’s social circle until it was “us versus everyone.” “We were supposed to be enough for us.” Ugh. I’ve been there. The more I thought about it, though, the more I wondered if we were also being invited to imagine the husband’s story, the one he doesn’t get to tell because he’s dead. The title is “Mercedes,” after all: is his new car just a bigger, bolder, more expensive version of the narrator’s string of pearls? And what might her own role have been, over the years, in turning the man she loved into the man on the couch? Is it inevitable that people in close relationships end up reducing each other in this way—not just spouses, perhaps, but parents and children, siblings, long-term friends? Who’s been allowed to turn us into the versions of ourselves that we’ve become? Could we have avoided it? Should we have tried?
Read the rest of Jennifer Panek's interview.
Alana Friend Lettner,
#230 cnf contributor
Past contributor Aldyn Chwelos talks with the issue #230 contributor about her essay on treeplanting and ecological loss, “Little Beauty.”
AC: I was struck by the image of a future where “millions of pines grown to an identical age” could be looked upon like the Great Pyramids, “absolved of its violence by the incomprehensible fact of its emergence from manual labour.” Could you tell me how you arrived at that concept? How else do you see “terror being wonder’s understory” in our world?
AFL:
My interest in imagining tree plantations thousands of years from now is not an attempt to absolve the forestry industry of its harms in the present, nor to justify its practices from the vantage point of some distant future, but rather to reflect on the ways in which the passage of time can impact perception. The Great Pyramids or the Great Wall of China are examples of how sites of exploitation—such as forced or conscripted labour—can metamorphose into sites that induce affects like wonderment. Tree planting is qualitatively different in that it is paid labour, and paid reasonably well. But perhaps it is not such a stretch to say that many of us find ourselves beholden to forms of labour we don’t always enjoy by the incessant demands of the prevailing economic mode.
In any case, what I am fundamentally interested in here is how the residual presence of hands, of human touch and human embodiment, is one of our most potent and enduring metrics of meaning. I think that the interest in architectural feats of the past actually speaks to an allegiance to physical presence, to the body: we care that we were there. Though often denigrated, manual labour is somewhat primordial and sacred for this reason. In these increasingly virtual times, it isn’t so difficult for me to consider how billions of trees planted by hand may come to seem incomprehensibly sublime.
Read the rest of Alana Friend Lettner's interview as well as an excerpt from her essay.
