Off the Page

Book World editor Marie Arana, who released her debut novel, Cellophane , this summer, joined Off the Page on Thursday, Sept. 28 at 1 p.m. ET to talk about her book.

Arana was in a slightly unfamiliar position this July--instead of helping to formulate opinion on newly released books, she was instead waiting for others to cast their verdict on her novel.

Reviews of Cellophane have been overwhelming positive, from The New York Times to The Washington Times , praising the book's ''luscious'' prose and its evocation of Peru.

Cellophane centers around an engineer/dreamer in Peru with a passion for paper that turns into a desire to make the clearest paper possible -- cellophane. But just as Don Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua succeeds in making cellophane, a truth plague falls on his household--what was opaque become clear--and the secret sins and desires of the characters begin to be revealed, as well as that of the larger world that Don Victor has stubbornly created in the midst of the Peruvian jungle.

Please join Off the Page to ask Arana about her novel, writing fiction vs. non-fiction (she also wrote a memoir, American Chica , shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2001), and other literary topics.

--Carole Burns

A book based on Off the Page interviews, edited by host and writer Carole Burns, will be published next fall by W.W. Norton. Twice a fellow at The MacDowell Colony, she's at work on a novel.

A transcript follows.

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Carole Burns: Hello, and welcome to Off the Page! We're kicking off a fantastic fall lineup (which will include Marisha Pessl next month, and Richard Ford in December) with Book World Editor Marie Arana. Welcome, Marie, and let's get to the first question.

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Carole Burns: So the shoe was on the other foot this summer-this time, you were the debut novelist in jitters about her reviews. Most people might assume you could be assured of positive reviews, given your position. I'm sure you didn't feel that way at all! How nerve-wracking was it? What did the experience make you think about being a writer, and a reviewer?

Marie Arana: Hi, Carole.

And thanks so much for inviting me to do this!

Yes, it is a challenge being both a published writer and a critic, but you know -- how can I grouse about any of it when both roles give me such joy? I feel very fortunate to live this double life. I grew up bicultural, and now I guess I'm biprofessional. It's a bit awkward, but comfortable at the same time.

In truth, there are a lot of pitfalls for the critic who writes. There are so many writers out there whose books have been taken to task on the pages of Book World: Who knows who might want to take a potshot at the editor?

And I'm afraid I fairly hamstrung my publisher about publicity. I have lots of rules about blurbs (None. I can't afford to have famous authors' quotes on my books. It would look like a lot of mutual backslapping, even if it weren't so.) And I have lots of worries about over-publicizing, being too much in the limelight. That wouldn't look very good either for a book editor who should be looking after everyone else's books.

But, in the main, I feel very lucky to be where I am.

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New York: With regards to ''wearing different hats'' during one's career - either changing disciplines or doing, seemingly, unrelated things - do you think it can still be seen as ''career suicide'' to step outside of what you are known for doing to pursue a new direction or do you think audiences are more able to see a body of work in totality?

Marie Arana: Thanks for this question.

I think it's a tightrope act.

Sometimes I wish I could throw myself into my novels completely. I'm going on book leave, for instance, in November. I'll take 5 months to get a jump start on my next novel. But I'll be away from Book World. And that is a huge professional sacrifice.

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Carole Burns: I was struck by the echoes in your first line to the opening of A Hundred Years of Solitude . (The first line of Cellophane reads: ''Don Victor Sobrevilla Paniagua always knew that he would die as he was born: in a bustling metropolis, surrounded by doting women, far from his paper, the trees, and the rush of a great, dark river.'') First, how gutsy! You've given yourself big shoes to fill. When did you decide to do that, and why?

Marie Arana: Well, thanks for the comparison to the great man Gabo. No one can fill his shoes. And I certainly wasn't trying to.

I wanted to write a book about people who believe in magic--who have deep spiritual ties to their faith and beliefs--but who aren't being given one whit of magic in their lives. If you look closely at Cellophane, you'll see that it's all based on science. There isn't one levitating moment.

I greatly admire Garcia Marquez, Cervantes, Cortazar, Borges. You'll see a bit of that admiration, I guess, in my work.

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Washington, D.C.: Hi, I was wondering if you could comment on the differences (or similarities) between writing fiction and nonfiction. I look forward to reading your new novel! Thanks very much! --Kelly

Marie Arana: Thank you, Kelly. And thanks for joining in on the discussion.

Writing nonfiction is like carving a rock. It sits there. It's hard. It's big. And you whittle away at something concrete.

Writing fiction is like pulling things out of the air. Nothing is there but invention. It's disconcerting, thrilling. Some of us in the fire of writing fiction end up running around and doing a lot of research just to weigh the process down a little, and make it more real.

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Carole Burns: An aspect of the book that is particularly striking to me is how everyone suddenly is telling the truth, but no one actually hears the truth-they hear something else. Everything is clear, and nothing is clear. How did this theme, if you will, come about?

Marie Arana: Yes. This is an observation I've made, and it figures large in Cellophane.

For all the truth we tell, and for however hard it is to tell it, no one can ever know what is in our hearts--what that truth we want to tell really is. No one can live in our skin. And we all see things from our corner of the cave.

Thanks for being so perceptive and picking this up in the novel.

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Washington, D.C.: Can you talk about how you get your inspiration--not just the big idea, but every day? What do you do when the muse isn't there?

Marie Arana: You know, we're running a really interesting essay by Stephen King in this Sunday's issue of Book World. He says, basically the secret of the writing life is this: Sit on your ass. Write. (His words precisely!)

Sitting down every day, waiting for the words to come, being disciplined about the time: that's the real work. And eventually, the gears start in.

I'm always surprised how characters can run in and just carry that ball for you.

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Washington, D.C. : Can you talk about how you write about Peru? I know you grew up there. But do you need to visit Peru again to write about it?

Marie Arana: Someone famous (Garcia Marquez maybe?) said that everything he ever wrote about in his novels he knew before the age of eight.

I feel very much the same.

Peru infuses everything I do, because it was where I first saw daylight and where I learned the hard business of being a small person in a large world. I somehow can't take my head out of Peru, because it seems to me that all the important emotions for me were first felt there.

I go back several times every year. My husband and I have a place in Lima.

But I think that if I never went back, if I were to do all my writing henceforward sitting in Logan Circle in Washington DC, I'd still be writing about the Andes, the Amazon, that rugged Pacific coast . . .

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Basel, Switzerland: I'm sorry to say that I've not yet read your book, but I'm intrigued by your comment on magic and science, that there's no 'levitating' in the book. Could you expand on that? Are magic and science incompatible? Isn't there an aspect of belief in both?

Marie Arana: Bless you.

For the daughter of an engineer, as I was, who felt that science was magical, you say it exactly right.

Magic for me is something that lives in human heads. We long for it. We wait for it. And sometimes it happens. But, of course, it is all up there, somewhere between the cortex and the hippocampus.

But that doesn't make the magic less real.

Cortazar wrote a beautiful essay, "El real magico" or something like that (can't remember the exact word, but it wasn't magico, come to think of it), in which he explained that for those of us who grow up in South America, where extremes are so common, it is only natural for us to see magic in the hard world around us.

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Bethesda, MD: Wow. What a great observation about how doing research while writing fiction is a way to keep connection with the real world. I'd never thought of it that way, but there is a real grounding aspect to research. Do you find the opposite -- when doing research for nonfiction that you sometimes want to leave it all behind and be in that fictional world of infinite possibility?

Marie Arana: Hah!

We were talking the other day about journalists who became novelists, because they were afraid that any day they'd slip fiction into what was supposed to be fact. I think Alice McDermott said that once. And so did Gail Godwin.

Yes, the writing is best when you leave all reality behind and go with your imagination. But there's something compelling, too, about constructing a world that people can recognize and learn from.

In writing Cellophane, I did so much research about the rainforest. Botanical. But the fauna, too. And it was fascinating! I found that maybe I could deliver a world that was there along with the world I was inventing. . .

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Carole Burns: With its setting of Peru, the novel is based at least somewhat as your own experience of the place and its people. Don Victor does seem to have something in common with your father, for eg. Can you talk about the grains of truth that you used to ignite the novel, and how they were and weren't transformed?

Marie Arana: Yes, Don Victor is partly my father. Certainly, my father was an engineer. And a brilliant one.

But Don Victor is also my husband, a wonderfully stubborn, hardheaded, softhearted man.

And Don Victor is my great uncle Tio Salvador, a bemedaled admiral in the Peruvian navy, who was half-insane, and trooped off to Andorra to try to become King.

And Don Victor is me, too. Loving his family beyond expression. And yet dragging them where they should not go.

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Washington, D.C. : Is it difficult to write fiction when you're used to writing non-fiction? What is different about fiction--if anything?

Marie Arana: I'd love to get back to nonfiction some day (and I have idle dreams about writing a major biography--don't have a clue who), but fiction keeps pulling me away. I hear a phrase, or someone says something about a wayward aunt, and my mind goes off constructing worlds. If only there were time enough to do it all!

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Baltimore, Md. : Can you talk about how you go about revising? I find that the hardest thing.

Marie Arana: Oh,this is a very good question.

Revising is all.

I sometimes feel I'm flinging mud on the page. It's opaque, terribly formed, badly expressed. And then slowly, slowly, I begin to move it around. Thresh it. Squeeze it. And by the end of the day, I may have 500 words of usable stuff.

To be a novelist, you have to let all the critical faculty go and be prepared to be the fool.

And then to edit yourself, you have to bring the ax back again, and be ruthless.

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Carole Burns: It's interesting what you said about how everything in the book is explained with science. For instance, the butterflies that fly out of Don Victor's hat -- they were put there by him. It's not a magical realism moment. And then again it is. Do you think your book falls in that category? Is it somehow against that category?

Marie Arana: THANK YOU.

Yes. The book was written against the category of magical realism. And yet, as fate would have it, all the critics have said, Isn't this wonderful? It's magical realism all over again!

The butterflies in the hat business actually happened to the grandfather of a friend of mine. He collected the butterflies in his hat, and then pulled it off when he proposed marriage to my friend's grandmother. And yet reviews of Cellophane said,"You know when you're in that butterfly/hat scene that you're in magical realism territory!"

Nothing in Cellophane happens that couldn't happen in this hard, real world of ours. It's that characters in the book BELIEVE magic is happening. And that is the whole message.

Carole, you're so smart.

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Carole Burns: Why, thank you!! Truly, I didn't pay her to write that.

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Washington, D.C.: All those people in one character. But Don Victor is also just Don Victor, I imagine, or he became so at some point. How and when did he become his own character?

And are you in every character you invent?

Marie Arana: Of course, he became his own person.

And a stubborn one, too.

I remember my editor saying that she didn't think that "Don Victor would be capable of doing this or that thing I had him do, and when I thought about editing these things, he got huffy and arrogant about it.

No really: Characters will do what they have to do. We pull them from experience, but then they go off and do whatever in creation they want to.

Like one's children.

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Houston, Tx..: When writing a novel, how do you ever know that you're done?

Marie Arana: Good question.

Sometimes you slop over and write a lot more than you have to.

I did.

I wrote a huge afterward, Victorian style, in which all my characters went off and had lives beyond the story. It was fun to imagine.

But when I put on my editorial hat and looked at it in the cold light of day, I saw that I had to lop it off a lot sooner.

Some writers, John Irving for instance, write the end first. I'm not kidding. He told me he does this. He cannot begin a book, until he has the last sentence!

That I canNOT imagine.

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Arlington, Va. : Can you reveal what your new novel is about? Or is it too early to say?

Marie Arana: Thanks for asking.

Well, since Cellophane is such a complicated plot with so many characters, I've decided the next book will be simple. Spare. Quite psychological.

It's a love story.

Things go wrong in it.

But I'll only have two people to wrestle.

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Washington, D.C. : How did you come up with the idea for writing a novel about cellophane? It does seem an unlikely topic!

Marie Arana: It was a feeling first.

I had fallen in love and felt emotionally naked. So there was that issue of transparency. I felt people could see through me and into my heart.

Of course they couldn't.

And then I began to think a lot about what they could see. Which brought me to the issues of truth.

Cellophane was my title before I realized I would be writing about paper. And being a paper engineer's daughter, I knew a lot about paper factories.

It sounds, I know, as if I backed into the story. But that's how it happened, I swear.

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New York, NY: Do you like much new magic realism? A lot of it feels forced to me, like someone trying on someone else's shoes. But they don't fit, however nice they look on someone else.

Marie Arana: Okay. I'll have out with it now: I HATE the term "magic realism."

There's no such thing. It's a convenient label (condescending, actually) that's put on a lot of writing about South America. It's as if someone in South America decided that all writing in English was "domestic realism" -- all that Jane Austen! Michael Cunningham! Anne Tyler! -- going on endlessly about the quotidian details of family!Latins believe in magic. Our mythologies teach us to. It isn't a literary conceit.

So, no, I don't write magical realism. Neither does Garcia Marquez. Or Isabel Allende. South Americans write what they know.

End of rant.

But yes, as you say, there have been many very interesting books recently that employ plot devices that couldn't possibly happen --narration by a dead person (Lovely Bones), for instance. I don't think of these as magical realism. I simply think of them as mythical explorations. Humankind has been doing that for a long time.

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Carole Burns: How amazing! A rant from the Book World Editor. Marie hates the term ''magic realism,'' and I have to say, I love rants about books.

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Swansea Wales: It's tempting to see Cellophane in the tradition of Garcia Marquez. But I'm just wondering, who would you name -- contemporary writers or writers from the past -- who you regard as fellow travelers. Are there writers who you identify with, or who occupy the same territory as you do?

Marie Arana: Thanks for this.

My heroes and models are Nabokov, Conrad, Flannery O'Connor, e.e. cummings. I feel their writing so deeply it sometimes amazes me, because they write about such different things.

For me, it's as much the care writers take with their language as it is the story itself.

I was very moved by Geraldine Brooks's "March." And I am still reeling from Alice McDermott's "After This." I wouldn't say we occupy the same territory at all, though.

I'm just so glad they're there and doing what it is they do.

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Long Beach : Any opinions on the Shakespeare Authorship question? I find it odd to have our language's greatest author with no experience in anything related to his work, other than as a secondary actor and an investor. For instance, could I write about paper factories as well as you?

Marie Arana: Isn't it odd that when a writer is as magnificent as Shakespeare, we spring to believe that he couldn't really possibly have existed?

I don't much care about the authorship question, I'm afraid.

It's the work.

The WORK.

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Anonymous: Were you at all affected by PERFUME by Patrick Susskind? I thought perhaps you'd read his book. THANKS

Carole Burns: We're all anonymous, here! Well, except for me and Marie.

Marie Arana: A very good book indeed.

But no, it didn't occur to me that it would have affected anything I've written . . .

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Carole Burns: Here's an old Off the Page discussion with Alice McDermott: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31756-2003Aug22.html

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Munich, Germany: Have you ever met Mario Vargas Llosa?

Peru is such an exotic country with so much history. Do you think that Peru's ancient past is becoming more important for Peruvians?

Marie Arana: I do know Mario Vargas Llosa.

I had the pleasure of interviewing him at a PEN function some years ago, after he published his novel about Flora Tristan and Gauguin.

He's a titan. And a gentleman.

Peru is rich beyond imagining. In history. In nature. It's tragic to me that it is struggling so in poverty.

It's a beautiful, merciless, unforgettable country.

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Washington, DC: Some of the discussion today prompted me to do a quick Internet search of the term "magical realism", and I netted a goldmine of Web sites describing this term (and some decrying it). Is it possible that some critics/readers use the term "magical realism" for simply refreshingly imaginative writing?

Marie Arana: I'm afraid it's just a lazy term.

We deserve better.

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Anonymous: Do you feel as though climate has anything to do with any stylistic differences in the hemispheres of America?

Don't the tropics make things a little on the magical side?

Marie Arana: Not only the tropics.

The grinding poverty.

The questions of life and death.

The harsh, harsh history.

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Dupont Circle, DC: I'm looking forward to reading Cellophane!

I had a more general question about Book World? Does the number of pages listed in the description of non-fiction books include pages of text only or pages of both text and notes? Thanks for the clarification!

Carole Burns: A technical question! Time to put on your Book World Editor hat, Marie.

Marie Arana: And maybe time for me to wrap things up?

This is a pleasant way to do it. Talking about Book World: Yes, the page numbers we cite are the WHOLE LOT, including notes, indices and afterwards.

Thanks so much for joining me today to talk about Cellophane. And thank you, Carole, for being such a close and observant reader.

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Carole Burns: And thank you, Marie, for giving such poetic answers--and a rant, too. And I do hope the rest of you join us next month, when we have as our guest Marisha Pessl, whose debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, has made a big splash this year. She'll be on Off the Page on Oct. 26. See you then! Remember, you can receive e-mails about Off the Page discussions. To sign up, email me at offthepage2004@yahoo.com

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