Keila Vall de la Ville’s debut novel The Animal Days is a thriller—but not in the traditional sense. Protagonist Julia, a climber, chases mountain highs as she tightropes between life and death, joy and grief, adolescence and adulthood. She also chases a boy bent on destruction. Julia narrates this time in her life—the animal days—in a powerful, fluid vernacular that plunges readers into her precipitous milieu. We’re proud to feature this cliffhanging novel as our Book Club pick for July and to share this conversation between Vall de la Ville and translator Robin Myers, which was held live for members. The collaborators discuss the delicacies of portraying gender violence, the climbers’ patois, and the way contemporary Latin American literature plays with time and tense.
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Allison Braden (AB): There’s so much going on in this book, even though it takes place over a relatively short time span. Keila, how do you describe what the book is about?
Keila Vall de la Ville (KV): I think of the book as the story of the process of becoming, in which travel, spatial movement, has to do with the inner journey as well. That might seem a little general in the sense that many talk about displacement and movement, geographical movement, as a way to travel inwards.
What makes the book different and what gives the book its identity is this relationship with fear and with the extreme—not only because the characters are climbers but also because of their own particular intimate relationship. Julia’s actually transitioning from one state and one moment to the next. So, it’s all about extremes.
Gender violence pervades the whole story, and it’s very important to me. It took me a while to figure out how to talk about it. We all know how terrible it is, but at the same time, it has so many nuances, and so many colors, and so many ways of manifesting. I believe it’s important to show that it’s not only about physical violence or even psychological violence. There are many, many ways to feel violent, especially in an environment that is mostly masculine.
AB: Robin, how did you encounter this book? What attracted you to the story?
Robin Myers (RM): I came into contact with this wonderful book after coming into contact with Keila herself. We’ve actually been working together for so long that I can’t even remember which came first, Poetics on Beauty or this novel, but we’ve been in touch for a number of years about different projects of Keila’s. Shortly before we started writing to each other, this book had won the Latino Book Award, so Keila was interested in having it translated into English.
I read it and was instantly fascinated. I was riveted by the story and by the force of the narrator’s presence—she has a very subtle narrative voice. But in terms of the language itself, which is always what does it for me or doesn’t as a translator and reader, I was so interested in the intensity and the directness of the narrative voice, which is very beautiful but also very blunt. It has this almost spoken quality, which I was really interested in.
AB: One of the characteristics of that voice is the climbers’ lingo. They’re a very insular community—a family, even. How would you describe that language of the climbers, Robin, and how did you approach translating it?
RM: You’ve mentioned, in the same breath, both the climbers’ lingo and the kind of shorthand that can exist in a family or a group of friends. I came to both of those things as a novice, in the sense that anyone who picks up the book is getting initiated into the language of this group of friends, into this family. Some readers may have a knowledge of climbing and some may not—I did not. That was daunting, because this language is presented so seamlessly; it isn’t usually described. There isn’t this explaining, like “now we’re going to stop and explain these devices.” But it did mean that I had to learn, and I had to feel very confident in what was being talked about and how. Keila and I had, for the number of years we were working together on this book, a very, very rigorous back and forth where Keila would review what I had translated. There were multiple climbing terms that I had to ask her about—I did a lot of research on my own, too. Sometimes it was hard to know if I was on the right track in terms of the climbing jargon. Keila was incredibly helpful in clarifying some of that.
AB: Keila, you’ve written a lot of short stories, but this is your first novel. What was it about this story that made you want to spend so much time with it?
KV: It started as a short story, actually, which was mostly about, or had strong undercurrents of, gender-based violence. I first explored many elements of the novel in this story, without knowing what was going to happen. The story was awarded a prize in Venezuela, and I started to see that people wanted to know more. I realized that I had so much more to say about these characters and that I was in love with them and have so much to give them. So, I started playing with it. I wrote a second short story. I realized that between the two stories was the universe I had to work on.
AB: Throughout the novel, the reader gets so much of Julia’s perspective and emotions. You don’t really go into the mind of Rafael. Can you help us do that?
KV: When I started writing the novel, I realized that I was feeling so much about Rafael and so little about Julia. That was fine for the short story, but the novel had to be mostly about her. When I saw the first draft, I realized that it was mostly about him again. He has such a strong personality. Both of them do, but he’s so mysterious. He’s on the verge between being human and animal in a very passionate way, in a very mysterious way. It seduced me, as an author, exploring this way of being in the world that is almost noncultural, that is mostly natural. How would that person love? How would a person who is not willing to be among humans, and doesn’t really know how to be among humans, love someone who is human? When I realized that I needed to shift the focus, I started thinking about how a person who feels herself to be human falls in love with someone who is so wild, so noncultural, and so in the natural world. He has some major issues.
AB: At one point, I wondered, does he really love her?
KV: I do think he loves her, but he doesn’t know how. That’s one of the challenges I had when I started working with the idea of gender violence. How do you show that love and gender violence can coexist without ever justifying gender violence? That was super challenging to achieve without being informative. I really don’t like to read informative novels. Fiction has to be fiction and I don’t like to explain if I don’t have to. I believe human communication is very subtle and economical. Real communication is really economical. We use the fewest possible words to communicate—unless you’re in academia. You see how people are and what they want because of their actions, not because of their words.
AB: Robin, you mentioned Julia’s strong narration. But you get the sense that she’s telling this from a remove, looking back on a time in her life. How did you approach the memory-like structure, which jumps around in time and place?
RM: One thing that I did recognize while reading the book at first is that fluidity of time and space. There are so many threads that are returned to over and over again—they’re the fluidly stitched together temporalities of different trips to different places to climb and the alternate kind of mountain time. And then there’s also the plotline, which contains the steady and painful progression of the illness and death of Julia’s mother. And then this final epic journey at the end.
One thing that I thought a lot about in Keila’s book—I have actually been thinking about this while translating many different books—is that there’s more of a fluidity between present and past tense, often within individual scenes, in multiple works of fiction in Spanish. It’s a conversation I would love to keep having with people who both write and read literature from Latin America in Spanish. I’m fascinated by this. There are moments in a scene, often scenes with high action—a scene of desire, or violence, or both between Rafael and Julia—when something shifts really abruptly. There’s a shift into the present tense and then a shift out again. There were points where I told Keila pretty frankly that I felt that there was a certain shift in and out of the present and the past that I thought could be read as confusing.
I have not conducted a survey about the use of past and present tense in Spanish fiction and English fiction, but I do feel that there’s a lower tolerance for it in English, that things are a bit more rigid temporally. There were places where we went back and forth about that and ultimately, I opted to keep some things in the past tense if it took place mostly in the past. But there were a few really critical moments—the very last scene when Julia is on the train and another one, a physical encounter between Rafael and Julia—where Keila said that the shift into the present tense was very important, that this was a reaction she’s having. It’s a completely embodied response. There were times when it felt important to protect and to honor the fluid nature of how we experience time, and adrenaline, and trauma.
AB: Robin, you have a slew of things coming out soon. I’m curious about what you’ve been working on and what you’ve been reading lately.
RM: There’s some new poetry collections that are coming out soon that I’m wrapping up, which I’m excited about. There’s one called The Science of Departures by Adalber Salas Hernández, who’s also a Venezuelan writer, a wonderful poet and friend. There’s a single poem in many parts called Another Life by the Argentine writer Daniel Lipara. Aside from getting started on Keila’s next novel, which I’m very excited about, I’ve been working on a novel by the Argentine writer, Andrés Neuman, who has been in Spain most of his life. It’s his very first novel. He wrote it when he was twenty-two years old, and it’s amazing. There’s a first novel by the Colombian writer, Cristina Bendek, who’s from the island of San Andrés, which has historically been disputed territory between Colombia and Nicaragua and has a really fascinating, multicultural, multilingual life. It’s very difficult to translate, because there are so many languages happening there, but it’s been a really, really thrilling project.
AB: Keila, do you mind sharing what your next novel is about?
KV: The title of the novel is Minerva. The main character is a woman who grows up in a multi-parent, nontraditional family with two fathers and one mother in Venezuela. It’s about peripheries, I would say, because she lives in this family, which is completely uncommon, anywhere but especially in Venezuela. The current political situation in Venezuela locates them even more in the peripheral areas. This is a very divided country, the country I was born in, and then the previous years have become worse and worse. People who don’t agree with the regime are growing farther from the possibility of taking power and making change.
She is trying to figure out her own identity, her own gender identity, in this super loving, beautiful, and supportive family. But she has to cope with the fact that her parents are very, very particular, and their relationship is very particular and challenging. She has to figure out who she is, and who she wants to be, and how she wants to be. Eventually she travels; she comes to the US. Then she experiences a new way of existing, as an immigrant. She’s a dancer, and she poses for artists, so she transitions between stillness and movement all the time. In these moments of stillness and movement, she realizes who she is and what she wants.
Keila Vall de la Ville is a New York-based Venezuelan author. Her novel Los días animals (2016) received the International Latino Book Award for Best Novel 2018. She is the author of the short story collections Ana no duerme y otros cuentos (2007), fiction finalist in the Concurso de Cuentos Monte Ávila Editores 2006, and Enero es el mes más largo (2021). She has published the poetry collection Viaje legado (2016) and edited the bilingual anthology Between the Breath and the Abyss: Poetics on Beauty (2021), a compilation of essays and poems by thirty-three contemporary poets on the subject of beauty. Her books De cuando Corre Lola Corre dejó sin aire a Murakami and des / encanto will be published in late 2021. She has a BA in Anthropology (UCV), an MA in Political Science (USB), an MFA in Creative Writing (NYU), and an MA in Hispanic Cultural Studies (Columbia University).
Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and translator. Her book-length translations include The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza, Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos, Animals at the End of the World by Gloria Susana Esquivel, Empty Pool by Isabel Zapata, and Lyric Poetry Is Dead by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg. She was among the winners of the 2019 Poems in Translation Contest (Words Without Borders/Academy of American Poets). Her own poetry collections have been published in Mexico, Argentina, and Spain.
Allison Braden is an assistant blog editor for Asymptote and a contributing editor for Charlotte magazine. Her journalism and translation have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Columbia Journalism Review, Outside, and The Daily Beast, among others. She’s seeking publication for her translation of Arelis Uribe’s award-winning collection of short stories, Quiltras.
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