Eduardo Lago

by Amanda Rivkin

Tuesday February 7, 2006

"The only way to teach literature is by sharing a passion for reading," Eduardo Lago said. As a professor at Sarah Lawrence since the fall of 1993, he sees himself as being in a position of privilege because, "I get to read and share a passion for literature with young people."

When in a Spanish literature class with Lago (as this reporter has been for two years), one develops an appreciation of the pan-Hispanic canon and masters like Roberto Bolaño, José Donoso and Federico García Lorca. Lago has long seen the experience of Hispanic-Americans or Latinos as a fundamental part of the larger body of Spanish literature.

Lago’s first novel, Llámame Brooklyn (Call Me Brooklyn), reaches for this canon with numerous references throughout.

Llámame Brooklyn will soon be published in Spain and distributed throughout Latin America. In the novel, Lago meditates simultaneously on his relationship with his craft while drawing a fragmented valentine for the city he has called home for the past eighteen years. For a Spanish audience, this is undoubtedly new territory.

Earlier this month, Lago was awarded Spain’s oldest and most prestigious prize, the Nadal Prize. On a recent afternoon, Lago told his students that he was first notified by telephone on December 28, a day known in Spain as El día de los inocentes, when practical jokes are indulged on a national level. He joked with the caller to try reaching him on a different day.

The Nadal Prize, in addition to 18,000 euros, virtually guarantees its recipients the same recognition and audience that a Pulitzer Prize would guarantee in America or a Booker Prize in England.

In news that will hardly shock his students, Lago’s novel follows a nonlinear trajectory that he said "allows me the possibility to divide the text… to economize and tell a much larger story in fewer words." Lago enjoys playing with the mechanisms of storytelling and, like some of his contemporaries, Lago chooses to use his novel as a forum for discussing some of the difficulties involved in the creative process.

"This can be torture," Lago said of his craft. The process of Llámame Brooklyn, which Lago refers to as his "first professional novel," might have taken longer. While Llamáme Brooklyn was technically fifteen years in the making, Lago says his work in earnest only began five years ago, after he had discarded the drafts of pages he had spent ten years writing and accumulating. Lago said he wrote the parts of an incomplete novel over the course of those ten years.

His first effort was an attempt at a "personal response to the experience of living in the U.S. as a Spaniard." After he discarded his first efforts, he decided, "I am going to write a real novel." From that moment on Lago said he began his effort in earnest. "Llámame Brooklyn is the result, not a commodity."

When he went to begin anew, Lago says he found himself writing the same novel, since "it was precisely what I had been carrying inside for so long." This time, Lago found he had matured as a writer and had become acquainted with literature in a different way, through working with his students.

"I have been in a very privileged position as a writer because I have been able to interview some of the most important American writers and probe them for how they manage," Lago said of his responsibilities as a contributing writer for the Saturday literary supplement "Babelía" in El País, Spain’s most widely circulated daily newspaper. In addition to interviewing American authors like Joyce Carol Oates, John Barth and Philip Roth, among others, he has also interviewed international giants like Polish writer and poet Czesław Miłosz.

Despite his close involvement with other writers and the publishing world, Lago has much to criticize about the current state of publishing where "writers are in the hands of their agents… to a great extent," Lago said, "but this is not necessarily bad."

He shuns the idea of treating writers and their works as commodities for quick profit. While his literary agent signed a contract to write a second novel to be published under Destino, the Barcelona publishing house responsible for the release of Llámame Brooklyn, Lago affirms that, "no one will see a second novel until I am ready. That could be in five years and that could never happen."