Author interview: Exile - Immigration – Languages - Literature

Seattle Times: “It is a real treat to have this book available in English.”

WINNER OF BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2004 IN FOREWORD MAGAZINE

( http://www.forewordmagazine.net/botya/search2k4.aspx?srchtype=author&srchval=palma )

Read a short story from The Trail We Leave

THE TRAIL WE LEAVE Short fiction by Rubén Palma Translated from Danish by Alexander Taylor Curbstone Press

Contact the author: mail@rubenpalma.dk

Palma was forced to leave his native Chile after the Pinochet coup d’etat in 1973 and went into exile in Denmark. In 2001 he wrote this collection of stories in Danish to rave reviews in major Danish papers. No one has captured the impact of culture shock in quite so vivid a fashion with such compelling characters or with such a range of tone. Palma is equally at home in hard-hitting, unsentimental drama and in the comic and satirical.

Library Journal

“… These stories are each different in style and theme-upbeat, humorous, tragic, or sad... these are "homely" stories that will resonate with readers of all different backgrounds and experiences. Taylor's translation is smooth and idiomatic. -  Rebecca Stuhr. (see whole review)

Seattle Times

“… Not everything here is perfect; the first two stories are a little weak. But the book's best offerings are as moving and sharp-witted as anything else that's come my way this year… It is a real treat to have this book available in English. Michael Upchurch. (see whole review)

The Midwest Book Review

“… Palma has sensitivity such that his attention on the unsettled emotions and predicaments of the émigré relate as well to the lives of most persons. Readers of short fiction will be glad to come into contact with Palma in his translation of his fetching stories.”   Henry Berry. (see whole review)

The New Mexican

Informed by sensibilities born of two languages rooted in different stems, Palma constructs a linguistic architecture replete with meanings so multiple that exile itself becomes a new home. Soledad Santiago. (see whole review)

The Sun Sentinel

“…The stories are full of emotion, nostalgia and sadness, which contrast sharply with Palma's dry and firm tone. The characters all know in the end that the past is going to stay as such, that after exile they have become as much foreigners in their native lands as they are in this new place to call home.” Delmarie Martínez. (see whole review)

The Chattanoogan

“…Each story is a unique blend of fiction and autobiography, giving this a different feel than much of what I’m used to reading. Through his tales, Palma brings the reader into contact with unforgettable characters.” Daniel Brantley.

Eclectica

“Palma is probably at his absolute best in the relationship stories… Years ago, I fell in love with Knut Hamsun who wrote such simple pithy sentences I was sure Hemingway had stolen from him. Ruben Palma is a better combination of both who rises above the past!” Rochelle L. Holt

New Pages

Ultimately, I recognized myself in these stories, even though I am not an “exile.” I came to see my own desires are so intense that they blind me to what life is already offering me. I came to see that what I want is somewhere else, always somewhere else, and unless I come to terms with what is here, and now, in a very Buddhist sense, I will never find peace or acceptance. Not everyone is an exile, either literally or figuratively, but we can all share the sense of lives, people, and ideas lost, and what we gain when we endure into our new lives. This is what these stories offer. Jessica Powers.

Main Street Rag

“…Palma explores his own state of mind through the actions of his created characters…. The title story effectively weaves a path through the doubts and illusions that arise from living in a new country and then going back to visit the old one. It lays bare the feeling of being pulled in two directions at once that permeates the book, a feeling impossible to dispel. David Chorlton.

World Literature in Review

“ Palma’s is a calm and gentle voice, in an excitable debate about the traumas of migration and identity crises on a global scale or, as one U.S. academic put it, a crisis of “self-authorization.”. Palma seems to have had no problems with identifying and “authorizing” his self in a radically new setting. His response to the question, “Is a multi-cultural identity possible?” is to turn his back on all but the vaguest kind of cultural generalizations, those which uncontroversially add up to nostalgia, mild bitterness, and wry affection…. All the stories have something original to offer—a subtle relationship, a persuasive turn of phrase, a thought-provoking idea…” Anna Paterson.

David Unger – author of Life in the Damn Tropics

“Rubén Palma’s imaginatively conceived stories, mostly set in Denmark and Chile, portray the dark lives of immigrants and exiles whose native and adoptive lands are equally inhospitable. Reminiscent of Mario Benedetti’s fables, Palma’s characters stumble through a world full of duplicity, deception and betrayal, never quite losing their faith in the ultimate goodness of others or their humour. The Trail We Leave will haunt you.”

Translation of review in Politiken,

major Danish newspaper in September, 2001.

BITTERSWEET POSTCARDS. Ten charming "immigrant tales" about life in transit

Salman Rushdie coined the expression "the countries of the fantasy" to describe those strange places between a country forever lost and a new, one that will never be familiar or felt as one´s own. Rubén Palma is Chilean, resident in Denmark, in his From Airport to Airport  he sends ten bittersweet mainly self biographical postcards, or literary chronicles as the publisher calls them, from this borderland. But he also expands the field  to embrace the gap between the two sexes, between two national languages and cultures, between life and death, between past and future.

The  main theme is a metaphor of  our life as a transit hall. And even when the subtitle clearly states that we are dealing with "immigrant tales" Palma elegantly demonstrates, that these experiences are not limited only to an exiled Chilean or the lovelorn man from Bangladesh, who he lets keep company for a while together in Helsinki, the one on a hopeless quest for his beloved Finnish girl, and  the other divided between his Danish and his Chilean girlfriend.

Palma states a non sentimental, liberating and at the same time tough line, that maintains " we all have to embrace our fate". He lets a small newly arrived Chilean girl float in the air: "between heaven (...) and his mother and life in Vestervig" without revealing which choice she will make; a man is caught between "the time he has lost and the time he is loosing". The point of tension is the relation between distance and intimacy, the familiar and the strange, and Palma treats his subject with a charming, caustic humour and a life wise nerve, that makes his short stories absolutely recommendable reading.  Michael Zangenberg, literature professor of the University of Copenhagen. September, 2001.

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