Q & A With Armando Romero

Armando Romero’s

La Rueda de Chicago

won the 2005 Latino Book Award for best adventure novel. Discussion of this book, as well as his other work, demonstrates why his writing has been so well received.

Q: The novel’s setting is Chicago in the early 1970’s. You were living there then, but you did extensive research anyway. Why?

A: Literature is memory and imagination. But if imagination improves itself with our experience, memory tends to deform reality. I wanted Chicago, a very real city, as a setting, and I reconstructed it historically from that particular time.

Q: You said that in searching for someone, the protagonist travels through different levels or loops, somewhat like the structure of

The Divine Comedy

. What kinds of people does he meet, and what should readers learn from the changes he undergoes?

A: The name of the novel,

The Wheel of Chicago

, is literally a clue to understanding its structure. It’s a circular, not a linear novel. The protagonist, in search of the loved one, visits the different layers of the city: blues and jazz musicians, beatniks, poets and writers, hippies, Vietnam veterans, political revolutionaries, terrorists, Mafia people, as well as Latin Americans and other kinds of exiles and immigrants. Each loop that brings him more and more to the entrails of the city also changes his views, his approach to the other human beings. The city, as a character, transforms him. The reader will learn that this type of static traveling to the end of the circle is a way to self-knowledge.

Q: You write all your poetry, short stories, and novels in Spanish when it would probably be more lucrative to publish in English. Why? What does that choice tell us about language?

A: You wear your language every day as well as you wear your skin. My mental country is in Spanish. It’s my culture, too. I didn’t want to make my life writing books; I wanted to make my life better writing books. Literature for me is a way of improving myself, not a way of improving my income. Although English is a marvelous language, I don’t feel I can swim through it like Nabokov or Conrad.

Q: You mentioned taking the “risk” of appealing to different audiences. What did you mean?

A: I tried to write a novel that teaches the general public they can have access to the intellectual world and the intelligentsia, that they need to know people in the street so they can go to the alleys of humanity, not just to the grand avenues.

Q: You’re finishing a book on Latin American poetry. Which do you prefer—academic or creative writing?

A: Creative writing. I love the feeling of freedom, that lack of restrictions that the imagination has in order to open its own path. But thanks to my academic writing, I have the possibility to see the inner aspects of the creative mind. It’s a privileged position; you can be actor and spectator at the same time.

Q: So will the next work be creative?

A: Both. I’m beginning to write a novel about the people and geography of the Southern Pacific Coast in Colombia. It’s a big challenge because this land is very remote, very violent, and extremely beautiful. All of this thanks to its location close to the Andes and the ocean, the immense and dangerous rivers, wild forests; and to the infighting of guerrillas and paramilitary armies, to the violent character of neo-colonialism. But I also have been doing research for an academic book about the avant-garde poets of the sixties in my country, the poets that from my own generation.