Shelf Unbound October/November 2013 October 2013 | Page 9

Shelf Unbound: The narrator is
obsessed with a young female
factory worker, and everything we
know of her is filtered through his
warped view of her. How did you
go about giving the reader a close
glimpse of these characters while
actually revealing very little about
them?
Sergio Chejfec:
The story’s narrator finds inspiration
in the mystery zone
between what he
knows and what
he does not know:
He loves the girl
because she is a
factory worker and
because,
while
being a factory
worker, she has a unique subjectivity. As a factory worker she cannot
have the psychological attributes
literary characters usually present. She belongs to another culture. Maybe that is why the narrator
knows too much and too little at the
same time.

these layers settle uniformly and
without hurry …” This line in The
Dark well describes your writing
style: You have almost no plot and
without hurry build the story layer
upon layer. Did you build the story
sparely from the start or did you
pare it down in the editing process?
Chejfec: In reality I give the same
importance to the first
draft as to subsequent ones. Sometimes I believe my
novels are built
basically from my
effort to get away
from the first draft,
something incomplete or inaccurate.
In my case, the
versions advance
and expand as I go about the editing process.

Shelf: In an interview in Guernica,
you said, “Literature needs to be
a machine of illusions.” What did
you mean by that?
Chejfec: Almost all stories are
Shelf: “Like dust in an empty room, presented as a natural and obvi-