No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. No Kings.
Dennis: Thanks very much, Oscar, for talking about Where We Come From. It’s a textually rich book. There’s a lot happening on each page and your characters have an exceptional memorability. Let’s start with the title. Who is “We”? Who is included in that word? And are they coming from a place or a state of mind? If so, what is it? People who are coming from somewhere are going somewhere. Where is that?
Oscar Cásares’ distinguished yet understated novel provoked a lot of questions in this reader’s mind-especially because of the restraint with which it dealt with volatile issues connected with illegal migrants. The story keeps to the human scale and has a rare eloquence. In the ‘book club’ of the mind, these are the questions I would like to ask.
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When we try to conceptualize complex cultural movements the sometime clumsiness of language can from the start distort what we are saying and lead us down a dark noir alley of error.
Based on "Where We Come From", the first Oscar Cásares novel that I have read, this writer is a master of understated highlights. His discipline, his control of what happens on the page, is formidable.
In quite a lot of books, the narrator is a camera; he just observes and let other characters do the entertaining heavy lifting. I wanted to have a Nathan Zuckerman-kinda protagonist, who sets out and does all kinds of stupid stuff himself, is funny, is weird, is misguided, is in his way quite brave and adventurous. He does a lot of things I would not dare to do myself.