When Riv del Rio flies back to Cali, Colombia, fleeing an ugly breakup, he has no idea about the journey he’s about to take. His cousin sets him up with work — finding a local woman’s daughter, an intelligent woman who has been missing for a while. Seems easy enough, but as Riv finds himself more enmeshed with the story of the town and the underlying criminal activities within it, he seems to realize he’s out of his league, but not before he comes face to face with the Earth’s darkest secrets and unlikely realities. Funny, philosophical, and genuinely mind-bending, Sergio de la Pava’s Every Arc Bends Its Radian constantly surprises and shocks.
Our Culture chatted with Sergio de la Pava over email about conversations, arguing, and genre.
Congrats on your new novel! How has the reception been so far?
Well, that’s really none of my business, is it? If someone says I messed with their head,
or words to that effect, then I guess success. Either way the globe will keep spinning
undeterred and largely undetected.
Riv is such an interesting narrator; he’s pulled to his homeland of Colombia, half fleeing a breakup, half to look for other work. When did he start to form in your mind?
Riv seems the reactionary type. Events form him at least as much as he initiates them. So I’ll say he started forming on that flight to Cali.
I like that the book is mostly dialogue — he trades off jabs with his friends and later foes with really clever ideas. What goes into one of your conversations?
I respond best to conversations where you feel the parties have arduously reasoned the matter through for themselves well beforehand and are just now filling us in.
Each chapter begins with an ‘argument’, a kind of motto that determines how he acts in the world. Some interesting ones assert ‘How any misgiving, if properly investigated, is empirically sound,’ or ‘The world as a kind of sleight of hand.’ How did this structure influence the novel’s themes?
These arguments seem to be able to exist out of time, as it were, to comment helpfully on what then unfolds. The words entry and argument helpfully have multiple meanings and connotations and it’s mostly left to the reader to disseminate this ambiguity as they see fit.
The book takes a bizarre turn that I didn’t see coming where Riv comes face-to-face with the criminal syndicate Mondragon, a villainous non-entity he’s been tracking down. Were there any real-life influences for this character?
Sadly, our world is full of Mondragons. The only question remaining is whether we will allow them to win; not looking good so far.
Even though it starts out as a detective novel, you really subvert it by adding body horror and bold ideas, along with becoming a thriller towards the end. Did you set out to write something kind of difficult to classify?
The kind of classification you’re talking about is, above all, unnatural. Genre works are very careful about their rules. How depressing, it ain’t me.
One of the book’s main ideas is that reality as we know it is not as it seems — you certainly make a parallel as the book peels back more and more layers. Why did you want to explore this idea?
I suspect it’s more like there are varying levels of reality, all true in their special way, but most of them untrue in the ultimate ways that signify.
You also touch on artificial intelligence and superhuman cognition, the origins of humanity. Was this inspired by the recent upticks in AI research?
Novels mostly have to opt out of current events. This one’s no different as its inventions predate the rise in notoriety you’re referencing.
So many ideas come together towards the end, I kind of picture you as someone who works out philosophical ideas through fiction — they’re definitely picked apart and examined from every angle. Is this a correct read?
It’s correct in that I know a lot more about what I believe at the end of a novel than I do at the outset. But it can be difficult, even for me, to tease out what’s motivation and what’s byproduct.
Finally, what’s next? Are you thinking of any themes for the next work?
How much of what we call romantic love is bound up in notions like loyalty and erasure of self?
Every Arc Bends Its Radian is out now.
