You were born in Peru, have written of the effects of the war there, but chose to make this book about an unnamed place. Was that an attempt to avoid ideology?
In the novel, many of your characters don't seem to be aware of the long-term outcome of their actions.
For someone like Zahir [a villager who spies upon radicals] he doesn't know anything about politics; he doesn't really care. He's getting paid to do something, and he's doing it—you could ask him about politics and he wouldn't really know about it.
Do you believe it's helpful or accurate to talk about Latin American countries which have gone through this experience as suffering from a collective post-traumatic stress disorder?
You do see it. In 1999, I went to go see the epicenter of the Shining Path—I was working with an organization that was teaching art in the slums around there. They were doing art therapy for kids. These were kids who had seen their parents die, who had seen torture, who had seen car bombs, who had no understanding of the value of human life, and they had grown up with the same easy, casual relationship to violence. It was absolutely terrifying. And I think you can only diagnose that—and in a grand sense, there is a lost generation. So yes, it's useful, as a shorthand, but one thing a novel can do, which newspaper articles can't always do, is particularize that and make it unique—strip away the shorthand.
I keep thinking of the image of Norma, the radio host, sleeping with her bedroom door open a decade after the fact, still waiting for her husband to come home. You must have heard or seen things like this a lot in your research.
And it would come up at the most unexpected moments. My uncle is a cop, and he plays soccer every Sunday. They have to hire a ref, since they're all type-A cops. As they were paying him one time, the guy says, "I want to thank you gentleman," in this very formal speech that Peruvians use when it's unequal. "Thank you very much. Ever since my son left to go to the mountains to fight, 10 years today, I don't have anyone to take care of me."
He's saying this to cops—you know what side they are on. And none of the cops know how to react. So one of them says, "You're welcome, please, that's enough." And the officers swerved the conversation back to women or a foul. But these are the kinds of things that shoot through and happen.