Does your process change from book to book? And how do you go about balancing those two sides of the story

in your process? Everything changes from book to book.

There is no constant, there is no common denominator.

There are no dogmas or manifestos that underlie what I work.

My goal as a writer is to never have a voice.

I don't want one.

Thank you very much.

As a writer, just on the craft side of this, how do you wrap your head around piecing all these different ideas together? How would you describe that process for Ply?

Hernán Díaz, please describe the setting and how far in the future the book is set.

The book is set a few centuries into the future.

I left it a little bit unmoored and untethered to give readers enough space to roam in their imaginations.

And as the title implies, the book is set at a moment of a historical fold.

The era that we currently live in, modernity, is coming to an end.

And a new historical epoch is trying to be born among the debris that remains of the previous historical period.

So it's very much a transitional moment in history, but it's not about sort of the end of an electoral cycle or something like that or a regime.

And Dickens, tell me about the in-within.

I spoke with Hernan Diaz here in the studio and asked him to start by telling us about the book's main protagonist.

The protagonist is a young woman who lives in this city sometime in the future, vaguely shaped after New York.

Uh, she's orphaned at a very early age.

Uh, she's very crafty.

She's very intuitive as a sort of proto engineer, what in this world is known as a tinker, someone who fiddles.

Very, very few things are made from scratch, new industrially, so people get by fiddling and tinkering with objects and technology, and she's very adept at it.

Gradually, she becomes a pincher who's someone who siphons electricity for the grid.

[laughs]What does the book say about the self? What is self?

Mm-hmm.

Because, uh, apocalypse implies sort of, uh, um, a scatological, teleological notion of history like- Everything has ended.

So there is, there is no post.

The prefix is, is, is ridiculous.

So let's just discard that one right of, uh, off, off the bat.

In terms of dystopian, I think for sure, as I was saying in my, in my previous answer, for sure, uh, in this world, many things have been lost.

Uh, mostly those that are associated with, uh, the institution of the modern state, the rule of law, uh, public services, most importantly public health, education, safety, uh, uh, sort of a regulated currency, which is also a tremendously important, uh, uh, event in human history to have regulated currencies.

What did you want the disagreement to establish about the competing visions of humanity in the novel?

I think family specifically, because I think that was a really interesting part to me, was the relationships that the pincher is involved in as we follow her over the course of these few years.

Okay.

I'm very interested in the family as a unit and as our first experience as humans of intimacy.

Like that is our first connection or approach to that, what it means to be extremely close to someone both physically and emotionally involved.

I think this notion of sort of the bourgeois patriarchal family wasn't always such a stable institution at all.

It varies culturally and it has changed its shape historically.

I was trying to think of these units that are still sort of brimming with emotion and where one goes to find safety and comfort and shelter in physical and emotional ways, but that were sort of unmoored from the family structures as we know them.

The second part would be, did you feel as though you had to understand it to write it?

What did you want to explore with age and this setting?

What a lovely question.

Well, a few things, I think, and entire, not volumes, but libraries have been written about this, how age is a little bit of a construct.

Teenagers are a very new invention.

It's a very 20th century invention.

Of course, there were always pubescent humans who were undergoing all these hormonal changes.

I'm not denying that.

Can you talk to me about this little exercise? Sure.

I'll take your word for

it.

So...

I think the title in a way refers to many things.

One of them is a fold in history.

So the order that we currently live in, all of us globally I would dare to say, which is an order that is centered mostly around a few notions.

The notion of the institution of the state, which is kind of omnipresent, which can be both oppressive but also Boy, will we ever miss it when it's gone, you know? And we see the signs of it cracking now.

And there's a point where the pincher says, are these actually my memories of my life or are these my mother's interpretations?

And what made you think, do you know what, this would be a great fit for the book that I'm working on?

Let me go back to Frankenstein.

I knew that I wanted to write about a paradigm shifting kind of invention.

It had to be enormous.

And in Frankenstein, obviously, this is creating life out of dead tissue, right? Which completely alters our very definition of life itself.

And the philosophical and material implications are endless.

But But the premise is very simple.

astronauts and when they were flying around the moon this year ahead of time they said they spent a lot of time working with poets in terms of working out ways to describe what they saw because potentially like many scientists they're quite analytical and maybe didn't have the background in this kind of freer form of writing and you've been on both sides of it now you've worked with the scientists in cern and obviously you've been writing your book what do you think the kind of through line is between the two what can one learn from the other do you think

So anyway, so tell, go on.

Yeah, so this, this independent publisher had, uh, one day a year of open submissions.

I, needless to say, did not have an agent.

Uh, but I was ready, and I think they capped it at 600 or 800 submissions, which only took a matter of hours-

met."I wonder, though, since, since you were able to pursue your art with such passion for what you were doing in isolation just for yourself, is it actually harder now that you're an award-winning acclaimed novelist who everybody expects great things from?

Um, par- parts of it are harder.

Uh, but I also know the other side of this, of writing in complete solitude, in this kind of solipsistic, uh, uh, madness of, of, of, and keeping going despite the world telling you to please stop.

[laughs]

Now, now are there this year? Tell me about the are there any speakers or keynotes that you wish to highlight? Who are some of the the interesting speakers that you're going to have this year?

Sure.

Well, on Wednesday, September the second, we're going to have the official opening ceremony.

Well, bringing together key national and international authorities from the European Union and others, well, some other countries, to launch the 41st edition of Andycom.

And during this morning, well, attendees will hear the vision of the national government, so we expect the participation of the Minister of Information and Communications Technology, Mrs. Alexandra Falla, and also with other representatives of the European Union.

Also this day, on September 2nd, we're going to have some keynote speakers from different companies, big tech companies such as Google AI, Microsoft, and also, well, Oracle.

To highlight some of the speakers we're going to have this day, I can highlight Pilar Manchón.

Is there anything that you wanted to mention that I neglected to ask you that you wanted to bring up or let the listeners or readers know? Yeah, well,

Rockefeller or J.P. Morgan, or were they part of your research in any way?

Totally.

Not John D. Rockefeller because he was an oil man.

And it was very important for me that my character or characters, that their fortune not be rooted in any sort of tangible goods, right? It had to be abstract finance because I think it's so weird.

Like the more removed...

The more removed these financial instruments are from our daily lives, paradoxically, the more influential they are.

And also this high level of abstraction made me think of math, which also made me think of music again, which is a big part of the book.

Yes.