For the latest edition of BA lives, The Argentina Independent spoke with Benjamin Kunkel. Originally from Colorado, the 37-year-old Harvard and Columbia graduate previously lived and worked in New York. It was there that he wrote for a number of publications, including ‘Dissent’ and ‘The New Yorker’, and published his successful first novel ‘Indecision’ in 2006. In addition to co-founding the magazine ‘N+1′ in 2004, Benjamin has written a play, and is now in the process of writing his second novel.

How did you come to live Buenos Aires?

I happened to be asked a number of years ago to write a travel article about the city, and it was right when this novel I wrote was published, which meant that I was finally in a position to leave New York which was something I had been wanting to do for years. And so the first place I saw, in a sense, after I had become free, was Buenos Aires. There are lots of other foreign cities that I liked but I thought this one seemed more interesting and more dynamic than a place like Paris or Barcelona which I think have become museums in a sense, museums of themselves.

And how do you find being in Argentina?

I think it’s an interesting country if you’re an American because in some respects they’re very similar countries, in the sense of being societies of immigrants, these kind of promised lands, quite big and isolated. And yet, of course, they’re totally different.

One of the things I noticed is that there are extremely similar statues of Columbus in Columbus Circle in New York and outside the Casa Rosada here. Our Columbus in New York looks west, its as though he’s just arrived in this ‘New World’ and he’s looking forward. But Columbus here looks east, it’s as though he’s arrived in the Americas and is immediately looking back to where he’s come from.

And can you tell me about your magazine, N+1?

Anyone who reads the Argentina Independent should subscribe to N+1. It’s a great publication.

How did it come about?

There was a group of us who’d gone to school together and we didn’t know each other particularly well as graduates. We found that it was relatively easy to publish book reviews, but we wanted to write essays; we wanted to write crazy polemics; stories that were unpublishable because they were too essay-ish; we wanted to do all these things and there was no way to do these things without getting our own publication where we could publish what we ourselves wanted to write. We didn’t want to be merely political, or merely literary, or merely critical. [In N+1] there’s a mixture of politics, and more theoretical writing, fiction, a mixture of all that stuff that I think is relatively unique. Although to say it’s relatively unique is probably a contradiction in terms.

Who are the contributors to the magazine?

People we invite, people who solicit us, and the editors themselves. A pretty good mix. To a great extent we’ve been poached: we find great writers and people like The New Yorker poach them. Which is fine. Like the farm teams in major league baseball, we have located and developed a lot of the talent. We just don’t have the money to pay anybody, so we find these great writers, and then we publish them and then the people who can pay steal them. Which is okay because it means that everybody is happy in a way, they don’t write for us any more so we have to find new young writers. Meanwhile these people are being paid a decent amount.

Could you tell me a bit about your play?

It’s a play with a somewhat heavy, existentialist sounding premise which is namely that these people live in an apartment infested by flies. It takes place on the day after the exterminator has come. It’s got all this hopefully light physical comedy to it because they are swatting at flies all the time. It’s like a tragical farse: it ought to be really funny and really dreadful if it succeeds.

How was the transition from fiction to theatre?

The transition didn’t feel too hard, and in some senses was quite nice. One of the things you can’t do in theatre is to give access to the minds of the characters, they can only act and say things. And for me one of the difficulties of writing fiction is that it’s hard to stop talking about what’s going on in people’s heads. I think there’s just a lot more pressure on a play to be absolutely efficient, and not have any part of it be dead space. Most great novels have longeurs: they’ve got problems, passages that are not so great, and the theatre is less tolerant of that.

What were the themes you were hoping to incorporate?

Certainly among other things it’s a play about global warming, a play about feeling like you’re in the midst of a declining, perhaps falling, civilisation. As I say, it’s not meant to be very heavy, it’s meant to be heavy and light at the same time: the unbearable lightness of civilisational collapse.

As a writer, how do you see the literary world in Argentina?

To tell you the truth I don’t have the clearest notion of the literary world in Argentina…I think it’s a country that I think has distinguished itself in literary terms more than any of the other arts. If you think of really imposing, excellent Argentine writers, that’s a pretty long list.

If you look at the history of Argentine writing a lot of great writers after the Second World War ended up dying abroad, expatriating themselves for long periods. I think that’s not happening nearly so much now because the political condition of the country has improved so much, writers don’t need to be abroad in the same way. Some of the great writers, even Borges, who spent most of his life here, even he went abroad to die, partly for political reasons I think. Someone like César Aira, who I admire enormously, he’s sticking around, and I think there’s no reason not to.

One of the things that’s interesting that’s happened to Argentina since the crisis is that it has become a more inward looking country, which with a lot of countries might not be a good thing but for this country I think probably has been a pretty good thing. I think once upon a time Argentines who had a certain level of education looked abroad culturally too much, and wanted to live abroad. I think the problems with the exchange rate have meant that Argentines have had to come to know their own country better.