Edmundo Paz Soldan: walking the tightrope.

• Author: Bianco, Adriana
• Position: LITERATURE

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From the Andean country of Bolivia, a place of tropical forests, highlands, and lakes, where the song of the reed flute hovers and flits amid places of toil in copper and silver mines, the literary voice of Edmundo Paz Soldán emerges:

"I know Bolivia, not just because I was born in Cochabamba," he says, "but also because I led a Cornell University student travel seminar program for four years. We visited La Paz, where many of my books are set, and we visited places like Lake Titicaca and the mines of Potosi. It was a deeper look at my country that left me surprised and amazed, and with some mixed feelings. Miners, for instance, were working in terribly difficult conditions. But I was also awed by the immensity of Lake Titicaca and was able to take a closer look at La Puerta del Sol and see the vestiges of that archaic, mysterious civilization."

A writer, professor, and political analyst for various media outlets, Paz Soldán's work has been translated into several languages and has won many awards. He is considered one of the 50 most influential Latin Americans in the United States.

Edmundo Paz Soldán was born in 1967 and is part of the post-Boom generation of Latin American writers of the 1990s known as the "McOndo Generation." Along with Chilean Alberto Fuguet, Argentine Rodrio Fresán, Mexican Jorge Volpi, and others, Paz Soldán is one of the most representative narrators of the continent, and though he doesn't use magical realista, he doesn't ignore his teachers.

"Borges had a fundamental influence on me," he says. "I was reading him when I was fourteen years old; his stories always leave you with a puzzle to solve. But I a]so like to shine the light on certain things as I write, and one of my models is Mario Vargas Llosa. His novels reveal an entire period of time, and the issues he writes about are absolutely compelling."

Paz Soldán has learned from his predecessors but he also takes on very contemporary topics. While he continues to write about political and social issues, existential anguish, and love, he also delves into how digital technologies are impacting society.

On how he found his literary vocation, the Bolivian writer says the following: "I spent my childhood and teenage years in Bolivia and at seventeen I went to Buenos Aires to study political science. I loved reading, but I was afraid of following my cultural interests. When I was in Argentina, I began to experience the 'culture of the book.' I saw...