Interview with Jose Miguel Varas.

• Author: Landa, Luis
• Position: LITERATURE - Interview

The last few years have been especially busy for Chilean writer, journalist, and octogenarian, Jose Miguel Varas. After winning the National Prize for Literature (beating out such heavy weight contenders as Isabel Allende and Diamela Eltit) Varas has been deluged by invitations to give talks and interviews. Suddenly, many people in Chile are asking, "Who is Jose Miguel Varas?"

But this prolific veteran author is anything but a new arrival on the scene. His first book, Cahuin, was published in 1946 and he now has a total of eighteen books, with several more on the way. In this interview with Americas, Jose Miguel Varas spoke about some of the events that have marked his life: his early and long-time membership in the Communist Party, his friendship with Pablo Neruda, his nearly two decades of exile in the Soviet Union, the Salvador Allende government, and his last memories of the Unidad Popular.

* Where did you come to have the social sensitivity and voice that appears so consistently in your work? Did it begin in your youth?

I would say it was my involvement with the Communist Party, which did begin very early in my case. I joined the party in 1949, during the time of Gabriel Gonzales Videla. At the time, many people were joining precisely because the party had been outlawed and persecuted. It seemed to me, and to many other people, that the right thing to do was to join. It was a time when they were after Neruda ... a lot of things were happening. That involvement gave me direct contact with some working class people who I had previously known only from a distance. Having personal contact with them, eating together, and talking about our lives was what did it. It was a very enriching experience for me. Then, of course, my work as a journalist also had an influence--first with Democracia, the paper the Communist Party put out to replace El Siglo when it was shut down. That's where I began in 1950 and '51. Then, in 1952, Vistazo magazine came on the scene under the leadership of Luis Enrique Delano, a great journalist and writer. I started working there regularly until 1953. The following year, I began working for El Siglo.

* So your vocation as a journalist has influenced your work a great deal?

Journalism forces you to establish a different kind of contact with reality. Because if you cover a strike, you have to go to the place where the strike is happening. You have to talk with people, see the conditions, try to talk to the employers...