Sergio Ramirez between reality and fiction: the one-time vice president of Nicaragua talks about Latin America's great surprises, the revolution that crossed his path, and what we can learn from the animal kingdom.

• Author: Cabrera, Enriqueta
• Position: Interview

The short stories in Sergio Ramirez's newest book, El reino animal, combine to create a common atmosphere, according to the author. "I realize that they can be read as a great parable that has to do with our discomfort with the 'other,' with the person who is not like us. This is something that is leaving its mark on the twenty-first century. We are uncomfortable with people who don't dress and eat and pray as we do, and we tend to distance ourselves and separate ourselves from them."

Interviewed at his home in Nicaragua, Ramirez says, "I knew from the beginning that I had to tell stories. I couldn't waste my life by not writing." Two Mexican writers were important literary influences: Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes. In Fuentes, he saw an ideal model of a true writer, "young, gripping, modern, and universal." Ramirez got to know the writers of the so-called Boom through their books, and later became friends with both Rulfo and Fuentes. He also developed lasting friendships with Julio Cortazar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as well as Salvador Elizondo and Hector Aguilar Camin.

Ramirez describes himself as a writer whose path was crossed by the revolution. "If this revolution hadn't crossed my path, the way that great and unexpected loves do, I would have never been known as a politician.... If there hadn't been a revolution, I think politics and literature would have been completely incompatible undertakings for me. In fact, few professions are compatible with being a writer, but I think being a politician is the least compatible."

Ramirez says that Latin America today continues to be a continent of great surprises. Voters are looking for alternatives to the failed economic policies of the 1990s. But, he believes that some of the alternatives aren't working either, nor will they. "Because we haven't learned yet--and this is a question of political maturity that we will arrive at some day--that societies don't change because of a single administration during a period of five or six years. They change little by little in a process of accumulation."

How, where, and when did you begin your literary life?

When I started studying at the University of Leon in 1959, I was seventeen years old. I realized that most of the literary passions among the students tended towards poetry, because Nicaragua is traditionally a country of poets. But soon I realized that what I really liked to do was to tell stories about things that seemed to me to be really remarkable or extraordinary, things I wanted everyone to hear about. I think that the writer's vocation has to grow out of that need to tell a story. The first remarkable thing that I wanted to turn into a story was the situation of the students from small towns who went to college in that big provincial city of Leon, the place where the Catholic bishops had their headquarters, where the university was, the cradle of Nicaraguan liberal thought, a place of intellectuals. These students began the school year with so much energy and excitement, but many failed and were left with no choice but to return, defeated, to their little towns. They ended up selling their books and their class tings to loan sharks who would pay a few cents for them, and they'd use that money to go back.

I was already starting to see myself as a writer. That is to say, I was a law student who was starting to see himself as a writer. But I was also leaving behind something very significant, as I see it--the weight of the vernacular that existed over Nicaraguan short stories. Poetry was already very modern in Nicaragua, modern from the time of Ruben Dario, and even more modern with Salvador de la Selva, Alfonso Cortes, and later with Coronel Urtecho and Ernesto Cardenal. But the short story had remained locked in the vernacular, in stories about peasant farmers and Indians, the type of narration that happens from the academic balcony looking down with a certain sense of superiority--the kind of writing where everything the peasant farmer says is in quotation marks, as if the writer had to put on surgical gloves so as not to contaminate himself.

I started studying another kind of urban storytelling, at least what could be called urban in Nicaragua at the end of the 1950s. It was a kind of story that didn't lead to the same old folkloric portrayals of people but tried instead to enter into a real universe, because the universe of the peasant farmer in the literature of the time had really stopped being real.

Your new book, El reino animal, is a collection of stories in which animals interact with human beings. The stories are sometimes dramatic and critical, but they still have touches and tones of humor...