You cannot make a writer-it is an innate way of seeing the world, and a love of language, and a lifetime commitment. - Luisa Valenzuela

(Which other Argentine and Latin American writers do you appreciate? Or writers from farther afield?) Oh, the list is vast, a movable feast if we may say so. Cortázar is the one who is closest to my way of understanding the act of writing. And nearer to my heart. I admire Carlos Fuentes on the opposite extreme of the equation. That is why I wrote a book on both of them, Entrecruzamientos: Cortázar/Fuentes (Crossings: Cortázar/Fuentes). It is astonishing to discover how much they connect in their so different personalities. But if you ask me for a list, it can go from Clarice Lispector to Haruki Murakami, with innumerable names on the way.

(What do you think about the idea of women's language?) VALENZUELA: I openly fight for it. I think there is a different charge in the words-women come from the badlands of language. Women know a lot about ambivalence and ambiguity-which is why, I think, good, subtle political writing by women novelists is dismissed in Argentina. Women are expected to console, not disturb the readers.

Those worlds erroneously called primitive have such rich cosmologies.