On a deceptively hot day in September, I met Daniel Loedel in the backyard of Blue Marble ice cream in Prospect Heights. I spent the 40 minute walk from my apartment listening to an interview between Loedel and Phil Klay about Hades, Argentina, Loedel’s debut novel. It’s strange to meet someone for the first time after researching their work. The idea you build of the person is forced to confront the actual person, and in the best case scenario, the line between the real and the imagined is thin.
The gap between truth and what we imagine as true is major part of Loedel’s debut. Hades, Argentina follows Tomás, a man driven by guilt, shame, and desire to return to Argentina a decade after leaving the country. Tomás fled to save his own life, following the 1976 military coup; though, ten years later, he is a broken man. His former love—unrequited—has died over that span, and, back in Argentina, he must confront his complicity with a military regime that tortured countless innocent people.
Hades, Argentina is my favorite kind of novel: it fearlessly explores the tense contradictions of being alive. The good are capable of awful things, the awful are capable of startling kindness. And often, the truth about ourselves is more difficult than we wish to admit. Loedel and I talked about these very contradictions, the divide between what we tell ourselves and what is true, the eerie feeling of seeing the plot of your novel play out in real life, and the ongoing effort of building a writing career.
Can you talk a little bit about the process of coming out with a book mid-pandemic? What was it like to release into this world, especially as an editor and a writer? I imagine your expectations were probably very different from someone only just entering the publishing world.
Yeah, it was strange to have no access to what I knew of as the buzz machine, where you run into someone, and hand them a galley—in my case, usually a book that I was publishing as editor—and talk about it. All of that went onto social media, where I do not feel very comfortable or equipped to do it well. So I felt out of my element. But at the same time, it was also nice to be removed from a lot of the inevitable envious feelings of “Why aren't they talking about my book?” or whatever. To have it all be far away was actually nice. But there were weird hiccups, like my book didn't really have proper galleys, and things that were odd, but my publishers were really great about always reassuring me. What was the second part of your question?
Because of your background, were you expecting something that maybe you weren't able to get?
I think the strangest part about publishing it when I did is it was less, in some ways, about publishing it during the pandemic than about the fact that my book came out six days after the coup—the storming of the Capitol. And my book has a lot about a coup in it and is about the outcomes of that. So that was the most surreal part, to watch that unfold while I'm talking about the outcomes of oppression. In terms of being an editor, I don't know, you'd be surprised, it felt probably the same as it does for any first time author, which is to say, full of anxiety, some excitement, a good amount of excitement, but also a good amount of anxiety. And I knew the ropes in some ways no better than anybody else.
I want to circle back to what you were saying about coming out with a book six days after the Capitol storming. I think of it as literary mysticism when really all it is is like having paid attention and that all of these things are cyclical. So I guess how did it feel to release something that seemed so unintentionally topical. A non writer would be like, oh, clearly they were aiming for this as if you had written the book over those six days to get it out right away.
What's funny is there was a tiny, tiny element of that in the sense that I started the book roughly in the aftermath of Trump getting elected. I remember when Trump was elected, I spoke to my dad about it, and he referenced the election when [Juan] Perón was elected in the 40s. He said, basically, that election didn't lead to the dirty war stuff, but it was the one that opened the door. That was a fair election, but then [Perón] was ousted, and the cycle began with that door opening. He felt that with Trump's election, the same door had been opened. And that wasn't the direct reason I started writing Hades, by any means. But the timing was not that coincidental. It made sense that I worked on the book for four years and it comes out right at the time when what started with that election ends up at its natural conclusion. Which is not to say that, you know, the book or the process was prophetic at all. But it made sense that it happened.
So much of this book is really grounded in stasis. Tomás is going back and living through memories that aren't really there, trying to find a new way forward through memory. How did the world that you are inhabiting find a way to inflect the book that you're working on? Were there ways emotionally or thematically you felt that living in the US at a time so obsessed with memory—the Trump project is one of insidious nostalgia—shaped your thinking about this book?
As for the stasis to do with memory, it was less a product of the political landscape of America and more the personal landscape of my family. My father lost his daughter, who obviously is the inspiration for the character of Isabel and for this whole book. He never healed. That loss was just too deep. While his life moved on and I was born and a lot of other things happened, he was in a kind of stasis in terms of that pain. I think, in Argentina, there's a lot of that kind of stasis because of the nature of the deaths, and also of the dictatorship. There are no memorials held, or there were very few for a long time, because people were disappeared. The military regime wasn't held accountable. A lot of people didn't get to mourn, heal, move on. And I felt that on mostly unconscious levels with my father and my family in general. And I think that that's where that comes from more than sort of the American political landscape.
Probably a more interesting way to think about your relationship between editing and writing is: What is the goal? What do you think art can do to provide catharsis? Or do you think you have this trickle down ability to write about the things that it sounds like your father couldn't talk about or couldn't fully engage with? What is the goal of writing about this thing that seems to not have a language?
It's interesting. On the one hand, I would say my book did nothing to close those wounds. But my father--who historically never spoke about those wounds, basically at all--he was a professional translator, translating documents for the UN for most of his life, and he took it upon himself to translate Hades into Spanish, which is obviously a way of putting the story into his own language. Obviously, the book didn't heal him, but it did allow for him to process things in some way that hadn't been processed. And maybe that's truer in some ways even more with the rest of my family. In writing the book, I called up cousins and friends of Isabel, and asked them questions about her. I asked them to engage with this life that they hadn't engaged with in a really long time. There was also the practical ramification that, while searching for her story, I was also engaged in a literal search for her remains. My father and I did blood tests to identify her remains. And we finally interred them in 2019, 40 years after she was disappeared. I don't know to what extent the book itself healed anything, or to what extent the process of trying to talk about these things was healing. But I do think there was, at the very least a lot of confrontation with what happened that needed to take place and hadn't.
And that seems to be a huge theme of the book. I was listening to your interview with Phil Klay and you talked about denial. It's almost as if they are two levels of denial. There's the denial that's happening in the book and the confrontation with that, and it's also happening in the outside as well, in your own life, or in your dad's life. These things are being engaged with when maybe they weren't previously.
I guess what I don't know, to this day--nine months out from publication--is, does confronting this stuff, these wounds, does confronting the past heal you in the present? What does it offer you in the present? In Hades, that question also goes unanswered. It is a journey into Tomás's past. And he comes out on the other side, and he does not know what he gained, except, perhaps, clarity on what happened. And we generally think that kind of clarity and self knowledge are beneficial things that allow us to progress into our futures. And I generally think that as well. I mean, obviously, this is the reason we are all in therapy. We have accepted the assumption that confronting our traumas helps us move past them. And I think that's true. But it's hard to have tangible evidence of that.
I think about that especially with Tomás in relationship to his wife and how she's pushing him to understand these things, but it doesn't seem like it's necessarily the right idea.
And if you ask my father, I think he would to this day say it doesn't do anything. But if you ask other members of the family, they would say that it offers a kind of catharsis. So maybe it depends on the person? Or maybe it means more to my dad than he would admit to me.
Classic dad move.
I have the pure instinct that silence is bad, emotional silence, political silence, all forms of silence is bad. And writing is obviously a way of breaking through that whether it's on a personal or political level. But where that faith comes from that breaking silence is urgent and important--I sort of don't know, it's sort of like a faith in God.
I think that it's interesting you’re also saying that there's a reason why all of us are in therapy now. Because it also seems so contemporary, this faith that we can't possibly be in silence. I'm totally extrapolating, but I'm thinking about the need for noise. I personally am terrified of silence, always washing dishes with a podcast on or something like that. But how is that engagement with the past its own form of needing to be entertained, to pick that old wound?
And going back to stasis, it's a way of breaking that, of making yourself feel like you are moving forward. It's not always clear that you are moving forward by unveiling something in your past. I hope you are.
I'm going down too deep of a wormhole here. But I'm also thinking about something like recovered memory. Which have mostly been proven false, right, that's not really how like the brain works. So how do we engage with a memory that might not exist but is in fact a creation of a narrative that didn't actually exist. Which in some ways debilitates, but also creates a narrative, which is something that Tomás needs. It might not help him to have this narrative and might not help him to know what happens. But at least he knows what happens.
Going back to your original question of what does writing do in terms of healing: we all need stories about ourselves with which we can anchor our sense of ourselves. I think a story often provides a destination point. It provides an ending and provides this logic to why your life ended up where it did. If you look at your past and can create a story from it that makes sense and you can embrace it, it makes it easier to embrace where you ended up. I keep being really ambivalent, but what's complicated is they can also be lies, too, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
No, I love that ambivalence. And that's something that isn't exactly clear in what is happening with Tomás in the book. I was interested how you had said [in your Phil Klay interview] you originally wanted this book to be realist. There were so many times that I was like, Oh, I'm in scene. And then suddenly, I would be like, Oh, something is happening that could not be happening. I don't want to call it a trick, but that sense of destabilization is a really great reminder of the ambiguity of what is being learned or what is being retrieved when remembering. Is it truth or is it a story?
I like that. Are you recovering truth or story.
I'll bring that question to my therapist: What have we been doing?! With that in mind, I wonder how that shapes your editing process, this hatred of silence? I talked to Rakesh Satyal a couple weeks ago and we talked about his practice of editing, what he's looking for, what he's trying to do. Do you feel like you have an editorial ethos that you're looking for? Are you looking to crack silence when you're deciding to buy a book?
I like books that wrestle with something, and that also feel comfortable straddling that kind of ambivalence we were just talking about. I find a lot of books today to be--I don't want to necessarily say preachy--but the moral complexity feels a little diminished, straight on, here are the bad guys, here's the right path. And I personally am not called to those books as often. I mean, I can be if the language is just so extraordinary that I don't care. But I generally love work that is trying to ask a question, not necessarily provide an answer. And the question can be about virtually anything. It can be something political, familial. But I want to see the characters, and by extension the writer, figuring it out on the page as opposed to feeling myself being pushed toward a certain conclusion. I do also like books that have what I call for lack of a better term stakes, which I don't really know how to define except that the questions that are being asked do have some significance, particularly societally.
It's like a “so what?” factor.
Yes. The “so what?” factor, exactly.
But moral complexity is so huge in this book, right? We are for hanging out with torturers for a lot of this book. Can you talk about the process of avoiding the really simple good person bad person dichotomy when you are writing about people who objectively we can say were doing a lot of really bad things? It would be easy to say these are evil people. Kaitlyn Greenidge had this line about her first book that I think about all the time, "I would have to love this monster into existence," when writing about this old racist white woman. It was horrifying to her but that's the only way that she could make the book work. So can you talk about that process?
When I first conceived of the novel, I didn't have torturers in it. It was a story of Tomás, Isabel, and the Colonel. The barrier I kept hitting was that the character of Isabel was too morally pure. She was this idealist, brave champion of the oppressed. And I was trying to do honor to my half sister, by purifying. And the reality of both my actual half sister and people in general is that no one is like that. And they are uninteresting if they are. They [characters like that] don't force the average person who is not a saint to wrestle with the questions of what do I do when confronted with a difficult moral choice. So the first step of increasing the moral complexity in this novel was realizing that the character of Isabel had to be really morally complex. She had to demand a lot of Tomás and the people around her a commitment that bordered on the immoral. A commitment to the cause of justice that bordered on injustice. So that was step one. That opened the door to the narrative completely. And I still resisted for a long time writing about anything explicitly to do with torture and torture centers. But I was researching the period and I found myself falling into the trap that I think most people fall into, which was that I was scared to look at this stuff. I didn't want to deal with it head on. Most people in Argentina at the time didn't want to deal with it head on. Most people in the world don't want to look at these horrors head on. They prefer a book about the legacy of the horrors. They would prefer a book with very clear heroes and villains. But once I started looking at this stuff head on, I decided I have to include it because to not do so is to engage in the exact kind of denial and silence that I really don't want to engage in. I read a lot of first hand accounts of being in these sorts of centers and the truth was the people who did these acts were people. And by virtue of being people, they had personalities and backgrounds, often had families. I would have had to actually simplify them into pure monsters. I mean, some of the characters in the book are almost basically pure monsters. But some people in reality and in the book had shades of kindness and even just brief, brief, tiny moments of goodness, that didn't seem to accord with any of the rest of what they did. And I found it both fascinating and true. I couldn't look away from that truth that I saw. It wasn't even necessarily that I have to write a morally ambiguous book, it was just that life is morally ambiguous.
But I'll admit to this principle I have which is that, if you believe there are good people and there are bad people, I think you're assuming that you belong to the good people, almost always. And that does not allow you to see yourself clearly, when perhaps you are actually being complicit with a bad action. Good people can do bad things and bad people can do good things, particularly when the systems around us are bad. Good people in bad systems or situations often inevitably have to comply in some way or other. There's just a kind of denial if people don't want to admit that, and that denial is dangerous, because we all have to wrestle with what we ourselves do, in the good and bad actions we do. If we just assume we're good people, we're not actually asking ourselves whether our actions are good or bad.
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it sets you up with a sanctimonious way of living, right, which assumes a level of infallibility. That creates a worldview in which no matter what you're doing, it's perceived as good, because the possibility that you could be bad--even if you're doing bad things--if you define yourself in a certain way, then it becomes incompatible. It creates cognitive dissonance and you ignore the fact that you've done a bad thing, or you reshape it into a good thing.
This goes back to what I was looking for as an editor, which is, the question of choice is, to me, one of the great questions of literature, period. And choice means often good or even just the average person choosing between two sets of action, neither of which is necessarily clearly right or wrong. Because that's how I think it works most often. I don't feel there's great appetite for that way of thinking.
I absolutely feel that which is really interesting because I think of America as obsessed with this idea of the anti hero. I wonder how that version of the anti hero is not actually an anti hero, but Americans believe their moral code is so good that it supersedes our moral code and we don't see them as a complicated person. We see them as being extrajudicial. It's not so much the antihero, it's the vigilante, you know. I mean, I watched like, two seasons of the show years ago, so I don't know what I'm talking about, but a show like Dexter is the example coming to mind. I've also been watching The Sopranos for the first time throughout quarantine. And that is such a difficult show to watch right now because Tony's mostly not good. But you're stuck with this person. And it also does not seem as if you can contort yourself into thinking that he's a good person. But there's really no way around it.
I don't know if this necessarily belongs in the interview, but I do think Tony is an interesting reference point in the sense that if you asked him his chief virtue, presumably he would say, his love of his family.
Loyalty, right?
And I've been watching rewatching Succession and Logan Roy, same thing. Whether he believes it or not, he takes care of his family. And I think so many people in the world look at themselves and say, I'm good, because I am good to my family, and that is what is most important. And what was really interesting thing about these torture center workers is a lot of them are family men. They had a wife and kids. In one case, an actual torturer brought his young daughter to the torture center to introduce the child to prisoners. And obviously, that is really warped. It probably helped him sleep at night to think that he was somehow taking care of his daughter.
There's that one line from the book that is burned in my memory--I forget which character it is--but Tomás says something like he didn't assault a female prisoner and was it because of conscience or because he had a family at home? You would want to believe it's the conscience, but also you see that he's still torturing people, right? So how far does this conscience go?
Exactly.
Reading this book I was thinking so much of Bolaño. I felt a real sense of similarity, of confrontation on the level of language, on the level of theme, on a level of thinking with what is damned. Rather than avoiding it. Who were you reading to get in this headspace to be able to do it?
Well, I confess to not actually being the like the biggest Bolaño guy.
I haven't read him in years, in fact.
Well, I know I am supposed to be, and I have read Bolaño. Some things you read, especially by legends, they echo around inside you, even if you're not conscious of them. And Bolaño is born of similar traditions. I mean, Latin American literature and sensibilities. When you're aware of things like political corruption and how that informs people's lives, the echoes are inevitably there. But in terms of the the authors I had closest to mind when considering Hades, one book that was really important was Pedro Páramo by Jaun Rulfo. Because of the confrontation with memory and it's also a literal journey into a ghost town. This is gonna be a list that has no unifying theme, which will tell you how I view influence working. I'd love to say, "I'm born of the South American literary tradition." At this point with globalization, it's impossible to figure out what traditions writers come from. The Remains of the Day was hugely important to me because of the way that is also a confrontation with the past and denial. On a totally different end of the spectrum, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. That's a story that also uses a ghost and confronts a communal trauma and memory and history. And then in some ways less conscious for me in a kind of minutiae of the craft kind of thing, but the general goals of these books. Exit West, in that it tells a story of a journey that is supernatural, but is very grounded in reality and recognizable situations. Similarly, Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, which took a real fact of history and made a metaphor literal. And the concept of Hades was born sort of out of thinking about that. Particularly, this idea of the disappeared-- where did the disappeared go? The initial like eureka moment, when I was struggling a lot with the book, trying to write it as a realist novel. And then suddenly, on a walk, I had this eureka moment of wondering: What if there's an underworld where the disappeared go? The book became more complicated than that. But Underground Railroad was a book that definitely contributed to that line of thinking.
Have you continued to write since your book came out? And what has it been like to continue to move on to the next book after the first? What keeps you going?
Yeah, I have been working on something. The quality of which is also wrestling with ambiguity. One thing that's been really different is Hades had this personal backdrop that grounded the project for me. It gave me a kind of faith that I had to write it, that this was the right book for me to write. It was important to me to do it. However hard it was to figure out at different points for different reasons, I had to. My personal connection provided a true north as a compass, and I'm now working on a novel that is set in Argentina and is historical and plays with a lot of the same themes and stylistic choices that Hades does, but does not have that sort of obvious personal anchor. And therefore, at moments when the book is difficult for me, which is inevitable, I don't have as much faith that this is the right book, that I have to persevere and keep going with it like I did with Hades.
Was Hades your first book?
I had written one other that I put in a drawer. As we all do. But Hades was pretty much my first. It was the first one where I really felt I was onto something and had a different kind of belief in it. Although there were times I obviously knew it wasn't working. But the question of abandoning it wasn't really an option. Whereas I'm finding that temptation feels more real this time, to let go of a book that is challenging. On the other hand, I'm also like, Well, I've written and published a book. I can work my way through this. But it's harder, and it goes back to the “so what?” question. When you have this personal anchor, it's very easy to answer that “so what?” question. You think, There's a reason I alone can write this book--which is also a question I believe a lot of writers should ask. Why should I be the one to write this book? And when you veer away from the personal--as I believe many authors should and have to do later in their careers--it's harder to answer that question. Sometimes it's easier, but often, I think it's harder. It's been a struggle, but it's going.