"Extranjera": Gonzalo Heredia's novel that connects Syrian immigration, secrets, and two temporalities

A story of oppressed women, family secrets , a woman who writes to feel less alone and remembers her life; a lineage whose Argentine chapter begins with the arrival of a group of Syrian immigrants who manage to escape a storm surge in the Río de la Plata. All this and more is Extranjera (Lumen, 2025), the latest novel by Gonzalo Heredia , a story that unfolds in two time periods, one in the past and one in the present, featuring an elderly woman hospitalized in critical condition and the circumstances this situation has on the family. Heredia is also about to premiere the theatrical adaptation he wrote of the 2013 American film Coherence . He spoke with Clarín about these works.

–How did the writing process for Extranjera begin?

– Extranjera began to take shape in the midst of the pandemic, in mid-2020. My grandmother, my father's mother, was hospitalized after having a stroke. First, she was in a hospital and then in a nursing home. I started writing around the time my father began to think that perhaps his mother was leaving this world; that place of a son beginning to navigate orphanhood seemed very interesting to me. The truth is, I didn't have a very close relationship with my grandmother, for no particular reason but because it happened that way and wasn't constructed any other way by either of us. I became interested in the possibility of going through that moment of beginning orphanhood with him.

“When his mother dies, he is a son who is left alone, without a mother, but who at the same time goes through that stage of being a father,” Heredia says about his father and the character in the story, which, in the novel, takes place in the present.

“It was a place that seemed very attractive to me, because right now I'm still a son and I'm just starting to become a father . I thought it was a very interesting position. A son who learned to be a son—I think in some way, you learn to be a son—but with those unanswered questions that he has or had, he begins to be a father with uncertainties, with fears, with questions that still haven't been answered, that half-incomplete place that was repeated from generation to generation. And I started to think about his mother and the story of her immigration.”

“ I knew that my grandmother and her family had emigrated, that they were Syrian, arrived in Argentina by chance, there had been a storm on the boat where they arrived, I had two or three specific images engraved in my memory and I began to put them on paper. Then the fiction began to win , the expansion of those ideas, a character who begins to grow, his voice gains ground, and after two years it was a text that was shelved because I couldn't find the narrator, the tone, the narrative voice,” Heredia recalls, adding that, while that first draft of the book remained in the drawer, he began writing a play that premiered two years ago at the theater, Cómo causar un fuego (How to Cause a Fire ), directed by Eva Halac and general production by Javier Faroni.

“The entire writing of the play, its staging, and its premiere happened in the middle of this novel,” says the writer and actor. “When the play had already premiered and I decided to rewrite, I went back to these texts I had , these scenes, where at the beginning there was a male narrator and stories of two brothers were told… Whenever I write, I read the text trying to find the atmosphere. Then I discovered that I had started reading diaries and confession novels by female writers, one of them, one by May Sarton, called Longing for Roots , and in her voice, in her honest, raw, and also fragile confession, it seemed to me that I had found the voice of Emma, ​​the character in my novel. It was like putting my ear to that voice . And that's when the character began to have a voice,” he says.

Heredia then decided to tell, in a second timeframe set in the present, what was happening to a second character, Eleonora, the last descendant of that family lineage. “A woman who is also rebuilding her life, and burdened with a kind of family inheritance in which she is completely alien to her family, has no relationship with her grandmother, doesn't have much connection with her brother, nor did she ever have with her deceased mother; there was something about the reconstruction of these two female characters that I was interested in moving through these two timeframes and jumping from one time to another, almost as if these two voices were one, the same voice.”

–Does it often happen to you, like in this case, that a reading helps you find a way to tell a story?

–I was also reading Marguerite Duras and Clarice Lispector. I read Diary of a Life by the Russian writer Maria Bashkirtseff, the diary of a girl who talks about her lack of desire, her inability to find meaning in her life, and her constant frustration. I seemed to always be in that semi-cyclical place, from which I couldn't escape. There was something about that that resonated with me and that I wanted to share. I also read Hebe Uhart and, at the time, Héctor Tizón; there's a construction of atmosphere, of voices, that begin to build the character.

–Is there any question you set out to answer by writing the novel?

–I think there's always a question one tries to answer through novels, texts, stories. In this case, I think it's whether one can be capable of escaping from the legacy; whether a person aware of the existence of a repetition from generation to generation can move away from that place, or if it's something inevitable, something that can't be prevented, something that's almost part of one's DNA. The question was a bit like that: if one is aware of this inherited situation, how can one move away from that place, to cut that kind of Möbius strip?

–Did you intend to return to writing in this book, which is one of the central themes in your previous novel, The Point of No Return , or was it something that just appeared?

–Here it appears from another place, although yes, there's something about the theme as well. It's a family that arrives in a completely unknown land, with a different language. There was something about words, the construction of a new language in that family that seemed very interesting to me, and it occurred to me that one of those people, Emma's mother, in this case, had a strong relationship with writing, a great need to write. There's something in this theme that speaks to me, summons me, and in which I believe. I believe words are the only thing that will survive us; I mean ideas, the conception we have of the world in this handful of time we have here, which we call life. María Bashkirtseff, whom I mentioned earlier, wrote a diary when she was 17 or 18. There's something about words that survived her, traversed centuries, decades, years, and, for example, reaches me in this moment. There's something in that that also manages to illuminate specific areas. So, undoubtedly, I think that, to a large extent, in future novels there will always be someone who writes, someone who searches for something in a book, or who has changed some aspect of their life through a book. Because I believe in that, and I believe that it happens. That's how it is.

–Could we say that from your first novel ( Construction of the Lie ), which dealt with the world of television, until now, the possibility of reflecting on writing has been gaining ground?

–I think the theme has always been there, and if anything, in recent years it's taken on a more important place in my life. I consider myself self-taught, and I think I've discovered, through introspection, that for me most things are written down, they're in books; I talk about feelings, experiences, ideas. About unknown aspects of life that exist in books. So, for me, everything is there. Beginning to realize that was very gradual; it was discovering what I'm passionate about doing. Finding meaning in my life, in my days, in my everyday life. A why and a what for. So today I can say that yes, I aim to tell stories, or at least try to. But not because I like this more than that; it's about giving things the place they deserve. Simply that. It felt strange to me at first. No one in my family had or has the habit of reading. Nothing physical exists, nor ever existed, neither the object of a book nor a library. So for me, it was very strange to have this desire, this passion. When I read in my father's auto repair shop, he would send me to do something: 'Go check out the grave.' So, building and rebuilding the activity of reading within myself, and for that to happen, not just in the shop, but in the world: going out, riding the bus and reading, not feeling the shame of the comment, 'Oh, he's got a book in his hand.' All of that, as I went through it, led to it occupying an important place in my life.

–Did you do historical research based on family stories to reconstruct the era?

–The beginning was this specific scene my dad told me about when his mother arrived in Argentina. He told me that they were coming by boat, when there was supposedly a storm surge in the Río de la Plata, and the crew started pushing the immigrants because they needed to lighten their load, pushing them and their belongings into the water. Jewelry and trunks flew from the deck; they opened and everything fell into the river. It was a brutal yet desperate image of these people swimming to the nearest shore they came across. That story had a huge impact on me. Later, I also did research on immigrants and where they ended up when they arrived. I wanted to reconstruct that whole universe. Over time, I discovered why I chose to tell a story about Syrian immigration: in the Arab community, initially at that time, women were oppressed. There was also something about that redemption of this grandmother telling the story of her authoritarian father, and of this granddaughter telling her story of the supposed oppression she felt at the hands of her family. It seemed to me that the stories of these two characters were completely in tune. Not for nothing was that the case; it's not that they were Spanish or Italian. The Arabs had two or three wives and hid them in their businesses, because in the eyes of society, that situation was frowned upon. There was something about that that seemed very in tune with the characters and the story.

–Was the title Extranjera defined from the start or did it appear with the writing?

–The title came to me with the editor, Manu Frers, as part of a project that, at least for me, was beautiful. It was sought and conceived by both of us. The tentative title it had at the time was a quote by Marguerite Duras, who said in one of her interviews, "The story of my life is a story that doesn't exist." This story of a life that doesn't exist seemed incredibly appealing to me, how it speaks of people who feel alienated from their lives. Also, because it's all fiction, there's a fictional construction to the book; I liked that duality. Later, Manu told me it was a very long title, and rightly so, and so it was changed to "Extranjera ." There was something about the word, when Emma says she felt like a foreigner in her life, in her family, in her home, and it kind of led me to think, "Of course, that's it."

–What place do you think this book will occupy?

–I don't think much about it. What I'd like to do is build my own universe. Simply that. Right now I'm reading Carlos Bernatek. He was born in Avellaneda but lived in Santa Fe. There's something about that Santa Fe that has its own universe that I find magnificent. It's not for nothing that this novel talks about the passage of time in a place, a town, which I present as a town and then transforms into a neighborhood, something of that setting that will possibly return later. That idea of ​​maintaining the same place seems brilliant to me. Through reading Bernatek, I'm searching for that kind of voice for a new text I'm starting to work on, with an idea of ​​a family that isn't a family; something of that universe that's beginning to emerge.

Foreigner , by Gonzalo Heredia (Lumen).