Why Uruguay?

I have a confession to make. I’ve never been to Uruguay, yet I set a novel in its capital city, Montevideo. As a social scientist, this is discombobulating, to say the least. We are not supposed to write about things we don’t know anything about or haven’t experienced directly. But this is exactly what I find so liberating about creative writing. The writer can write about anything, and as long as it is not slanderous or blatantly untrue, it doesn’t have to be precise and accurate. This is what fiction is about, right? Imagination!

Then you might ask, “Why did you choose a real setting unfamiliar to you for your novel?” I could have chosen any other place I have been to. Although I have not travelled nearly as much as my main protagonist Marta has, I still have been to a fair number of places around the globe. Many of them would have been suitable locations for my novel. And so many people have asked me this question already.

Editors wanted to know why Marta chooses to go there. And you can find out her motivation when you read the novel. But readers would probably want to know why I chose to send Marta to Uruguay. That is the harder question to answer. But let me try here.

Curiosity

Like Marta, I’m a curious creature. I realized it fairly recently, and it explains my choice of profession too. Through research, I constantly seek to satisfy my curiosity, and that is SO rewarding. Being able to make discoveries is what I love most about my job. And I don’t only reveal truths about our objective reality or human existence. Along the way, I also gradually unveil the multiple aspects of human nature. I peel away the endless layers of an onion, as Shrek so wisely explains to Donkey. (My kids were young when these movies came out, and we watched them countless times).

I achieve this through my hugely rewarding interactions with my students who choose to do research in my lab. And the participants in my research, who are often children, and they do say the most surprising and amazing things.

For example, in response to what the nonsense word corplum means, a child chose to ignore the, let’s face it, boring information that she was given as part of our test. She was supposed to deduce that the word means “a hole.” Instead, her eyes brightened and she jumped in her seat and said, “It’s a core from a plum!” Or another child who was telling us a story based on a wordless-picture book about a boy, a frog, and a dog. Unprompted, he chose to name the frog Jumpeth. Then he told us, “Jumpeth likes to drink ice,” even though there was no ice anywhere throughout the book. I still think that Jumpeth is the best name for a frog.

I learned something wonderful from each one of these kids. Spontaneity and freedom from constraints that don’t make sense to me were just a few of them. By setting my novel in an unfamiliar place, I was able to learn something new, to discover a new place. Trust me, as a good scientist, I did research the place as best as I could with the information available to me through online and library sources. But I’m also certain that none of it truly resembles what it is like to be actually in Montevideo. And I can’t wait to go there and experience it myself!

Small, friendly, and obscure

For the purposes of my novel, the location had to be little known to most readers. It’s essential for the understanding of the main protagonist, but it was also essential for what I wanted to achieve as a writer. I could’ve come up with a make-belief place, but I also enjoyed the challenge of finding a real place that I thought would meet my criteria. And some of my criteria were: 

• to be small (Paris or Bangkok would not do), 
• not well-know (that wiped out almost all of the most popular tourist destinations, e.g., Greece, Egypt, or Peru), 
• little visited by tourist (any small place in Provence or Italy was out of the question, and Venice — my heart bleeds for you!)
• with culture that was welcoming, direct, and warm (no English-speaking countries, please, with some small exceptions)
• it had to be similar to my native country Bulgaria, but not be Bulgaria (it’s complicated . . . very complicated!)

So, Uruguay, with a population of just over 3 million, without well-known tourist destinations (at least to me), and no blockbuster movies set in it (not yet!), seemed to fit the bill.

Soccer/football

As you will find out in my next blog post on this topic, the main male protagonist in my story is a professional soccer/football player. So, the country Marta visits had to be obsessed with soccer, and what better continent to focus on than South America. Yes, Europe comes close to it too, but for the reasons listed above, I chose to focus on South America. And did I ever learn a ton about soccer! Surprised me too, but I found most of the information fascinating and disconcertingly enriching. Another example of the beauty of life — we can discover the most amazing things in places we least expect.

Learn a new language

As an expert on bilingualism/multilingualism, I do have to live up to my reputation. And indeed, I love learning new languages, even at my “advanced” age in terms of the critical period hypothesis. But more on that in a later blog post devoted to bilingualism. Now I am fascinated with learning Spanish, as well as Italian, and what better excuse to do that than to go to countries that speak these languages. We cannot ignore the pragmatic, real-life reasons that motivate us to learn a new language. And they are the only ones that help us learn it at any age.

So, here are the answers as to why I chose Uruguay as the main setting in my novel. I hope they make sense to you as much as they make sense to me. But I have learned that our experiences, thoughts, preferences, and assumptions are subjective. If for no other reason, I hope that you choose to read my book as an opportunity to learn something new, as I did while writing it (I can’t help the professor in me).