Story audio is generated using AI
The story centres on three ambitious but struggling 20-something artists. Arturo is an aspiring novelist with unruly hair and a vertical scar on his ribcage, rumoured by locals to be the result of a dog’s heart transplant. Magdalena, known as Maggie, is a waitress with a desperate longing for fame who plays a battered butterscotch-yellow Fender Telecaster guitar. Rounding out the trio is Felix, a handsome and confident artist who is secretly homeless and hiding out in a hospital morgue. Together, they spend their nights drinking heavily at a run-down bar called The Mean Monsoon, discussing books, music, and their dreams of making it big.
Whispers circulate that the Devil has come to Vivo, a rumour that gains traction with the arrival of a smartly dressed stranger in an expensive suit. How will his arrival affect the trio? And what are they willing to sacrifice for the things they most want?
We asked Axelrad a few quick-fire questions:
1. Which book changed your life?
I bought a novel at the airport when I was 20 and read it while in the south of France, lounging in a wheelbarrow, eating an apple. By the time I’d finished, I knew with certainty that I’d write a book one day. The title of that book was Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord by Louis de Bernières. My fictional town of Vivo (along with a tattoo on my forearm) stands as a tribute to that strange and wonderful novel. It isn’t the best novel I’ve read, but it’s the one that unlocked something inside me. I think every novel we read changes our lives, including the bad ones, if even only a little.
2. What music helps you write?
Curating music is an undervalued art form. When I was at university, it was the highest act of friendship, a way to show love. It’s not an easy thing to get right. The mood and the theme are important, the flow and pace elusive. Some writers detail plot lines or character histories before starting a novel, but the first thing I do is make a playlist. Each song is a commitment. I’ll only listen to this collection of songs for the duration of the novel. If it takes a year, then so be it. The benefit of this obsessive habit is that I have become something like a trained rat. When I hear the music, I’m hypnotized, in the zone, ready to write. I’m often asked to share these playlists, but something has always held me back. To me they are secret and powerful. My advice? Make your own obsessive playlist and never show anyone.
3. What is the strangest thing you’ve done when researching a book?
I taught myself to smoke while writing The Nicotine Gospel. One day I walked into a petrol station kiosk and bought a pack of every single cigarette brand on the shelf. The cashiers loved it. My lungs less so. In my defence, I needed to invent a gospel/zodiac based on cigarettes, and you can’t do that from the sidelines. I spent a year standing outside bars talking to smokers, asking what brands they smoked, who gave them their first cigarette (a first cigarette, I discovered, is like a first love). I learned a lot. For The Dogs of Vivo, I spent years working in bars, restaurants and DVD stores. In my off-evenings, I played countless open mic gigs at small venues. I fell in love twice and got my heart broken twice. I was in my early 20s, and had no idea what I was doing was research for a novel. Life can be fun like that.
4. Do you keep a diary?
Not since that fateful trip to Uzès mentioned above (Sven in wheelbarrow, eating an apple). I started writing more music around that time. These songs are pages in a musical diary. Some days, when a particular mood overtakes me, I listen as a young version of myself sings to current me while I drive or sit in the garden with my dog.
5. Who is your favourite fictional hero?
I’ve always been drawn to supporting characters — the cast of best friends, bar tenders, ex-girlfriends and anyone we meet on the periphery of a story. They can be heroes, [David] Bowie reminds us, just for one day. If we get into the psychology of it, maybe I see myself as a supporting character, drinking quietly at the bar while some love story unfolds on the dance floor. It would make sense — really watching people, narrating them, comes at a cost — they begin to exist a little more than you do. If we go back to Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord, my favourite character is probably Ramon, the philosophical policeman, who keeps a cigar rolled in the barrel of his service revolver where it’s cool, dry and won’t get damaged.
6. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
This is probably a question better posed to my editor. I think it changes with each novel. In The Dogs of Vivo I found myself using “thus” a few times – a strange-looking word on the page, but an interesting one. I like to use “replete” and then watch it get edited out. I also try to create one neologism for each novel, nothing fancy, just a word I like the look of.
7. What novel would you give a child to introduce them to literature?
In the beginning, the act of reading is probably more important than the content, so the cop-out answer which I wholeheartedly believe is that they should just be reading: comics, fun stuff, whatever. Once they’re in the game, the choices start to matter in terms broadening horizons, but gently, balancing fun with exposure to different kinds of people, worlds, and ways to live. The same advice applies to adults. I see genres like individual dishes on a menu. Kids seem to love chicken strips (at least they’re eating, right?). When they’re ready for it, there’s a whole world of strange and wonderful things to taste: olives in martinis, hot-honey pizza, salted liquorice, Pad Thai, dolmades. As a kid I read Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. It’s lyrical, a little creepy and takes a lovely look at friendship.
8. What book do you wish you’d written?
So many. Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado because it’s playful. Flights by Olga Tokarzuk because it’s strange and I don’t understand why it works. Nocilla Dream by Agustín Fernández Mallo because it’s even stranger. Anything by Sally Rooney because each one is so lovely and makes me so sad. One Hundred Years of Solitude simply for the opening sentence. Shadow of the Wind, The House of the Spirits, Musicophilia, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, The God of Small Things, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, All the Pretty Horses, Dept. of Speculation, and Summer of Night. Anything by [Clarice] Lispector, Dylan [Thomas], [Haruki] Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, Mariana Enriquez. I wish I had written them all, but in truth I’m just happy they exist.
9. What keeps you awake at night?
I’ve never been good at sleeping. As a teenager, I used music to fall asleep, waking up wrapped in my headphone cords. These days I sleep to an audiobook. Here’s a list of what keeps me awake at night, including but not limited to: no audiobook, my dog licking her paws, good ideas, bad dreams, having to get to the airport early the next morning.
10. What are you most proud of writing?
Until about four years ago, I had been quietly writing for a decade with no hint of traditional success. In those long years, I’d go to my accounting job and receive the occasional rejection email from an agent or a publisher. I’d read the polite “thanks but this isn’t right for our list” response and under those fluorescent lights I’d slip into a sort of creative rebellion/depression. I think what I’m most proud of isn’t what I have written, but that I kept on writing. I will say that founding the fictional town of Vivo has been the creative joy of my life. It’s a place full of love, failure, hope, darkness, kindness, and good humour. My characters are beset by profound loneliness and equally profound friendship. Everyone in Vivo, in their own way, is trying their best in the face of insurmountable odds (life). I’ve made a place [where] I feel I belong ... [and] I want you to belong, and I’m very proud of that.
*The Dogs of Vivo by Sven Axelrad is published by Picador Africa
First published in TimesLive.
