- Olivia Brooks
- Jul 22
- 9 min read
Updated: Jul 26
An Interview with Ruben Reyes
Leslie-Ann Murray
A remarkably self-assured and thrilling debut novel...The book starts with a Cambridge couple whose relationship is on the rocks, until one of them decides to explore all the alternate storylines her own ancestors could have lived, bouncing from Cuba to El Salvador to the US. War, revolution, forbidden loves, and complications abound, and the result is a deliriously fun read.
— Boston Globe
Leslie-Ann Murray: Your novel, Archive of Unknown Universes, is a maximalist novel where you’ve attempted to capture the totality of our human experience, but more particularly, a post-civil war El Salvadorian gaze. What was your process?
Ruben Reyes: I had a lot of different ideas that I wanted to put into one package. It is a multiverse novel, and it follows two families’ alternate histories of the Salvadoran Civil War. In one of these alternate histories, the war ended as it did in our lives—when the peace accord was signed in 1992. In the other universe, the war was won when the leftists succeeded. Part of the novel is focused on a gorilla soldier and whether he lives or dies in these two different timelines. But also this novel is about love, destiny, fate, and political structures, and whether or not we can escape them.
LM: The novel moves through many timelines and borders on history, speculative fiction, as well as an epistolary component where two of the characters exchange intense love letters with each other during the time of war. How were you able to interlock all these moving parts?
RR: I'll be honest, it was a hard challenge. The key to making all these entities feel seamless was ultimately the structure, which took a long time to nail down. I had the first draft of the book in 2019 but didn't have a sense of the structure. For about four years, I worked on the structure and tried many different formulas—until one clicked into place.
Once I knew the three categories in this novel: alternate timeline, another timeline, and the past, I started building cohesion in each of these timelines, and then I figured out how to create order within these categories, so that the reader can understand the concepts, the flow, and feel connected to the characters and the story. So, figuring out the novel’s structure was the ultimate key.
LM: In the novel, the use of "the Defractor" offers a unique narrative tool to explore alternate realities. Why did you incorporate speculative elements into a story about historical trauma?
RR: The novel is stuffed with so many ideas that I didn't even mention the Defractor at the top of our conversation. It's a device that lets the characters see alternate histories of their lives, and it allows readers to experience these alternative histories.
LM: You’ve incorporated queer characters so seamlessly within this alternative history. Netto and Raphael’s love feels powerful and passionate yet layered with tension—not just because of their relationship but also due to the societal expectations of men during that time. How did you approach exploring the intersection of love, masculinity, and revolution? And what was it like emotionally investing in a love story that unfolds over decades?
RR: I wanted Raphael to be essentially unbothered about his sexuality and clear of his feelings, and for Netto to be a little bit more on the fence about it. I wanted there to be some tension regarding their sexuality at the time because, let's be honest, it's the late seventies. The leftist movements were famously very macho and expected a certain kind of masculinity. When I was writing the scenes with these characters, I got emotionally invested because their love story plays out over many decades. Their love story becomes epic in a way because we get to see how war, an oppressive government, migration, and family conflicts play into their relationship.
LM: I’m fearful of daydreaming about alternative versions of my own life because I don’t want to deal with the fallout of a hypothetical poor life choice, or a real one, but your novel makes alternative history so intoxicating, dreamlike, and full of possibilities. How and why?
RR: In my short story collection, “There is a Rio Grande in Heaven,” there's a series of stories in the book that are all titled An Alternate History of El Salvador or perhaps the World, so I've been thinking about this concept for a long time.
Also, when you're a child of immigrants or an immigrant yourself, you can't escape the question of what if. What if I did not immigrate? What if I did not leave my family behind? My parents are both from El Salvador, and while they’ve never asked this question to themselves out loud or posed it to me in the open; however, I’ve sensed these questions radiating from them. What if my mother stayed back in El Salvador and never came to the States to be with my father? What if the war never happened? The older I get, the more I ask myself different versions of that “what if”.
What if I'd never come to the East Coast? My life would've been different if I'd gone to school in California. I think living between the many possibilities of my own life has made me obsessed with the concept of alternative histories. A lot of my favorite art of the last few years has been asking the same type of question, for example, the movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” There’s something human about this kind of desire to think about other possibilities for ourselves.
LM: Like your parents, I immigrated to the States, and I used to privately ask myself the “what if I remained in Trinidad and Tobago” question. Unfortunately, within months of my departure, austerity measures had taken hold of the country, and these have economically and politically strangled my generation as well as the one ahead of me. Because of my move to the States, I was living the alternative version of my friends' and family members' lives.
RR: Yes, sometimes a person can become naively idealistic when thinking about the “what if” question. Unfortunately, there's no clear-cut answer. One choice isn't necessarily better than the other, at least not in a straightforward way. In the novel, the characters are dealing with the same sort of questions and dilemmas, depending on which timeline they're living in and under which government, there are certain pressures added to their lives, and they still must navigate the particulars of their life in that timeline. There’s an impulse in people to be like, “Oh, but I would've been happier over there,” or “it's prettier over there.” You know, the grass is always greener effect. The novel approaches these ideas in a more literary and speculative way.
LM: I found place and positionality to be an interesting aspect of the novel. Luis and Anna, a couple and first-generation Americans, are studying abroad in Cuba, a communist country that the United States has economically and politically marginalized due to the value conflict, and it appears that they had to be placed on foreign soil to reckon with themselves, their relationship, and their grief.
RR: That's a great observation. I'm interested in characters who travel, I think , in part, because it's interesting when someone is in an unfamiliar or new kind of landscape. I included Cuba within the novel because a couple of years ago, I went on a spring break trip to the country, and the place, its history, and culture generated the seeds that eventually became this novel. Also, I was thinking about an alternate history in which the leftists won in El Salvador, and Cuba was one of the few real-world examples, so I had to include the country as a place and as an idea within the scheme of the novel. One of the undercurrent themes in the book is the privilege of mobility and travel, so I thought it would be interesting to send these American-born characters who can travel abroad but feel complicated about these privileges. At the heart of my writing, I am thinking about how borders and nations are a political construct. Because of the political rhetoric that we have in the United States, people think of “the border” as this static thing, but it's not, and it has never been, despite people's attempts.
LM: You are a first-generation immigrant, and as a result, you’ve lived between two worlds—California, where you were born and raised, and the memory of El Salvador from your parents. But you write about El Salvador as if it were your own home. What is it about your parents’ homeland that calls you to the page?
RR: I have both an academic and intellectual interest in El Salvador and the history of El Salvador because the country has shaped my family's history. Moreover, I write a lot about immigration and immigrants, and I have so many close friends and family members, but I've never had that experience of immigrating. I am drawn to these topics because it has a rich depth of experience that is not examined in a lot of literature. There's so little written about El Salvador in general, historically by Salvadorans or by the children of Salvadorans. The novel is trying to capture the full kaleidoscope of what it means to be part of an immigrant community through the multi-generational characters.
LM: Speaking about multi-generational, I'm sure you grew up hearing stories from your parents, your aunts, and your grandfather about El Salvador, and even though you did not live through those moments, their memories have informed you, and it has become a historical document of sorts. Can you talk about when our memories become history?
RR: That's so beautifully put. I love that idea that so much, I wrote it down. One of the themes in the book is how we access history, whether it's family history, family memories, or official state-sanctioned history. A sociologist wrote an article that argues that because the United States spent so many years underplaying the kind of authoritarianism that was happening in El Salvador and their role in it, it created a cultural denial, which she argues that people who immigrated have unknowingly embraced. So many children of Salvadorian refugees didn't grow up knowing about their history, both because it was traumatic and hard to talk about, and because there were all these big forces saying that it wasn't as bad as it was. I have experienced this myself. My mom didn't tell me about her experiences during the war until I was in college, and I was doing academic research. That silence stops us from telling our history and from preserving our memories. In a way, I’m using history, our memories, and fiction to tell our stories and make us uncomfortable with the silence of the past.
LM: Archives of Unknown Universes is a novel that is jam-packed with everything: love, regrets, war, memories, and immigration. What are two takeaways you would want readers to know about this book?
RR: First thing—we must take care of each other regardless of who is in political power, and we have to continue to build our lives and community, even when the pressures from the outside feel insurmountable. The second takeaway—I hope this novel makes readers more curious about El Salvadoran history, culture, and its people beyond the gaze.
LM: Lastly, one of my favorite questions to ask writers is based on Edwidge Danticat’s book, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artists at Work. In the book, she said, “Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.” How are you creating dangerously?
RR: I’m creating dangerously by taking a risk when it comes to blending genres. This novel is both speculative and historical fiction, and at the same time, it’s a campus novel. Doing this comes with risks, but it gives my writing life. Additionally, all my work has a clear political stance, which I think some fiction writers are a little hesitant to do because it can take the attention away from the book’s characters and the emotional questions of a text, and it always feels a little dangerous to engage with politics so explicitly.
RUBEN REYES is the son of two Salvadoran immigrants and the author of the story collection There is a Rio Grande in Heaven, which was a finalist for The Story Prize and longlisted for The Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Slate, LitHub, and other publications. Originally from Southern California, he now lives in Queens. Archive of Unknown Universes is his first novel.
LESLIE-ANN MURRAY is a fiction writer from Trinidad & Tobago, and a citizen of East Flatbush, Brooklyn. She created Brown Girl Book Lover, a social media platform where she interviews diverse writers and reviews books that should be at the forefront of our imagination. Leslie-Ann is working on her first nonfiction essay collection, This Has Made Us Beautiful, about incarceration, race, immigration, education, and the overwhelming impact of these political forces on herself, the boys and men in her life, and the women in her community. She has been published in Poets & Writers, Zone 3, The Audacity, Ploughshares, Blackbird Journal, Adroit Journal, and Salamander Literary Magazine.