Goodreads asked Sergio Troncoso:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Sergio Troncoso My most recent book is a revised and updated edition of my novel, The Nature of Truth, which was published in 2014. So I'll focus on that book.

I love philosophy in literature, that is, literary works of ideas, novels that explore moral questions, novels discussing and arguing about philosophy, whether this is done obviously or below the surface. One of my favorite writers was (and is) Dostoevsky, and I loved Crime and Punishment. Yet I also felt he did not quite attack morality at its core in this novel. Raskolnikov kills the old lady for instrumental reasons: that is, he kills her for the money, and not because she deserved to die. Also, I thought Dostoevsky copped-out at the end, when Sonya and Christianity save Raskolnikov. Wouldn't it be better, I thought, to write a novel where the protagonist does something morally wrong (but that he thinks is morally right), and then saves himself after he realizes what he has done? That kind of novel would really question the nature of morality, the nature of truth.

Beyond these and other literary influences (Nietzsche, for example, is also important for my novel The Nature of Truth), I was also a graduate student at Yale and I had experienced the winner-take-all mental combat that is the norm at many Ivy League seminars. There was a certain obsession with the pursuit of the truth, an obsession in which individuals would easily lose their humanity in search of the truth. I also believed 'The Truths' agreed upon at many of these seminars were just well-argued perspectives often incompatible, or even contradictory, with each other. In a way, it was truth by brute intellectual force. So I wanted to write a novel about this pursuit of an abstract truth, and categorization, that I believed was at the root of racism, at the root of dehumanizing individuals. When you think of this person as 'this category' or 'that category' it is much easier to do violence to that person because that person has ceased to be an individual, has ceased to have a empathetic connection with you.

Helmut Sanchez, the protagonist in The Nature of Truth, is half-Mexican and half-German. He discovers that his boss, a renowned Yale professor, hides a Nazi past. Helmut's mixed heritage (mestizo) allows him on the one hand to be empathetic to others not like him. Yet his obsession with the pursuit of the truth about Professor Hopfgartner also consumes him in a dangerous manner. Anyway, I won't say anything more than that, to prevent spoiling the novel for others.

Thank you for reading my work.

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