Leticia MartinArgentine novelist, born in 1975. won its first Lumen award this year Literatureby the publisher of the same name, whose name from the beginning (Vladimir), A tribute to Vladimir Nabokov and his weirdness lolita.
It’s not an erotic novel, it’s about that book that’s highly literary and arousing a lot of controversy, not only because all the characters start from the Russian nature in their own name like the great novelist, but also because nourishes disturbing fictions that do not cease to be literature.
same as it is lolita, A novel about the instincts that drive the world, with their discussion of the guilty or the innocent that dominates the debate in Nabokov’s work. Vladimir Poet Luna Miguel, one of the winning judges, said: “I think Leticia Martin’s novel shows that Basic instincts are not just a matter of last survival, but hitting our guts every moment of our lives.Whether it’s the end of the world or not. I find the portrait of dangerous, painful basic instincts fascinating.”
We spoke to him last Thursday before his trip to Madrid, where he presented his novel. Zoom in when you’re at her house Buenos Aires.
Q. Access Buenos Aires For Ezeiza, this is sometimes a daunting task. And the hero of his novel arrives less than a day after something like the end of the world begins…
R. It is true that arriving in the city was a blow. The airport is far away… And it’s true, the character arrives just as the world comes to a standstill due to a severe power outage, an unusual electrical accident. But that’s how things work in Buenos Aires, as if it were a bit more difficult than in other places. Maybe this is a product of the fact that we are a very young country, but also that Argentina is a messy country. and politically unstable.
Question: At least on the way, he encounters the training ground of the team with the captain. Messi…
R. Yes, it is indeed a sign that you are on your way to the city… The character in my novel finds his way through communicating with a kind of North American British accent because he anticipates that the people he asks for help will be more helpful… I worked and I always liked helping the tourists there, so my character longed to find such help. And indeed, they are helping him even if the end of the world comes at that moment…
Q. Why did it occur to you that it must be difficult to get there?
R. The character, a woman, flees the United States, where she is accused of molesting a minor. I thought it would be difficult for him to enter Argentina, but he didn’t need to make a statement about his past in a country other than the one he left behind. In the conspiracy there was the possibility that she was the daughter of Argentines exiled to the United States. While she was a university professor in the country she teaches, she becomes the protagonist of a harassment scandal and has a sexual relationship with one of her students. Everything had gone viral and she was going to Argentina to start a new life. I read some books to adapt to the subject and its depth, for example Misfortune, A novel by JM Coetzee in which these events take place in reverse is the abused woman. The scandal that my own female character went through caused this woman to look for another place to live. And when you arrive at Ezeiza airport, you know the end of the world is exploding…
Question: The end of the world metaphor is no stranger to certain events in Argentina’s history. Now that you’ve done it novelIn his country where such a fictional disaster took place, it turns out that reality revolves around an ultra-candidate who could become president of his country.
R. A few weeks ago there was a sort of looting by WhatsApp from seemingly helpless people in Buenos Aires, some of which had certainly been invented. This is what happens in my novel that I designed at least three years ago. Nets power everything and these loot events have been taken out of orbit. You know, there are lootings in the novel, they are counted, in any case, it seems to be the trace of what happened in this country in 2001, when looting and corralito were combined. Nobody got their money, the banks confiscated our money… I thought I should write about it too. Now when these looting events occurred and my novel was about to come out, I felt that what I had intended to describe as fiction was being repeated as fact. We writers are sensitive intermediaries who sometimes act as a means of conveying the word to say what is or will happen. In the case of Argentina, everything stinks of disaster right now, because among other things, it’s legitimate to come out armed when the candidate you mentioned and who can win says it’s legal to sell human organs and also that he’s going to finish off the Central Bank… We can count out. Then reality coincides with the future. And this, as I understand it, is a novel written for the purpose of reading rather than for the present.
“When these looting events were happening now and my novel was about to come out, I felt that what I had intended to describe as fiction was being repeated as fact.”
S. Kahraman meets someone who takes him to Buenos Aires, where he lives with his son Vladimir. Various changes make the chaos on the street, where there is looting and fighting, less serious than what happens at home. These are two realities. Where does the fiction that produces these results come from?
A. Someone told me the story of the abuse of a minor. He was already an old man and remembers a woman abusing him when he was younger. This impressed me so much that I wanted to write about it. Everything that emerges when one sits down and writes is true, even if it is pure fiction. The story was believable, stood up and had all the connotations imaginable in this type of situation. But I did not want to write an erotic novel, it is not. At that time, which I designed in the sense I described, there was a major power outage in Argentina in 2018, which also affected Uruguay and Paraguay. When this disaster happened, my first thought was where my money in the bank would go, what they would do with it. There is no receipt for the deposit. These assumptions led me to associate this fact with the project of my novel. Our teacher Ricardo Piglia, who we no longer have but leaves his words in writing, says that one story is always two stories. And this teaching convinced me that this reality story should actually be included in the novel I was contemplating.
“Someone told me the story of the abuse of a minor. He was already an old man and he remembered that a woman abused him when he was a minor. It touched me so much and I wanted to write about it.”
Question: Your female character, who finds refuge in the midst of disaster, is a male with a teenage son. He is among them, his name is Vladimir, a tribute to Nabokov, so the female character is a lolita On the other hand. And that’s the opposite, Lolita, an old woman who’s attracted to the boy, lives in the middle of a more serious drama than the disaster she’s reached at one point…
R. Nabokov naturally inspires him. People warned me that at the moment when Putin attacked Ukraine, it was considered inappropriate for father and son to take Russian names, since the father was called Rostov and the hero himself was called Guinea, which is a Russian name. city. I looked at the map, that name is there. Nouns mark characters, it is; Even the boy she had an affair with at the American university was named Nikolai; all this was a sign of respect for Nabokov and his friends. Lolita… When the novel ends, a conflict breaks out between Russia and Ukraine. They told me from the publishing house: “What are we going to do with Putin?” Remove Russian names? We didn’t. Even the title of the novel was a tribute to Vladimir Nabokov. What would we do? leave. And here is Vladimir Nabokov, honored by the cover of the novel.
Q. When did you study? lolita What do you think about the conditions that have become so controversial in the world so far?
R. I think Nabokov has succeeded in making me empathize with complete dexterity with the passion that wants to be suppressed and cannot be suppressed. A relationship with the impossible that goes beyond sexuality… I think we still have time to think that it doesn’t matter who committed the crime anymore, that the important thing is to analyze the crime, to determine what is to blame, to ask. Questions about whether the abuse was committed by a man or a woman.
Question: In the most serious war waged in Buenos Aires, where you place yourself between the powerful and the outcast as part of the War of the Worlds, a rifle appears. It’s not a metaphor, it’s used to shoot. Those are very scary. Were you afraid of writing as I was afraid of reading?
R. I was more afraid of the outside than the three people in the house. While I was writing the book, the epidemic we lived all over the world fueled the sense of disaster in the novel. I was afraid of hungry animals… It scared me to believe that I was there with the three of them and that outcasts and dogs would come and do something to us. And I won’t say anything else in case people haven’t read it yet.