At the beginning of everything, there is a woman who does not know where she is going, where she came from, who does not know anything. Her name is Paulina, she’s in her thirties and she’s stuck inside her Peugeot 307. With a dog and a teenager after an accident. He smells of gasoline, he hurts everywhere, he cannot open his eyes, he cannot move, and he hears the distant echo of a conversation on the radio in which words such as dollar and inflation are heard. AND This beginning is actually the end of a story.She’ll tell us from a first-person perspective how she got here, to that disaster, and we’ll know that it all started (though perhaps much earlier) when her boyfriend told her she couldn’t stand it. Now and then, they’ve reached that point, where that guy already has a toothbrush, chats every dinner, and watches movies on the couch. travel together, promise things and have childrenFrom where.
And this separation, the end of love, the other catastrophe, is the seed of the other, with which ‘Queen of the Dance’ (Anograma) begins, written by the Argentinian Camila Fabbri, a finalist for the 2023 Herralde Novel Prize. Taking its title from that ABBA song, this song tells us what it feels like to be abandoned, when the idea of community crumbles and bonds disappear, when the lost closeness leaves a huge void and You discover that your relationship with reality is different and you have lost the language to communicate with him and others. “The end is something else, something very different is despair,” a man will say to Paulina, and this is not only that, it is the subject of this novel. The protagonist seems to be searching for a new and different identity of his own. It’s like after the disaster you wonder who you are when you’re no longer with someone else.
Camila Fabbri (Buenos Aires, 1989) actor, playwright, theater director He made his debut as a director with the film ‘Clara gets lost in the forest’, which premiered at the last edition of the San Sebastián Festival. He made his literary debut in 2015 with Los Accidents, a book of stories. This was followed by his first non-fiction novel, ‘The Day They Turned Off the Light’ and his second story collection, ‘We Are Here’. Trustworthy’. In 2021, he was chosen as one of the 25 best narrators of Spanish under the age of 35 by Granta magazine. He has been living in Madrid for three months, took part in the writing-in-residence program at the Eñe Festival and AECI, where she began a non-fiction project about musician Charly García. Fabbri, in an interview with this newspaper days before returning to his country, said that he was “in shock” after Milei came to power and the measures he started to implement. All I have right now is fear and anxiety.“I don’t know how we’re going to live, this is going to explode and we know it’s going to be suppressed and it’s going to be very difficult.”
how are people
In ‘The Dancing Queen,’ Fabbri draws a parallel between two collisions, that car crash and heartbreak, where for Paulina “the world kind of turns upside down when she goes through a breakup.” The author structures the soliloquy of the protagonist, who talks and talks but is better at thinking than talking, in a story that replaces past episodes with the present in a wrecked car, creating a sharp, dry voice. , abrasive and very shiny. That of a woman estranged and disconnected from realitythat of someone who doesn’t know how to communicate with her best friend, Maite, or with a man named Felipe who asks her when she drops him off. If “living so absently” seems normal to you. And that voice is someone’s voice, Fabbri explains, wondering “how people can reach such extreme closeness and then have that voice neutralized, as if the clothes had been taken off, as if none of this had happened, and as if there was something about the community and society.” “Perhaps intimacy is Paulina’s kind of obsession, trying to understand how people move in and out of these bonds, these relationships.”
“There’s a lot of nonsense about holding hands, exchanging saliva, and sucking each other,” Paulina says, and when that’s over, it’s like an approach, middle, and finally she’ll consider freezing her eggs while she searches for porn on her computer. There was a desire for conspiracy that ended in his life after the separation. Maite doesn’t understand why the men she sleeps with don’t fall in love with her and why she always comes home alone and asks for a light for her Marlboros and talks loudly. Paulina is also talking to herself, the man in the workshop will make fun of her and blame her and tell her about this. They say that because they don’t know how to drive, they damaged their brake pads, and that Paulina and Maite will brand themselves ‘Thelma & Louise’ with this car and drive to the countryside, to a lost little farm in the province of Buenos Aires. Her father lives in Maite, the town where Lara lives, which has a pool of green water filled with mosquitoes, Lara is turning 15 and will invite them to a party where she will be the queen of the dance and open the dance. o The adult life obligation he will escape from in the Peugeot 307 will hit the highway.
This isn’t brotherhood, it’s friendship
Dancing Queen is the story of women who feel lonely, who seem to be waiting for something to happen, the accident that takes them out of their current situation, and that longing for purification that changes everything. And although these bonds between them continue throughout the entire story, “there is no recorded record of it in the novel, and although it is true that the strongest bonds were between them, they were not sought after,” says Camila Fabbri.I didn’t want to write a woman’s story, but it turned out that way. Because the strongest people I’ve been surrounded by lately have been women, but they’re not unconditional because secretly they each guard their own territory and need to keep each other company while they fend for themselves, but that’s not how they create idea of brotherhood”.
The author explains that this is not a novel with a feminist mission, but it is true that some gender imperatives are present in her story, such as motherhood, the kind felt by a woman in her early thirties who believes she is “yours.” make a decision.” Its decision is like the coming of a prophecy that cannot be ignored, something that is already culturally established and resembles a historical war. So what happens if a woman that age breaks up? A man does not have this concern, and a woman carries it in an unspoken way.”. Fabbri, who submitted her novel for the Herralde Award under the pseudonym Sarah Connor, the boss played by Linda Hamilton in the ‘Terminator’ saga, demonstrates her career as a screenwriter and playwright with her brilliant and unpredictable dialogues and almost scenographic vision. Many situations, many indoors: a bedroom, an office, a hospital room, the inside of a car, or a pool of dirty water.
Fabbri’s writing is impressive, acutely aware and attentive to the cracks; He has the ability to build a crazy universe that goes from numbness to claustrophobia, in which he skillfully doses the violence of his male characters and the emergence of new bonds and loyalties formed by the hero. creates. Paulina will end her journey with a shout, followed immediately by this sentence: “There, my voice is back, I forgot”.