Rarely an author raises as many unanimity as Argentina Samanta Schweblin, one of the Spanish writers with the best international reception. His new book of stories, ‘The Good Evil’ (Seix Barral), connects with the Argentine tradition of the “Strange Story.”
“I always felt a weirdo and tried to understand what happened to other obsessed with belonging to the greatest of the fictions we have, which is the idea of normality,” he said Monday at a press conference in Madrid.
Schweblin (Buenos Aires, 1978) acknowledges that we “need” normality because “standardize and automate everything makes us easier for us”, but believes that, at the literary level, “it is not interesting” and that “what really happens and touches the reader is a unique, authentic, vulnerable and strange character.”
When asked about his referents, he cannot avoid mentioning Quiroga, Borges, Bioy Casares or Antonio Di Benedetto, but ensures that in recent years he has incorporated many authors that took longer to discover, such as Sara Gallardo, Silvina Ocampo or other Latin American such as the Chilean María Luisa Bombal or the Mexican Elena Garro.
However, he says he does not agree with the statement that the best thing that is being written now is women. “Women represented a minority and when a minority bursts in, brings new points of view and stories that are read with freshness, desire and need; And that makes the focus get there, but not because they write better. ”
Schweblin debuted in 2002 with his first storybook, ‘The nucleus of the disturbance’. With ‘Seven empty houses’ (2022) he won the National Book Award for a work translated into the United States and has been twice semifinalist and a finalist to the prestigious international Booker.
Translated to 40 languages, their stories have been published in The New Yorker, Granta or The Paris Review; The New York Times compared her to David Lynch and her first novel, ‘Rescue distance’ (2014), was taken to Cinema by Claudia Llosa for Netflix.
His editor in Seix Barral, Elena Ramírez, said that rarely an author raises so much unanimity, and recalled that, among her readers, other prestigious writers such as George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, Siri Huvsted, Amy Hempel, Enrique Vila-Matas, Leila Guerriero or the recent Nobel Prize Hang Kang.
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“The good evil” has as its conductive thread a inquiry about “the invisible forces” that push us in a day -to -day basis and how, in that daily life, the strangeness bursts, often the tragic, to change everything.
“We are commanded by invisible forces that we sometimes forget, fears, betrayals, family mandates, we believe that our truths are the world, we do not understand that one thing is the world and another our truths,” reflected the author, who lives in Berlin for twelve years.
Regarding Milei’s irruption in the Government of Argentina, he recalled that the president himself has spoken in terms of “cultural battle.” The writer said that “going against culture in a country where culture has always been a place of shelter and brutal resistance is nothing intelligent.”
“We have passed out there and we stand up again,” he added.
On their writing process, he said today that the images are very present and start it, but there is something much more important.
“We standardize feelings, but what we feel is terribly specific,” said the author, who suspects that the reason she writes is to decipher “a series of commands” to install that specific feeling in someone else.
Sometimes, as in the story ‘Atlántida’s wife’, it may take more than a year to get it. The entire book has written it in three years. “Language is uncomfortable, it makes us what we are at the same time that we fail all the time, saying what you are thinking is almost impossible.”
Schweblin arrives with this book to the Seix Barral catalog, which also begins the recovery of its background with the publication of ‘rescue distance’; And in April ‘birds will arrive in the mouth’ and ‘Kentukis’.
With EFE information.
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