There are parts of the year and a half it took him to finish Creep (AdN), his second novel, which Philipp Winkler (Neustadt am Rübenberge, 1986) is unable to remember. “I had fallen into a depression, and writing the book probably didn’t help,” he recalls. “The story it tells is very dark.” On this day in early May, it is a bright morning in Hannover, the closest city to his house in the country, where he lives with his partner and their rescued dog, but for that 2020, in full confinement, the sun —at least, in a metaphorical sense—it wasn’t bright enough. “At first I didn’t realize it, but the confinement played an important role,” he points out in a reflective cadence talk. “The derisory support given to artists made me realize that Germany sees itself as a country of thinkers and innovation, but in reality people still refer to Goethe and Schiller, figures who have long since passed away. they left. Besides, why should I find a separate job so I can afford to write, if that’s already a job? That idea blows my mind.”
In contemporary Germany, his name came to the fore in 2016 with the publication of his debut, hooligan (in Spanish it also appeared in AdN in 2017), a story that began while I was studying creative writing at the university and ended up being crowned as an unexpected commercial success for which he made a stage adaptation and is now preparing another for the cinema. If in that title she entered the sordid world of the violence of soccer fans, in Creep sneaks back into a hole that is as dark or darker: the one that opens in the depths of the dark webthe dark internet, that virtual underground where drug dealers, hitmen, pornographers and all sorts of shady businesses coexist.
“I could have written about social networks, about Twitter and Instagram, which I think are even more dangerous than what I describe in my book. It’s a totally different monster”, concedes the writer sitting on a secluded terrace, wearing a black outfit, blond hair tied up in a ponytail and blue tattoos peeking out from his hands and neck. “But if I decided not to write about people who become addicted to social networks, it is because I feel closer to the people who consume gore videos than to the ones. influencers from Instagram. Personally, I hate all of that. People do not realize the damage that networks have done to society, and that is not a secret either. There are a lot of workers in Silicon Valley who talk about it in Ted Talks and things like that.
In Creep—which was published in Germany after a new, Carnival, which has not been translated into Spanish—, Winkler recreates two stories with a multitude of common links that, however, never intersect. Perhaps because its two protagonists live isolated from the world in a radical, devastating way, or perhaps because their link is the Internet itself, that network that is supposed to tie us all with an invisible knot. Fanni, who lives in Germany, works for a surveillance company. The family he constantly spies on through security cameras is the closest thing he has to a human bond, though it’s hard to gauge the silence of his emotions after years of consuming videos peppered with summary executions, brutal accidents, and dismembered bodies. . All real. In Japan, Junya is a hikikomori, one of the hundreds of thousands of people who —not only in that country— decide to seclude themselves indefinitely in a room, imprisoned by their own decision in their bubble of solitude. Cruelly bullied at school, he now spends his days wandering shadowy forums where he draws instructions for committing crimes armed with a hammer and a mask. in the draft of Creep there came to be a third US-based character who was ultimately left out, though the book, Winkler believes, “works fine” without him. Neglected by their loved ones, devoid of all warmth, Fanni and Junya have disconnected their lives from tangible reality to the point of no return.
Set in the bleak landscape of hypermodernity, the background of Creep It does not stop proposing a review of the immemorial litany of psychological pain: the incurable wounds of an unhappy childhood, the hunger for affection and the thirst for belonging, wandering blindly with sticks in search of a meaning to live. Seeing the spiral of despair that unleashes on the pages of the book, it is not strange that his writing ended up affecting the author. “I think I’ve actually had depression my whole life, I just didn’t realize what it was. I come from a working-class family, where you don’t talk about things like depression,” Winkler confesses. As a writer who did not grow up among books, but with the noise of the television on at all hours, now he takes advantage of the influence that the audiovisual world imprinted on him to write the script for the film based on hooligan. “Working for the movies is a nice distraction from literature, where there are a lot of people with huge egos, and I don’t exclude myself,” he says. “But you can have a huge ego and treat people nicely or act like an asshole for no reason.”
In order to recreate the stories that thrive in the most inaccessible corners of the Internet, the writer documented himself by visiting pages and forums, although he already had some references. “I grew up with rotten.comthe site from which the websites of splatter gore [el gore extremadamente gráfico y violento]so I already knew that world,” he says, “but to prepare the book I spent a lot of time in subreddits [categorías dentro de la web Reddit.com] of gore talking to people, and I also contacted hikikomori from places like Brazil, not Japanese, because they use other websites there,” he explains, to point out: “Both the hikikomori as the people who participate in the subreddits depersonalization are real people with real problems, so I didn’t want to use their stories for the benefit of my book. Although, of course, they were a source of inspiration.” When reading how Fanni mechanically consumes ultraviolent images that end up playing in a loop in her head, it is inevitable to wonder about the reason for this impulse. The writer launched that question on the Internet, and although not everyone was able to verbalize a justification, he found a reiterated answer: “They often told me that it reminds them of how valuable life is, their life, and how it is It can be over in an instant.”
That Fanni is a woman in a subculture where men abound is a striking fact. Even more so considering that Winkler’s previous novel, hooligan, also thrives in a testosterone-laden environment. “I wanted to try to create a female protagonist, because I had never done it before, and I think I was especially respectful of the fact that I am a cis man and not a woman,” the author continues. “I don’t exactly bring a female perspective, because in the book there is no perspective from the self, but I think the narrator’s language is very close to who Fanni and Junya are, it’s colored by how they see themselves.”
Another noteworthy issue regarding the style of the novel is the use of a multitude of terms in Japanese to represent the universe where the Tokyo character moves and others in English related to technology to recreate the German one, an ambivalent decision On the one hand, it is enormously relevant to reflect how people speak not only in Internet jargon, but also, increasingly, on a day-to-day basis, and on the other, it poses a challenge when it comes to reading. “It’s funny, because there are people who tell me that it was difficult for them to get into the book because of this issue, and others who say that nobody talks like that, but I asked two people who work in the sector and they assured me that people He talks like that all the time.”
Finishing his coffee and another rolling cigarette on a terrace on a street near the center of Hannover, flanked by elegant stately homes and situated at the entrance to a lush urban forest, Winkler summarizes the various projects currently keeping him busy. Besides the adaptation of hooliganis working on a second script that, at first, was going to be based on Carnivalhis new, but that has ended up becoming an original story. In addition, he is going to start writing a future book “seriously”, which starts from reading the complete collection of stories by Richard Ford as a source of inspiration. “I read it because my agent thought it would be useful,” she says. “But now I’m reading the series Aubrey-Maturin, by Patrick O’Brian, which are 21 books about sailors and naval battles set in the Napoleonic Wars. I like it. It’s totally different from what I’ve read. It is very authentic and fantastically documented, although it is also quite racist and sexist, because those were other times. But I really think it’s different than what you can find in literature today, even though the old white men are still writing,” he laughs. And he realizes: “What’s more, one day I too will be an old white man.”
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