It is like Lolita, but the other way around”, an idea that the members of the jury have repeated: in this case, a mature woman lives a great passion for a young man. And, furthermore, it takes place in a collapse scenario: a blackout. It is a novel: it is titled Vladimir (precisely, in honor of Nabokov, author of lolita). Its author is Leticia Martín, born in Buenos Aires in 1975. She has won the I Lumen Novel Prize by majority.
This Thursday the ruling was announced, in the Eugenio Trías library in Madrid, inside the Retiro park, in the middle of the Book Fair. The jury was made up of the writers Clara Obligado, Ángeles González-Sinde (former Minister of Culture) and Luna Miguel, the bookseller Lola Larumbe and the literary director of Lumen, María Fasce, who defined the novel as “very disturbing and deeply disturbing”.
“The attraction and seduction of a mature man towards a young woman has been represented many times in literature, but the desire of a mature woman towards a young man has not. Vladimir bet on reading lolita in a feminine key, in the context of a world that is going out. With great narrative tension and a steely style, Leticia Martín has written a controversial novel about the limits of desire and power relations,” the jury’s statement read. The prize, intended for female writers (407 works from Spain, Latin America and the United States were presented), is endowed with 30,000 euros and the publication of the book in Lumen, which will be in September.
“It is a provocative novel”, says González-Sinde, “it talks about the depletion of resources, both physical and moral, and contains an interesting reversal of roles”. It is also interesting to use the collapse not as a plot, but as a setting, a phenomenon that is also seen in other recent novels, such as the latest by Isaac Rosa, Lucía Litjmaer or Agustín Fernández Mallo, which speaks of the climate of normalization of the daily apocalypse. . “I needed to speed up the times and that was achieved in a catastrophic context,” explained the winner, who was speaking from Buenos Aires by videoconference. “In your situation there is no light, there are no screens, there is no outside.”
“This book shows that talking about sex and desire is not talking about love, that talking about the end of the world is not talking about heroism, and that you can write a tough and dangerous novel while also being tender. Basic instincts are not just a matter of last survival”, said Luna Miguel, who claimed to have “eaten” the book in one go and reread it a couple of times. It is also a short novel. Regarding eroticism, Martín cites the influence of Marguerite Duras. “I have a lot of respect for eroticism, I find it very difficult to write, something that I always feel is wrong: Duras is the teacher in this,” explains the award-winner, who she cites as another of her teachers, Silvina Ocampo.
The abuse of power is another theme of the book. “It is an eternal theme: that someone with power, be it economic, political or labor, abuses that power in front of others. It is an issue that should continue to be discussed. What should not be erased”, adds the author. These are common themes in her work, and she points out that, as they say, writers are always writing the same book. “I have been working for a long time on the border between civilization and barbarism, the human and the animal, it is a line that I do not want to close,” adds the winner.
Martín has a degree in Information Sciences and a postgraduate degree in Cultural Management and Communication Policies. She is the author of the essay feminisms (2017) and the novels Taste (2012), estrogens (2016), rusty bulldozers (2019) and a new noise (2020), in addition to a long series of poems. estrogens He met the Spanish edition, in 2019, by the Huso publishing house.
The Lumen Women’s Award was convened between 1994 and 1999, to discover literary talent among women writers, and Ana María Matute, Ana María Moix and Cristina Peri Rossi, among others, were part of its jury. Among the winners were Ángeles de Irisarri, with Ermessenda, Countess of Barcelona, in 1994; Ana Rodríguez Fischer, with lost items, in 1995; Clara Forced, by Marx’s daughter, in 1996; Alicia Gimenez Bartlett by a foreign room, in 1997; and Clara Usón, for The night of San Juanin 1998. The current Lumen Award could be seen as a continuation of that award, and Vladimirby Leticia Martín, as a continuation of that record.
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