An adolescent, Talía, feels offended by her own figure reflected in the mirror. She with dull fury she rejects the image of her. Her insecurities, her lack of self-esteem, and her prejudiced and double-standard social environment fill her with guilt. The horizon of her life, in which she includes her first loves, turns dark. In reality, as Belinda Palacios says, all of this constitutes “Talia’s descent into hell.”
Talía, a girl from the upper middle class of Lima, is the main character of chubby girl, the first novel by the Peruvian writer and philologist Belinda Palacios. The work has been published by the label Black Editionsin Spain, and will be presented tomorrow, in Barranco.
The author resides in Switzerland. She got her doctorate in Colonial Literature at the University of Geneva. She is currently a professor at her alma mater and also at the University of Neuchâtel, in Switzerland, where she teaches the chair of Latin American literature.
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history of the novel
Belinda Palacios assures that she wrote a first version of Niñagordita 10 years ago and shared it with friends, who greeted her. He promised to review and correct it for future publication. But the author had the academic commitment of her studies and her novel was relegated.
Thanks to the pandemic and confinement, he was encouraged to take it up again to correct it. She read it from a distance and with different eyes discovered a series of inconsistencies. He set about correcting it in the hope of publishing it one day.
“The first version is based on the love failures of my adolescence, a somewhat bland text, which was not convincing. And it is that my adolescence, I think, was not so dramatic as to sustain a novel. It seemed more like a kind of personal diary,” he explains. Belinda Palacios.
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In the proofreading work, he realized that at the time he wrote it his life had not been intense and he had had the need to invent many things and that for this reason the text seemed to him not very solid, not very organic.
“One of the main problems that I noticed – says Belinda – is that it was in the first person. A writer friend recommended that I change it to third person. When I try to change it, I realize that it had a narrator, but it didn’t have a protagonist of the story. And without a protagonist, obviously, the novel did not work. I told myself, I have to invent someone who lives that story. And that’s where Talía appeared.” And the rewriting of the novel began with Talía.
Talía had to have a family, friends, live certain circumstances, common situations in the life of Peruvian adolescents. Talía took over the story of the first draft, so much so that he “radically changed the text.”
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“Basically the novel is the story of the destruction of Talía, who is an upper-middle-class girl who studies at a religious school, lives with her parents and siblings. She is insecure about her body. She feels chubby, uninteresting, she reproaches herself, as usually happens in adolescence, ”says Belinda Palacios.
He assures that Talía has no escape. She is quite naive, because of her religious upbringing. She has a somewhat indifferent father with her children and her dim-witted mother, she is more concerned with finding solace in the church. Talía did not learn to love herself.
“That combination of lack of self-love and growing up in a society that finally imposes a series of values on him ends up playing against him. She finds herself involved in a series of situations from which she cannot get out, all of which constitute a descent into hell”.
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Can it be considered as a genre novel?
Of course. Although I did not write it with that idea, in any case it talks about the ignorance that young women have about their bodies, it talks about the prevailing machismo in society. The novel is a denunciation of violence against women, both physical and psychological. In addition, it deals with an area that is still considered a bit gray, which is sexual abuse and a consensual relationship, where the line is drawn.
guilt violence
Looking in the mirror and not accepting your body has a lot to do with a sexist imposition of the female body…
Completely. She looks chubby, they want to manipulate her and she will try to offer resistance, but she doesn’t have the weapons to protect herself from it. She does not understand what is happening and that generates a lot of guilt. But it is not true, she is not guilty of anything. She is a victim of what she is living.
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Talía, as Belinda Palacios says, is not guilty of anything, but she doesn’t know that. Readers who come to this novel will know.
Fact
Presentation. It will be held tomorrow, Tuesday, February 15 at the La Rebelde bookstore. Jr. Battle of Junin 260, Ravine. 6:30 pm The author and the writer will participate in the ceremony Maria Jose Caro. Limited capacity.