Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Bogotá, 1973) says that perhaps what we read in difficult moments challenges us in a more special way, or at least that was what happened to him in 1996, when he had just arrived in Paris and his body It failed for reasons that the doctors could not fully clarify. He spent a lot of time in the waiting rooms of the offices, also on the subway to get to his appointments, to which he always arrived accompanied by his discomfort and a book. One of those was ‘Press Note’, a compilation of columns by Gabriel García Márquez in which he read this one from 1982: «The sculptor Feliza Bursztyn, exiled in France, died of sadness at 10:15 p.m. last night. Friday, January 8, in a restaurant in Paris. He didn’t know it then, but the ghost of that woman was going to accompany him for the rest of his life. Twenty-nine years later, in Madrid, already in his fifties and with ‘The Names of Feliza’ (Alfaguara) on the table, the man does not miss a word when reciting those journalistic lines almost like a very personal prayer. She has said it so many times… —Why has it taken so many years to finish this book?— Marguerite Yourcenar said that she tried to write ‘Memoirs of Hadrian’ at the age of twenty and failed. And he tried again at thirty, and failed again. And it was only at forty that he achieved it. She says that she needed to have gone through certain experiences, to have known certain things in order to be able to write the story of this character from the character herself. And a bit the same thing happened to me. I needed life, experience, a certain amount of knowledge, not literary but human, to get into her skin. It was necessary to reach fifty years of age to understand Feliza Bursztyn properly. And all these years were necessary, too, to learn to write this book. To have the literary tools I needed to transform a real life into fiction, and that I learned writing ‘Looking Back’ and ‘The Shape of Ruins’. —In all that time, did that obsession never disappear? -Never. But it seems to me that a writer is only the result of his obsessions. There are dozens of topics, stories that interest me, characters that I find curious or interesting. And only one of them stays and goes from being curiosity to being something more, an obsession. And that obsession becomes so intense that the only way to free myself from it is to write a book. For me, novels are a somewhat desperate attempt to free myself from a ghost, a demon that has been dominating my imagination, my memory, my attention for years. And my books, in that sense, are each a small act of desperate rebellion against a consuming obsession. —Feliza Bursztyn was born in exile to her parents, Polish Jews, in Colombia. And then during his life he had to go into exile twice from Bogotá to Paris. And he has his daughters in the United States… He is a character out of place, just like Sergio Cabrera, the protagonist of his previous novel, ‘Look Back’.—I am interested in people who are in a place that is not theirs. . There is a very old English word that I really like, which is tenant, ‘inquiline’ in English, which is defined like this: animal that lives in someone else’s place. These animals have always interested me. And in the case of Feliza even more so, because, having the origins she had, having the clearly foreign name she had, she always had a very strong Colombian vocation, so to speak. Colombia was always the place where he wanted to live, where he wanted to live. And at the same time that is the society that expelled her, that tormented her, that persecuted her. Those contradictions are what make my country so fascinating to me. Colombia is a hostile and violent place, but at the same time it is a fascinating place with a brutal capacity for resilience. This country is my obsession, my only interest. I have never written a story that is not Colombian in some sense. —Why Feliza?—Because she can’t be pigeonholed. I was interested in building her as a woman, as a family woman, as a woman who escapes from the family, but at the same time continues to love her and continues to feel that lost family, a kind of lack in her life. His life was a constant navigation between opposing forces, always trying to negotiate between the different roles that his society assigned him and his attempt to find what his own role was, to define himself on his own terms. She was a left-wing bourgeoisie, she supported the Cuban revolution, but she was not a communist: she refused to join the communist party, she refused to enter active militancy. He always wanted to be free and defend the spaces of his freedom. “A writer is only the result of his obsessions”—I quote: “The bad thing about loving a person so much is believing that we know them.” Are we all hiding some mystery?—I think so. One of the reasons we read novels is because we are aware that we never finish knowing anyone. We don’t know anyone, not even our thirty-year-old partner, not even our children as well as we know a character in a novel. And in the same sense, a life reading novels gives us a mysterious ability to interpret others and know a little more about who they are without them revealing it to us. Reading novels is also learning to interpret others and to intuit the invisible sides of the visible mask that they present to us. —Now that lies invade everything, literature seems to have become the territory of truth.—Today, half of the United States believes that Biden stole the previous elections and that the assault on the Capitol was a love festival , and that the participants in that act of sedition were patriots seeking freedom… In recent years, for various reasons, the notion of objective reality has disappeared. Before we agreed that reality was one and we interpreted it differently according to our convictions. It’s not like that anymore. We have witnessed the rupture of objective reality. Partly because of the strange transformation that social networks have caused in our behavior, in our way of being in the world. And in this terrifying landscape, where we have lost our orientation, where it is impossible to know what is true and what is false, something so profitable for autocrats, in this terrible landscape a work of fiction can be a space of certainties. A space where the truth that is not being told is told. In the stories that pass for true. What passes for not being fictional. But of course: novels are still a corner of our experience that exists for very few people. Novel readers are a minority. —He maintains that she died twice before she died. Have you ever died? —Yes, but if I tell it I will tell it in a novel.
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