Three years ago, Virginia Feito entered the Spanish literary panorama as a hurricane with her first novel, Mrs. March (Lumen). That history of psychological and crime terror that developed in the wealthy environment of Manhattan was so successful that it allowed him to change his profession and devote himself fully to writing. Now he returns with a bloody book and deranged by the hand of the same publishing house in Spanish and the Campana in Catalan. The translators have been Gemma Rovira Ortega and Inma Falcó, respectively. In Victorian Psycho There are fear and minds upset again, but the author has decided to serve a menu of viscera to cause some stomach revolting in addition to restlessness in readers.
The path of this novel from the blank page to bookstores has been arduous. The writer began working in her in 2020, but could not get her forward. Contrary to what happened to him with Mrs. Marchwhich flowed easily, it was choked to the point of setting it aside. The manuscript did not work, you had to edit a lot and she hates that process, so she chose to flee forward and write a new success book in a month, like Charles Dickens with Christmas story. The plan did not result as expected (it was predictable) and finally ended the one published now.
Victorian Psycho It stars Winifred Notty, a governess with little passion for teaching but much for the murder, which arrives at a house inhabited by undesirable nobles and its servants. Feito wrote it in full pandemic and perhaps that strange environment that was created in confinement influenced the personality of the main character. “I was in a very aggressive and very surreal mood. I noticed an anger inside that I had to vomit and had to do it, the poor, ”he says.
The evidence of influence
Yes with Mrs. March There was no doubt that the author knew Mrs. Dalloway of Virginia Woolf, the similarities of some elements of Victorian Psycho with American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis are equally obvious. Both for the title and by the personality of the protagonists, who enjoy the murder and dismembered equally. “I love that novel, it is a work of art. It is one of the most disgusting things I have read and also the most beautiful, ”says the writer. “Language can portray grotesque things in a very beautiful way. I think I was trying to do that, ”he says.
If Ellis is present, it is also Charlotte Brontë with the work of Netty governess, the relationship with her employer or the reference to the figure of ‘La Loca deliboda’. As if his Jane Eyre had entered Barrena and had decided to fix the situation in Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. In this sense, there is a bit of claiming the figure of the woman locked in the attic for having a behavior outside the norm, although also of questioning about whether in some cases it was a good idea to take it out of there. “Perhaps we had to simply accommodate her in the attic” adventures the author, laughing. The life of the Brontë sisters also served as inspiration because their experiences explain many things about their writings, mainly in what has to do with their torments.
“One day, Emily Brontë went to take a walk through the moor and met a rabid dog that bit her,” explains Feito, “so when he returned home, he took the iron, the wound caulted and waited a few days , to see what happened. Any Monday in Yorkshire in 1846 ”. That scene, for example, comes out in Victorian Psycho In a very similar way because for the writer it is a sample of the passion and the adventure with which – he supposes – everything was lived at that time. “Going to the street was a fucking adventure of life or death. The greatness of life can be seen in everything, at all times, for better and worse. You also died with 30 years, so you had to hurry, ”he says.
The question of whether evil or environmental is present throughout the book. While some details of Notty’s life can give rise to think that circumstances have led her to be a ruthless murderer, others suggest that her predisposition is natural. The author comments that she has read studies that argue that psychopaths do not have certain chemical connections in the brain that generate empathy, but others affirm that this absence is given by a childhood difficult or marked by abuse. “It’s something that fascinates me and I think the novel is a study on evil in all its aspects, because all the characters are doing it for different reasons,” he says.
Film antiherines
The two Feito novels will have their adaptation to the screen. Mrs. March It is in the hands of actress, director and producer Elisabeth Moss, who acquired the rights as soon as she read the novel. At the moment, they are in the process of revision of the script – “I have to deliver it shortly, thanks for reminding me,” he says – and there is no date to start shooting. However, the set of Victorian Psycho It will start operating next March if there is no unforeseen event. The project is promoted by A24, the producer of the moment, led by Zachary Wigon and starring Margaret Qualley (The substance). Feito is the author of the scripts of both films that foresee that they will be very different. It seems that the first will be more faithful to the book than the second, although he affirms that you never know where the shots will go once the script is over.
Cinematographic adaptation cannot be the same as the novel under any circumstances. Suddenly there is no budget to make a stable, so that scene goes out. Nor can we violently kill a baby on screen, another part that is removed
Virginia Feito
– Writer
“I’m exciting with caution because this is Hollywood. Sometimes it seems that everything is wonderful and then it takes ten years or collapse or someone leaves, ”specifies. In the case of Victorian Psycho It gives you the feeling that it will be a very original movie and that seems great. His script could become a musical or science fiction, but he is not restless because he trusts the director completely. “The film adaptation cannot be the same as the novel under any circumstances. Suddenly there is no budget to make a stable, so that scene goes out. Nor can we violently kill a baby on the screen, another part that is removed, ”he explains. The same goes for the image of the protagonist: while in the book she is a fat and ugly woman, as described by other characters, on the screen will have the physicist of an interpreter with an undoubtedly normative beauty. “This is Hollywood and if Margaret Qualey wants to make the movie, I am happy,” he says.
The privilege of success
Thanks to the good reception that his first novel had, Feito could leave his job in an advertising agency and devote himself full to writing. However, it is not that this change of profession assumed a void leap because he had a good mattress in which to fall if his literary career suddenly ended. The author comes from a family more than accommodated – his father was the Ambassador of Spain to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris – and her education was developed in elite schools in the French capital and Madrid (an American one and the another British). In addition, he graduated in English literature and dramatic art in England and resided for a year in New York with a scholarship. Hence you write in English and Mrs. March It was published a year earlier in the United States than in Spain.
In all this time, his life has not changed too much. “Apparently I’m still the same, with the same man, the same friends and I live in Madrid. And if I had not had to move, I would continue on the same floor, ”he says. What literature has done is to fill a vacuum that I felt, an emotion that compares with having a child. “I am not a mother, but the closest thing to what I feel that I have heard is when some friend around me has explained that having a child had filled her, that she could not live without being a mother,” he says.
At the moment, he rules out to return to the world of advertising if he has to look for a job ‘of dispatch’ again although he has the saying “never say”. Just in case, it maintains that labor email in case you have to return, but suspect that you might not want it again because it was not “so good,” articulates. As he is doing in the literary world, he does not seem to have to return.
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