“Prose must rise to the level of collective neurosis.”

– Your writing seems to be built from another side, searching for new methods of representation, searching, like Fleur Jaeggi or Clarice Lispector, for linguistic tension and psychological tension.

– You mentioned two writers whom I greatly admire and agree with regarding the search for tension in language. But, more than psychology, I place myself in bodies, as they are the first space, the first cage where the word is spoken and transmits its way to the next space: the body of the text. That is, I do not mean to describe mental states, but rather to experience them. For this reason, I invent the people I occupy from within. I’m not too concerned with how they dress, with a stroke I understand. What I investigate is intimate, as if I were tasting his flesh and could see through other eyes, and dig from there. The body is the soundboard. No two sounds are the same.

– Is “Saturn Station” a false narrative again?

-completely. All stories are false, but I enjoy exposing the hoax. At this point, trying to relate facts from another century or supposed confessions without interference seems to me a childish and conservative gesture. The world is delirious, terrifying. Prose must rise to the level of collective neurosis. I hate to think of literature thematically. In any case, the novel is a displacement. I like to think about object path. It couldn’t fall where it already was. Or they will drown. Although vertical exploration has been little studied, let’s not rule it out. I invent ways of thinking that are completely disposable. Poorly made, throwaway laws. In that, I am loyal to the era in which we live. The template of the previous novel did not suit me. The urgent need for new bridges to jump from.

The daughter of an exiled Argentine journalist, she spent her childhood and adolescence in Madrid, always characterized by these two worlds, these two hemispheres. Also for an eccentric vision of our reality.

Gothic and darkness are the hallmarks of its narrative world. As well as duality and the problem of identities. But you reinvent yourself in each of your books. What news does “Saturn Station” carry?

– Thank you for pointing that out. Run away from what is known as gunpowder. Especially since writing, in my case, is a way to question our own traps. “Saturn Station” is my first novel in strict third person. It came from “Sulforo”, the second one, and I exercised impunity over the false selves of its predecessors, the chorales, and so on. I imposed a detached atmosphere upon myself to counter the irrational nature of the characters and the area. Sadness, alcohol and loneliness in these beings require a certain display of logic. Silly, but modified. On the other hand, from time to time, the director adapts the novel to film, and that is why I wanted to write a novel as if I were setting a technical text for the world, without abandoning the tools of literary language. That is, analyzing what is seen, heard and discussed, in addition to internal issues. Such as disgust, desire, and specific pain. Space itself dictated its laws: mapping Buenos Aires as a catalyst for madness and denial of the present.

– Do you think we find in it three ways of knowing: mourning (dead brother), journey, and that space (Tianqi Hotel) where everything transforms: space itself, time, existence and… the political image of our reality? What is that picture?

-I like what you are referring to, in all three ways. I’m thinking in particular of the train station that was dismantled in 1977. On the other hand, the novel is a trilogy and I wrote it in three different places. Part one in Buenos Aires. The hotel is in Prague, where I lived for a few months. The third part, which is the dissolution of reality, was written in Barcelona. In a way, the passage of the novel reflects my vision, and I played with certain reversals between Alice’s cat and the rabbit, to make the characters who follow it get lost. In the geography of the novel there are pure possibilities: a road, a station, a hotel, as well as bodies, names, and certainties. It is all temporary, absurd, hopeless, about a death that explodes the perception of time and space. The picture is inconsistent. Underwater photo. Family in a fish tank. The death of clarity. The farce.

– The presence of Captain Minor is prominent. Is it a distorted image of some of our political leaders?

-Our political leaders should not be distorted, they come from the factory that way. I should also point out that when I started with Minor, a certain Argentine governor had not yet come into office, was a ridiculous cast member of a television show, and had no appeal other than his extravagance. But I think my character has more discursive resources. Rhetoric is dead. Nobody needs it. Thought takes up less and less space. The last stronghold is literary writing, if it can build its own program, invent tools that go beyond the ordinary. I prefer to follow my own plans and fantasize rather than follow trends.

-But in the end he got it right.

-Yes. I sound like a historical writer.

– His writing is beautiful (unexpected connections, surprising similes), but it has a convulsive and irrational beauty. Don’t you think that little has been said about your irrationality, what Dali called paranoid criticism?

– There was a lot of talk in my house about my irrationality. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. I think I practice “external” reasoning. evade. I need to feel disapproved. But I’m quite rational, despite appearances. I am aware of what I am doing and also intuitive. So it seems I got lost. I think this double gesture is necessary. Spontaneity is not enough, but without it I would be a cardboard writer. Dry, imposed. I write sentences that I isolate as if they were fruits. I like that they’re alluring and a little nostalgic.

– In “Saturn Station” the family appears again. Is it one of those darknesses that we have to deal with?

It is the first institution of power and control over the individual as we know. I am speaking from a literary, that is, political, point of view. Poetry is desacralization. We know little about love. It is an ambition that cannot be achieved. Families break up and reunite. We usually think we can achieve it, but happiness is elusive. And when that happens, what a beauty. But it is better not to write it down. It is written from what was lost. Otherwise it wouldn’t be necessary. Sitting down to summon what is not there is a wonderful thing, which is why we are drawn to stories of orphans and lost girls. Children’s literature is built from sadness. The mother was missing, she died during childbirth. Or he ran away from his suddenly powerful father.

– There is the issue of women (abuse, gender issues) and sexual arousal. Can you tell me about both?

-It’s a challenge. Writing without being manuals, clear. Or, on the contrary, concession. Desire remains taboo. But sexuality regulates me when thinking about personality. It is, as Armonia Somers pointed out, no less important than the digestive system. There are fantasies in which no one eats and no one touches themselves. It’s hard to play as someone without those basic mechanics. What do these people want? I’m not talking about fun, I’m talking about the engine. How he crawls and how he chews the other. It bothers me not to know those things, to stay in the shell of things. Without desire there is no word.

-Finally, how do you explain that one of the defining features of Argentine fiction written by women is the Gothic?

– Personally, before the exile I lived in a house that my parents thought of in terms of model. Perhaps this fueled my tendency towards extravagance. My mother, from Lyon, included a glass wall in the front, as if to evoke her lost cathedral. It was an impossible house, with a tower, a basement, lighting effects, and stairs. We played there, as at other times. Reality has been like this from the beginning. It seemed fake. Then it became tragic. Dictatorship has dismantled this universe. But thinking collectively, I think we descend from fantasy as a philosophical category, from the delusions of River Plate and the turmoil of history. Evita’s feisty daughters, our gothic creature par excellence. Deified or demonized, political monster, eternally young mummy, absent/present. The story of a woman that is impossible to ignore. Like Mary Shelley, at the end of the world.