Interview with Nona Fernández: "I grew up in a land of dead and ghosts" | News instantly from LAVOZ.com.ar

From the earliest sketches to the consummate narrator, from beginnings to recognition, from private ghosts to those of a nation: between books The Sky and The Unknown Dimension unfolds the remarkable career of Nona Fernández (1971), writer, actress, playwright and Chilean screenwriter, dedicated to cross the political history of his country with popular culture and personal experiences.

The two books, published in Argentina this year, also reveal Fernández's inclination towards an interesting tragicomic abstraction, a speculative plot that is not exempt from fable, anecdotes and characters. "Between Sky and The unknown dimension lived a full life.They pbaded the craft, the look of a glance, the conviction and l & # 39; El Cielo was written by a young woman who plunged into commercial research, without much certainty, full of insecurities. The Unknown Dimension ] was written by a woman, 15 years later, with new insecurities and less certainties.The writing, since then, is a pure vertigo, "says the writer

The stories secretly intertwined from El Cielo pbad between wine, drops of blood, urban loneliness, the dead and Gothic decadence .. While there is still no sign of generational marks such as as movies, video games or songs – which later appear in novels as Fuenzalida or Space Invaders -, soliloquy, spectral prose, the will to say bitter truths.

"If I knew why I write what I write, maybe I'll stop doing it," he adds. There would be no secrets to discover, puzzles to tackle. I like to write like that, in a dim light, without clarity, without reason. Maybe as I grew up in a land of dead and ghosts, this fantasy came into my writing. But I do not know. And I do not want to know. "

The unknown size laureate last year of the prestigious prize Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, is the most sophisticated delivery of Fernandez to date, and the most audacious.The narrator enters without resguardos in the "unknown dimension" of the title, amoral limbo of a man and a designated era of the fantastic television series Rod Serling.As almost a girl, the protagonist reads in a magazine the illuminating testimony of a repentant torturer and the deserter of the Pinochet regime.The figure of Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales is invoked with the spirit of a medium in the present stage by memory institutions, somewhat emaciated and detaining from a regressive Manichaeism to the antipodes of the troubling ambiguity of the "unknown dimension."

the end, the narrator reports of a new generation (that of the grandchildren of the dictatorship) and repeat a regulation exciting accounts with horror, which is intuition as impossible as crucial for the existence of the future. Does this resolution open a new stage in Fernandez's work?

"I do not think the subject is exhausted As long as there is an expressive need, everything is legitimate I think, yes, that the editorial and academic movements tend to make some themes fashionable and to drown them in. Something like that happens with children's literature, does not it? Personally, I feel called to go into other subjects, to discover the "unknown dimension" of 21st century ", he explains

-Jugás with the imaginary pop.What motivated this gesture?

-All the referents, the Space Invaders Billy Joel, The Ghostbusters The Twilight Zone are part of the imagery of the period that I am trying to portray.They appear randomly in my memory when I try to reconstruct these scenes from the 70s and 80s. And also because there is a desire on my part to repe nser these questions and stories from Chile at the time. Remove them from solemnity, victimization, and officiality. Offer a new look, more messy, more playful, that is why winking at the pop, junk culture, sometimes to the humor. I really believe that we must be able to tell our story and for that we have to own it. Playing with these pop referents, which are also part of our culture, and giving them a sensible reading, is part of this exercise of ownership.

-Also TV writer. What does this dedication imply?

-The scenario of the television gave me the freedom to lead my literary and theatrical project towards purely authoritarian places. While others give lessons, write articles, do interviews or develop parallel careers that allow them to survive, I write serials. Through this, I am free to write what I want in my personal projects. These are very, very different creations. A book requires more thought, time, it's pure authorship. I am the only one responsible for what I write. But in a script my job is to translate the point of view of many people. A chapter of a soap opera sees a number of people far exceeding the publishing of any of my books. These are different writings where the common point is me. In this exercise, there are more interesting projects than others, but I try to appropriate them and do something that has some kind of utility.