He says that during confinement he took refuge in literature. “That is, I dedicated myself to writing a couple of very bad novels,” says Martín Caparrós in an interview offered to this newspaper. The writer and journalist will give a keynote address today at the Quito International Book Fair.
He is the author of more than 30 works, with a career that began at 16 years of age. Talk about his dystopian novel and death.
Caparrós predicted it
The title of his latest book gives an idea of the subject, his name refers to eternity, and that is precisely what he proposes Endless, a novel of more than 500 pages in which Caparrós moves to the year 2070 to narrate about a civilization, which, rooted in technology, celebrates the greatest achievement: immortality.
It is the chronicle of a fiction, which poses death as an error. “It is basically about this attempt to find a technique that allows us to defeat death, death thought of as a mistake that can be solved and that one of the ways to solve it would be to transfer minds to computers where the brain is still alive “, bill.
“What caught my attention is that the book was published just before the beginning of the pandemic,” says the Argentine, who indicates that in Endless mentions about enjoying paradise as long as minds are cut off from everything else. “In other words, the condition for survival is isolation. This was published at the beginning of March and fifteen or twenty days later they told us, if you want to survive you have to isolate yourself,” he recalls.
Many have pointed to his work as a kind of prophecy, but for him it is a matter of looking closely. “It was just getting carried away by the things that I perceive in our contemporary society and trying to imagine how they could evolve if they continued in the same direction …”he points out.
He adds that it was thinking about the insistent and decisive fear of death, something that he considers has created part of “our” culture.
Is Martín Caparrós afraid of death? “More than fear I have a lot of hate for it, it seems to me a real shame that all this is over. I like to live, do things, I like to think. I hate that it is over,” replied the journalist from the other side of the screen.
More than fear I have a lot of hatred (for death), I think it is a real shame that all this is over. I like to live, to do things, I like to think … “
What has the pandemic left for the writer?
“The pandemic is another demonstration of that, from when we believed that this world we lived in was unchangeable, of a terrifying solidity, we discovered that it was enough with a Chinese bug to suddenly change so many things,” he reflects.
“If we can learn anything from these shitty months, it is that everything is modifiable, everything can change”, Add.
For Caparrós, these months undressed fear, showing it in an absolutely obscene way.
“If fear did not exist, there would be neither states, nor religions, nor the police, nor marriage, nor hair transplants. But we have never paid as much attention to fear as in recent months, where everything we did , we did it by and for fear, by the most primitive fear, the fear of dying and that made us accept things that we had never accepted, that we lived in ways that we had not imagined and that basically we will distrust absolutely everything“, he points.
A new book for 2021
Latin America is the protagonist of his next book, which he plans to publish in 2021. “It is a book that is practically finished, where I try to tell and understand what Latin America is now. This is an attempt at a general view of the region, which I think has not existed for a long time. I try to think about the region, its problems and its situations (…). I try to see the great constants in the region: inequality, violence, culture, religion, women, migration, etc. ”, he comments.
Ecuador, specifically the province of El Oro is one of the corners that would be part of this work, after visiting the place and its banana plantations in February of this year. “I wanted to tell a case of raw material production and it occurred to me that the banana is a quite exemplary case, because Ecuador is a leading world exporter of bananas, it is pure raw material. And I wanted to see how it was done, what the whole mechanism is like ”.
Literary recommendations
Before ending the interview, you are kind enough to suggest two works to read: Commonplace death, from Tomás Eloy Martínez. “Tomás died about ten years ago and that book is still extraordinary.”
And also Life and destiny, from Vasili Grossman. “It is one of the great novels of the 20th century, it is about the Russian war against the Germans and the Stalinist repression and the concentration camps of that time and more …”
“I think that if they can read those two books before the end of the year, they will have already saved the year”, concludes.
The ‘master of the chronicle’ will speak today at 4:00 p.m. with his lecture Latin America? To participate you only have to enter filquito2020.com (I)
–
