Sabina Berman’s new novel – El Financiero

You can be a millionaire and cynical enough to visualize in your mind that everything has a price; that turning poverty into a clientelistic business in new line stores to branch out and normalize the sale of souls is a logical question due to the natural order of reality; You can buy public positions and governments in turn, creating your own power structure that takes away all solace from governmental power, and yes, all of that is becoming dangerously normal.

All the old that does not finish dying – to paraphrase Gramsci – and the new that has not just been born is tarnished by the powerful of the checkbooks who, regardless of the names in the world, are actually a common denominator: feudal lords, until someone dares to denounce, someone dares not to normalize and above all dares to describe the palatial events of the entourage of human beings who depend on psychopaths with infinite portfolios.

And so Sabina Berman’s novel was born, the faithful portrait of the decline of public power leased to the designs of an individual who, without giving him a real name, the pseudonym warns that everyone knows perfectly well who he is, even before reading it.

As Sabina says, HDP, – her most recent novel – is a writing that was born in her imagination, but was documented with the Mexican reality. No fiction is needed, it is simply describing what happened, substituting names and the curtain of reality is there.

Berman cannot normalize, how the new feudal lord who stars in his novel, in a collective emergency -such as the Covid 19 pandemic-, Hugo David Prado makes his workers pay with their lives and with the sacrifice of their work because it is urgent keep starting the machinery of the “little fertilizers”.

Doing business with poverty for Prado is to use a bank that charges interest, but does not know how to pay taxes; who wants to sell installment loans and collect millions of poor people for life.

“Dogs have always saddened me, I thought, because they take care of their master’s mansion, but they continue to live in the kennel”, thus Sabina’s masterful aphorism clearly describes modern servitude and the esteemed power that thinks that everything, absolutely everything , is part of a new shopping center, where it is possible to buy any human or material merchandise that appears.

The problem for Berman is that when everything has a price, that everything really starts to lose value.

The acronym -HDP- naked full name and surname, title of his novel published by Planeta, which with the power of its inventory of yachts, mansions, television station included and a network of modern line shops, are propping up the excessive ambition to dominate everything , absolutely everything.

There is nothing more dangerous than a rich man who gets bored, because he no longer knows how to substitute his adrenaline power to buy to feel that he exists; leasing power with money and killing millions of workers with slow exploitation until a pandemic serves as the perfect pretext to begin his ultimate mission: to buy the presidency of a country.

To every government of the left that does not triumph – thinks the tycoon – corresponds a totalitarian and reactionary right. The “Mexican Trump” is going to try to buy the presidency by himself or through a third party, be it a man or a woman.

The logic for David Prado’s plan is that if a pandemic made the collective misfortune of a pandemic become its most important source of personal business and no one from the public power questioned it, power not only feels it close, but it strokes as easily achievable.

Yes, HDP, Berman’s new book, bluntly warns “this is a novel even if it looks amazingly close to reality.” Reading it is synonymous with an interest in understanding how Mexico is rapidly approaching turning fiction into programmed reality on a daily basis.

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