MEXICO CITY. Neither dystopia nor apocalypse: another future is possible from fiction. This is one of the conclusions that triggers the novel. Safe place, by Sevillian Isaac Rosa (1974). “It is an attempt from literature to propose a future beyond fear and resignation, one where there is room for hope.”
The winning work of the Biblioteca Breve 2022 Prize, which will go on sale on March 9, “tells the story of three generations of rascals, obsessed with social advancement, but who crash time and time again,” explains the editorial director Elena Ramirez.
It is a picaresque novel of the XXI century. If in traditional picaresque literature the motor of the protagonist was the promise of class advancement, the longed-for ideal of being able to abandon his condition as a rogue, the dream of the character Segismundo García rests on the concept of ‘social advancement’”, he indicates.
Safe Place is the name of a company that offers its clients a winning ticket, a man for himself, the only chance to survive the feared global collapse. Segismundo is a run-down businessman who believes he has found the business of his life: the sale and construction of bunkers. low-cost aimed at the lower classes.
His father went to jail involved in the bankruptcy scandal of a shady dental clinic business as well low-cost. And his teenage son, Segis, follows in the family’s “entrepreneurial” footsteps and sets up all kinds of shenanigans to make easy money.
Safe place takes place over 24 hours, in which the reader accompanies the protagonist in search of a hidden treasure. On his journey, we will see a world polarized by fear that is very similar to ours, “says Ramírez.
I wanted to write an anti-dystopia: tell a future in which, without the current problems having disappeared, some even becoming more acute, a possible alternative does open up that does not lead to the abyss, that could even improve our lives”, adds Rosa.
If there is a dystopia in the novel, that is a present dystopia, not a future one: the dystopia of entrepreneurship”, adds the narrator.
I wanted to tell a family saga in a business key, in which parents and children interact as if they were sitting at the table of a board of directors. The ‘safe place’ of the title is not only a refuge, a hiding place, but also that place where we put something valuable in a safe place, ”she clarifies.
Failed last January 18 in Spain, by a jury made up of Juan Manuel Gil, Pere Gimferrer, Benjamín Prado, Elena Ramírez and Andrea Stefanoni, the Biblioteca Breve recognizes that “Isaac Rosa makes a brilliant portrait of three generations of rogues from the same family who take advantage of the cracks in the system for their own benefit. A novel that catches and bothers and that reflects from the irony and the controversy the moment of uncertainty of the current society”, they point out in the minutes.
Safe place shows a fine irony to show how fear is permeating our daily lives, while part of the population refuses to hide underground, in a collective militancy that does not necessarily go through the institutions. A great novel, from a narrator who has specialized in telling the time in which we live in a masterful way”, says Ramírez.
The editor of Seix Barral concludes that this edition of the Biblioteca Breve, endowed with 30,000 euros and to which 858 manuscripts were submitted, has shown “how fiction seeks to reflect the need to order an unpredictable world, the importance of social and labor change and awareness of the unsustainability of the current way of life”.
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