Guillermo Arriaga likes to squat, hidden in the middle of the undergrowth while waiting for hours, or days, for his prey. It can be a deer, a wild pig, a turkey or even a reader because, for this Mexican writer, what really matters is hunting.
“I am not leaving because of the pandemic but, whatever happens, in December I am going to the mountains. If I have to drive 24 hours, I will, "he explains bluntly," I hunt with a bow, then you must have a much closer relationship with nature, you must blend in and have incredible patience because you have to crawl for hours following the animal. In addition, 99.9% of the time the prey escapes ”.
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Arriaga received this year the Alfaguara Novel Prize for Salvar el fuego , a novel to which he dedicated four years and four "exact" months, he says with a laugh. He wrote 500,000 words and had to cut his manuscript in half: "What happens is that I have no plan, I wrote it as a whole and did not know where it was going, I discovered that along the way," he explains.
Arriaga, celebrated for his parallel story games in the scripts of films such as Amores perros , 21 grams and Babel , forges in this novel a pact with readers through the story of Marina, a choreographer who tries to keep her creative flame alive in boring marriage and raising children.
In that boredom of a prosperous life that threatens her artistic ambitions, Marina meets José Cuauhtémoc, a man sentenced to half a century in prison for a murder. And a frenetic plot is fired that speaks of furtive love and couple relationships, but also of the rules of "true" literary art, drawing an acid portrait of inequality and violence in Mexican society.
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“I have a genuine interest in human beings, I am interested in all of them,” says the author, “I think that in any being, no matter how deplorable their behavior, there must be some hints of humanity; they are difficult to see but my obligation is to find them ”.
Guillermo Arriaga won the 2020 Alfaguara Prize for his novel 'Salvar el fuego' Penguin Random House
Question: How to tell a romance without falling for the pamphlet or the easy ways?
Answer: I think there is a complexity in human relationships, Balzac said that the body causes a certain luminosity which is an alphabet that only someone with a similar alphabet can read. I think that the protagonists are not opposites who attract each other, but people who have a great affinity in subjects: they are both interested in culture, they both have a certain passion for creating. José reflects the world that Marina would like to have, only that he is in prison, but he is not the opposite. I think it's about how in completely adverse circumstances these two like-minded people relate to each other.
Q: Unlike other contemporary novels, Salvar el fuego explores the criminal universe of Mexico without falling into admiration or apology.
A: I would never want to make an apology for crime. I think that those of us who live in Latin American countries know that this has very serious consequences. Violence has a weight and taking it lightly I don't think it's the right thing to do. Yes, I speak of organized crime but I do not present it as an ideal or as people who are doing the right thing.
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Q: You often say that instinct guides you when you write, how great is the influence of the unconscious in your works?
A: I believe that the unconscious has much more intelligent mechanisms than the conscious to create. Now the novel is a wild animal. If it could be tamed right now, it would be a Nobel Prize winner and a millionaire like JK Rowling, right? Or how was Gabriel García Márquez, who has books that are recognized in the most prestigious circles of literature and, at the same time, sell millions. Although you make an attempt to orient where the books go, at the hour of the hour, the novel practically grows by itself.
Q: What was the research process for this book?
A: Unlike many people who write documenting about imaginary, I go to the border a lot and I have known the pain caused by organized crime, I have known the places where there have been killings, I have met young people who later I learned that they ended up with the narco and you didn't see any homicidal impulse in them. Simply for enrolling in that spiral of money and supposed fame they end up murdered at 18 years old. I couldn't make a caricature of that world, but I think I know enough to know the pain it causes.
Q: Do you feel like a Mexican or more Latin American writer?
A: Not only do I feel like a Mexican writer but I also feel like a writer from my neighborhood which is the Unidad Modelo, that is, I am the root of the root. And I think my work, in every way, has always been very Mexican. In almost all my works the country appears, perhaps with the exception of 21 grams, which is the only case where no explicit mention is made of Mexico, because everything else has to do with Mexico, everything, everything.
Q: Several characters in this novel seem to have come out of the streets of the Modelo Unit.
A: Of course, I have met many people who say "enough of humiliation, we are going to be the strongest and the most intelligent and the most cultured in this place, and they will never again humiliate us because in the field of ideas we are going to beat them. And if the ideas do not work, in the field of the madrazos we will put them in their place ”.
Q: What has affected you the most during the coronavirus pandemic?
A: The most terrible thing about the pandemic is that it stirred the sewage of social, economic and political systems. There you realize how corrupted the systems in the world are with all this concentration of deep wealth that happened in the last 50 years, and with all the deep inequalities. Being able to lock up for the coronavirus is a privilege and part of this black water that has bubbled up is the infinity of people who have died because they had to go out to work.
Q: The Rómulo Gallegos Prize, now awarded by the Venezuelan regime, has starred in one of the most intense literary controversies in recent years. What is your position?
A: The problem is that the Rómulo Gallegos award was not established by Maduro, it has been an award with great prestige for many years. The fact that a government has usurped an award of this caliber does not take away its tradition. I have many Venezuelan friends and I think I know Caracas quite well, and the truth is that people are starving there. The Chavista experiment has not yielded results and that is visible to all. And another government will arrive and Rómulo Gallegos will follow.