The appointment was in a classic cafe in Buenos Aires, but it is so hot these days in the Argentine capital that the meeting point changes and it is an air-conditioned and noisy cafeteria.
Camila Fabbri (Buenos Aires, 34 years old) speaks softly, but her voice can be heard in the commotion.
The Argentine narrator has a past as an actress, perhaps that is why her voice comes through.
Her present is as a novelist, and as one of the most prominent voices of her generation.
Her most recent book,
The Queen of the Dance
(Anagrama, 2023), was a finalist for the Herralde Prize.
The novel begins inside a car: there has been an accident, the protagonist has glass stuck in her body and does not remember who the teenager traveling with her is or the dog that is in the vehicle;
The narrative reconstructs the story of Paulina, that disoriented woman in her thirties.
Camila Fabbri's present is also as a filmmaker;
Her debut feature,
Clara Lost in the Forest,
was screened in September at the San Sebastián Festival
.
She was a playwright and could be an essayist — she is preparing something (she still doesn't know what form it will take) about her idol, the Argentine musician Charly García.
“It is very difficult to control what you want to do.
I made myself believe that she was not a person who wrote novels and yes, I wrote a novel.
I don't know if that makes me a novelist.
I don't know... But I notice a certain relaxation.
Maybe I have anxiety for other things, but not for this,” she says.
The heat will be followed by rain and Fabbri will quickly leave for Congress to arrive at a demonstration in defense of culture against Javier Milei's measures.
Ask.
When do you feel anxiety then?
Answer.
I relate it to sometimes irrational fears that something bad will happen.
Q.
Is writing a safe place?
A.
Well, obviously it depends on the moment and many things, but it is the longest lasting relationship I had in my life.
It's what I did the most, it's something I never gave up.
Q.
How did you take the news that you were a finalist for the Herralde Prize?
A.
Good.
She had a work desire to go to Spain at some point.
I had applied for a three-month residency in Madrid and when they confirmed my residency they also confirmed the novel [recognition].
This allowed them to be present at the delivery.
Q.
What was that job desire?
R.
It was an intuition to open myself to other places.
I never left Buenos Aires, I am very Buenos Aires and I always move around the same areas and the same people.
Due to different situations, including current circumstances, I began to think about what would happen if I could open up those possibilities a little.
Q.
The political situation in Argentina?
A.
I know that before there was something very weak and a lot of bad social humor, but I have a feeling that now it is no longer possible to live.
There are many different realities, but I think there is a common thread, that it is very difficult to make ends meet and trust in the future.
All we can think about and all we talk about is prices and inflation.
It is as if the world suddenly became too small and that generates great anguish.
Camila Fabbri, on a street in the Colegiales neighborhood.Mariana Eliano
Q.
Being as Buenos Aires as you say, do you see yourself leaving Argentina?
A.
All my life I thought I would never want to leave, now I don't know.
I love Buenos Aires, I am one of those people who believe that Argentina is the best country in the world, I am serious, but Argentina is like a conflictive person: it is a magnet, but it is also very conflictive.
Q.
I was in Madrid when Javier Milei won the elections.
A.
It is as if I had returned to another country.
It's the same, but it's in a very extreme state.
It reminds me a lot of 2001. I was still very young, I was 11 years old, but I think they are conflicts that leave the ground very prepared for tragedies.
Everything is very prepared for things to happen that are not good.
A woman resists being removed from the Plaza de Mayo, on December 20, 2001.Ricardo Ceppi (Getty Images)
A.
Fatality appears a lot in his stories.
What is your relationship with that topic?
Q.
I have different theories.
I think it's partly an obsession.
There is something of the fear of being alive and that something can, from one moment to the next, cease to be or disappear... It is the feeling I have now with the reality of Argentina.
There is another germ that was the Cro-Mañón tragedy in 2004. He was just 15 years old.
There is something about the link between enjoyment and tragedy, I think they were quite woven for me.
At the end of 2004, a fire in a rock venue in the city of Buenos Aires—Cro-Mañón Republic—caused 194 deaths, most of them due to asphyxiation.
That night the band Callejeros was playing and a flare thrown during the concert caused the disaster.
The capacity had been exceeded and the place did not comply with security measures, as it was later learned.
Many were trapped.
Fabbri had attended the show the night before and after the tragedy, he began to spend a lot of time with other teenagers, his contemporaries,
rolingas
, an Argentine subculture of fans of the Rolling Stones and national rock.
The investigation into this collective drama led her to write
The Day They Turned Out the Light
(Seix Barral, 2021) and to direct the film
Clara Gets Lost in the Forest,
two creatures that, like Dr. Frankenstein's, are made of a diverse and strange material.
Q.
Do you still feel that fear?
A.
No, it is not a conscious fear.
If I write about that it's probably because it's something I'm very aware of, but it's not something I think about every day, luckily.
Q.
The characters in
The Dancing Queen
are distraught, but they try to survive.
A.
They are broken characters who do not completely surrender to that circumstance and keep each other company... It is company between people who share some of that sadness and find refuge in solitude.
Q.
What did you want to talk about in this novel?
A.
I started writing a story that was initially going to be a short story: a woman who wakes up in an accident.
It came from a separation on a personal level, a breakup entering the decade that is the 30s, which is a decade in which there are many things that one defines or defines themselves.
I think that, a little driven by the anxiety that this can generate in me or in anyone of that age, I wrote the novel.
Q.
The end of a relationship in your thirties, Tinder dating, the fertility clinic... Are these concerns of a generation?
A.
There is a generational portrait, but I think it was not something sought.
I think it ends up going through decantation because they are girls more or less from the same generation that meet.
In
The Day They Turned Off the Light
[her book about the Cromañón tragedy] it does seem to me that there is a search to make a certain generational portrait of the 2000s in Buenos Aires and of the music and consumption of that type of culture.
Q.
Was she a rolinga?
R.
Very cool.
Q.
Did you write in those years, in your adolescence?
A.
Less.
I was very busy meeting my friends and chatting about life.
Those were my activities: going to school and having friends.
There was no time to write.
A mural in an act of memory for the Cro-Mañón tragedy, in 2014, ten years after the events.Ricardo Pristupluk (Getty Images)
Q.
At that time did you also begin to get socially involved in politics?
A.
When the great crisis occurred in Argentina in 2001, I was 11 years old.
I don't have many memories, only flashes and anguish, the anguish of my mother, of my family.
An anguish I had never seen before.
We went cacerolando to Plaza de Mayo every day.
At 11 years old it can be fun, but at the same time you have a certain awareness of the disaster, that this is not right.
Instantly, right there, Cro-Magnon happened, which for me largely had to do with the context of a country that is broken.
That's why I say that the side effects are great.
That's the fear I have now.
Q.
Did becoming independent at a young age make you write more eagerly?
Or where does the intense search for her come from?
A.
There are many Argentine artists venturing into different disciplines and there are even groups of friends who come together in different projects: the actor in one project is then the director of another... I believe it is due to a great vocation since we are looking for make our lives.
At least in Latin America, it is difficult to live off royalties from books or from making a movie... To survive I do other things and before that I worked as a waitress, as a babysitter, as a cadet in an office... At one time I worked in downtown [the financial district of Buenos Aires] and I started writing a kind of novel that took place there.
Q.
You left acting for writing.
Do you prefer not to be seen?
A.
Acting was a gateway to many other things I do.
But I don't enjoy those permanent glances as much.
Some like it a lot and others don't.
Q.
The title of the novel, the Abba quote, refers to putting yourself center stage.
A.
The title is quite ironic.
I like to write from songs.
I love the classics, the music I heard 10 million times.
Dancing Queen
is a song that we all listen to so many times that it is expired, and yet you listen to it again and something else happens to you.
I listen to it and for me there is something grotesque in the lyrics, which has to do with a woman who is in the best moment of her life, that everyone looks at her, everyone desires her.
It seems to me that Paulina, the character in the novel, is the antithesis of that moment.
There's something ironic about being unique, there's something stale optimism about that idea.
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