Guillermo Arriaga (Mexico City, 1958) took the XXIII Alfaguara Prize 2020. Internationally known for his role as screenwriter and film director ( Babel, Amores Perros, 21 grams or The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada ), he is also the novelist. Guillotine Squad (1991), A Sweet Smell of Death (1994), The Night Buffalo (1999) and El Salvaje (2016), with which he won the Mazalán Prize for Literature 2017. Recently, Arriaga was chosen as one of the 100 best film writers in history.
The phrase of Cocteau that Arriaga also chooses as a quote is well known: “If the fire burned my house, what would it save? I would save the fire. " Saving the fire is an ambitious and compact novel, without false pieces or unnecessary artifices, but also a delinquent narration in too many sections. Structured on three voices, with an effective use of the different slang and dialect modes that will allow us to get into the story and differentiate the characters they narrate. A third person who follows in the footsteps of the parricide José Cuauhtémoc, a first from the choreographer Marina Longines, and the last, who also speaks in the first narrative, from José's older brother and who will be the one who gives us information on the childhood and formation of the family under the oppression of an abuser, Ceferino, who wants to make indigenous supermen at any price.
The ambition is obvious, but, despite the fact that the records are different - that of José and his carnal, the Máquinas, it is more about action, a subplot with the world of crime bordering on narco, and that of Marina, the bubble. bourgeois and educated—, Arriaga manages to give him credibility. The characters are designed in such a way that they seem plausible to us, and the way in which José and Marina know each other - she will make a performance and a literary workshop in the prison where Cuauhtémoc is serving time - and the fire that they will summon to burn the forest around yours is also without falling into stereotypes and cliches. That is to say, Marina's husband is not an idiot and his marriage is not a prison, José is not a kind of good savage, but a machine of violence from the street, blood, rage, but also from books.
Arriaga takes on more challenges. That of trying to explain to us some of the many Mexicos that exist in his country without Manichean temptation. There are no good or bad because of the narrator's prejudices regarding social class or political position. He himself says it - in the first of the fictitious texts of prisoners of the Workshop - that his is a country divided between those who are afraid and those who are angry. Corruption, the relations between drug traffickers and the Government, women as eternal victims of all that violence, the prison world, the upper echelons of power. All the filth, all the rot, but also all the generosity and honesty possible.
It also speaks to us of the racism of today and that of always towards everything indigenous (the character of the father is essential for it). The action scenes (the mark of the house in his books and movies) work, the relationships too —some extreme, almost on the verge of parody—, the process of doubts and confusion of the characters, the idea of redemption in and of the Literature or love or the description of the prison world are all good news drawn in a clean and forceful style. Never disheveled or exuberant, but neither "shark literature", that writing where the imperfect but alive —the art brut of prisoners— is imposed on the perfect but hollow machinery. Arriaga's prose is so powerful that it pushes you over and over against the wall. There is nothing I do that is not consistent: the plausibility of the characters, their actions and tribulations reach our brains, we understand and value them but they do not connect with our emotionality because it is always Arriaga who pushes us, never their characters or their conflicts.
It is the fire of the narrator Arriaga, but not that of the masks, so — contrary to Jean Cocteau — perhaps, on this occasion, the house should have been saved and not the fire. However, quite the contrary, Arriaga sacrifices the house and makes the conscious decision to narrate this polyphonic story to us, disregarding the elliptical story in its almost 700 pages. He explains everything to us as it happens. No cuts or temporary jumps. And the details do not hinder so much that we are told all the action losing, for that reason and in many moments, narrative tension without crediting what the reader is gaining in return.
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Author: Guillermo Arriaga
XXIII Alfaguara Award.
Publisher: Alfaguara, 2020.
Format: softcover (659 pages, € 20.90) and ebook (€ 9.99).
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