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Xita Rubert, the new literary promise is willing to question everything

2022-05-05T04:08:39.629Z


The Catalan debuts in the novel with 'My days with the Kopp', a fiction about the unswept corners of appearances and the mirrors of female oppression


"Where there is money there is always manipulation of the truth."

Xita Rubert (Barcelona, ​​25 years old) does not mind questioning meritocracy.

She is also among the cultural elites, whom she has been able to observe closely since she was a child.

"Many times we think that it is in politics and business where influence play reigns, but the cultural sphere is also sustained by a great

show

of interests," she points out, reflective in the words she chooses, one spring morning in the barracks from the Anagram publishing house.

Temporarily installed in Barcelona to face the last stretch of her doctorate scholarship at Princeton —focused on the role of philosophy, literature, bioethics and care (especially female care)—, the Catalan makes her novel debut with

Mis days with the Kopps

(Anagrama, 2022), an enigmatic fiction that was initially presented as a story and in which it opens multiple questions about "the uninhibited conscience of the upper class" and the perverse art of appearances of those who hold enough power to shape the morality and reality at will.

More information

'My days with the Kopp': An intelligent, imaginative and rare fresh debut

Finalist of the Ana María Matute de Relato por

Flores award for the dancer

(Ediciones Torremozas, 2020), Rubert rescued in confinement a short text that he had left in a drawer to turn it into his first novel.

“I have been writing many stories since I was a child, but I sensed that this story hid much more than it initially proposed,” she points out about a plot in which its protagonist, Virginia, recalls a disturbing trip at the age of 17, when she accompanied her father to the meeting of Sonya and Andrew Kopp, a particular couple of British intellectual friends.

Narrated from a more adult and analytical point of view, far from innocence and the hubbub caused by the hormonal explosion of adolescence, Virginia searches for meaning in everything that she did not say to herself that weekend that she shared with them and with Bertrand, son of the marriage;

a so-called "ephemeral artist" who has a mental disorder evident to everyone except his parents.

Determined to deny the illness in order to dress it up in an extravagant artistic personality, Virginia's gaze and memories open the door to multiple moral dilemmas: was Bertrand really an eccentric sculptor as the Kopps presumed, or was that facet a saving resource that they imposed on a sick son so that he would be tolerable and socially fit into his universe?

Is it possible to “reconvert the disease into

Was Bertrand really an eccentric sculptor as the Kopps presumed or was that facet a saving resource imposed on a sick son so that he would be tolerable and fit in socially in their universe?

Is it possible to “reconvert the disease into

Was Bertrand really an eccentric sculptor as the Kopps presumed or was that facet a saving resource imposed on a sick son so that he would be tolerable and fit in socially in their universe?

Is it possible to “reconvert the disease into

something else

as the only way to deal with it”?

And why are women always the ones who have to deal with the responsibility of caring, of “doing something” when the fragile normalcy falls apart?

“On the battlefield, more disturbing than the madness and violence of beings like Bertrand is the composure of calm, graceful, supposedly sane men”, will reflect a protagonist who will understand that “only when we make our differences explicit is it possible to treat us as same”.

Rubert makes his novel debut after being a finalist for the Ana María Matute Short Story Award in 2020. Massimiliano Minocri

On female "training"

Let no one expect personal connections in this plot.

"I neither write autofiction nor am I interested in positioning myself in political demands of any kind," she says, emphatically, about his writing material.

Daughter of the writer Luisa Castro (current director of the Cervantes Institute in Bordeaux) and the philosopher, writer and politician Xavier Rubert de Ventós, the author defends the use of fiction as a moral experiment on which to rely "to deploy all these elements in match".

A scenario in which the "training" of women is also analyzed —in appearances, in care, in being the eternal male crutch— through the reflection that the protagonist maintains with the British aristocrat ("Sonya and I were made of another subject, but of the

same

another matter.

That is why I felt antipathy and attraction towards her and she, I think, towards me”, he writes).

In

My Days with the Kopps

, the women maintain a pulse of fascination from feigned ignorance to stage total devotion to the men around them ("I sensed Andrew's superficiality; she guessed my father's; and neither of us admitted it because we wanted to, and in some sense we needed those wise and innocent men”, thinks its protagonist at one point in the novel).

Rubert confirms the impact of these performative tactics.

“Some men create images of women—and sometimes their daughters' fathers—that are completely false, but which we end up believing.

I wonder if something like that happens in the novel, among many other things that move under the extreme composure of the characters.

Yes, kindness can be a delusion, education very oppressive,

With references such as Joseph Roth or Arthur Schnitzler and "the very particular intelligence" of some storytellers, such as Silvina Ocampo, Hebe Uhart or Katherine Mansfield, this Catalan woman who grew up in Galicia with her mother bets on a novel that dissects perversity and what is really sick in our society.

“Perverse is not to focus on the dying or the sick.

It is perverse to make it mute, to make it not exist: that is what is evil”, she points out on a subject that, in a certain way, she is also investigating in her doctorate.

“The decline of health is not the same as the corruption of behavior.

One is never free from disease, whereas one is free from association with depravity or cruelty.

Wow, I sound very serious.

I think that the novel is to break out laughing, ”she clarifies,

While he continues with his daily habit of writing (“I always have a text in hand, writing is my vocation since I was a child and I have tried to organize my life around this”), Rubert is elusive in the face of media and personal exposure.

“I dislike this culture of success and image, that what you look at is already a reflection of who you are, it is not necessary to go on explaining and that, not even the interviews that are also public exposure, have a lot to do with the work silence of literature”, he recalls, and states: “The exhibition of private life is also a lie, because we manipulate the truth as soon as we know that someone is looking at us”.

All, as in her book, subjected to the tyranny of appearances.

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Source: elparis

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