The triumph of the late writers

British novelist Tessa Hadley at the FIL in Guadalajara in 2015.BERENICE BAUTISTA (AP)

They do not share a nationality, or theme, nor have they been strictly contemporary, and yet, the coincidence at the news tables in recent months of the Argentine Aurora Venturini, the Canadian Helen Weinzweig and the British Tessa Hadley underlines a strange link between these three novelists: success came to all three at an age when many writers are already in retirement.

Perhaps the most famous and extreme case is that of Venturini.

She was born in La Plata in 1912, she rose to fame at the age of 85 when in 2007 she won the New Novel award from the Argentine newspaper

for

.

“At last an honest jury”, sentenced the novelist, according to Claudia Piñeiro, who defines herself in a text about the triumphant octogenarian, who died in 2015, as “a member of the brotherhood of her admirers”.

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The novel that revealed an 85-year-old author

Almost six decades ago, in 1948, when she was 26 years old, Aurora Venturini had received the Initiation Prize from Borges with her first book,

.

Between one distinction and another, more than half a century of anonymity and graphomania passed: Ella Venturini published about 40 books on small stamps and even in self-paid editions that went unnoticed.

Friend of Eva Perón, acquaintance of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre during the years she lived in Paris, the sensation caused by

after its launch in 2007 (with 35,000 copies sold) was followed by the rescue of

, originally published in 1992, reissued in a new version in 2011 by Caballo de Troya and back in 2022 in bookstores by Tusquets.

"The success of

gave the narrative of this old writer from the city of La Plata an unprecedented place in the publishing world," writes María Paula Salerno in a prologue to the new edition.

The writer Aurora Venturini, who achieved recognition at the age of 85 with 'Las Primas'.

One of the projects that Venturini undertook when fame came to him was a column in the newspaper

entitled

in which he recovered the history of women who had fallen into oblivion.

Undoubtedly, Helen Weinzweig (Poland, 1915- Canada, 2010) would have interested Argentina, with whom he also shares a bizarre aura that surrounds both his writings and her lives.

Helen, née Tennenbaum, came to Canada at the age of nine and grew up alone with her mother in a Jewish immigrant neighborhood in Toronto.

A voracious reader, she married composer John Weinzweig, whom she met in high school, and threw herself into his career and raising his children.

“Both John and I lived his career,” she declared.

As the writer and critic Sarah Weinman explains in an epilogue to

(Infinite Doll) —a book she defines as a “feminist inner world espionage novel”—, in 1960 Weinzweig suffered from severe depression and her therapist encouraged her write.

She was 52 years old when she published her first story, which was followed by other stories and two novels.

There was also some theater and some non-fiction texts.

The mysterious story of Shirley, the adulterous protagonist of

who checks into hotels as Lola Montez and travels the world following the encrypted keys left by her lover for their encounters, originally hit bookstores when Weinzweig was 65 years old.

Her prose and the rhythm of her story place her in the orbit of the

1960s, although Weinzweig is celebrated as a pioneering feminist writer in Canada.

“One of the things I had to learn after reading all that literature written by men was to know how I feel as a woman.

All literary forms were the property of men, all philosophies were the property of men… I had to translate those forms into the feminine”, assured the author in an interview in 1990. The novel, awarded the Toronto Book Award in 1981, It speaks of masks and disguises, of madness and rupture, and masterfully explores the literary formula of the unreliable narrator in just over 180 pages, reissued in recent years in the US and Germany before reaching readers in Spanish.

Give in to the 'hippie' life

The escape from the home world of a married woman is also the central axis of

(Sixth floor, 2022), the latest book by the British Tessa Hadley.

Married to the professor and playwright Eric Hadley, mother of three children and stepmother of three others, the writer managed to publish her first novel at the age of 46.

With the eight that she has to date and her stories, she has accumulated awards and distinctions, although it has been in the last six years that Hadley, an academic expert on Henry James, has been singled out as one of the great current storytellers in the United Kingdom. United.

Her clear and classic style is concentrated on

to fictionalize the roar and explosion of the 1960s revolution in London.

The passion for a young maverick aspiring writer and critic shakes the conventional life of the flirtatious Phyllis, who at 40 years old does not hesitate to plant her husband and two children to enter the

and anti-establishment underworld.

The second life of the protagonist of

may have some connection with the story of the triumph of late female writers, whose list includes many others who are now achieving notoriety, such as Liudmila Ulítskaya, brand-new winner of the 2022 Formentor Prize and regular on the lists of candidates. to the Nobel, who did not publish his first novel until he was 49 years old.

Another list could be made of the phenomenal successes of authors in their youth (Françoise Sagan, Zadie Smith, Joyce Carol Oates…), but it is in the discovery and the suggestion of a second act in other lives where part of the reading pleasure resides.

Long live late success.

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