Ana Wajszczuk
07/22/2021 11:44
Clarín.com
Culture
Updated 07/22/2021 11:44 AM
Argentina, 1974. Perón has died and his widow, María Estela “Isabelita” Martínez de Perón, is worried:
Claudia
, the most avant-garde and sold women's magazine in the country, is about to publish a special issue on the new president, that is, on her.
Can
Isabelita
live up to "the magazine for modern women"? What dark plots are woven between the offices of the prestigious April publishing house, the
Ministry of Economy
and the offices of
Casa Rosada
? Thus, with one foot in historical events that
turns
into fiction,
Claudia Vuelve
begins
, the new novel by the writer and journalist Julián Gorodischer.
A
"novel-collage"
, as the author himself describes it, where, interspersed with the text,
images and original clippings from the magazine
and period newspapers
appear with great prominence
.
This collage is also of various narrative genres: journalism is taken to fiction in an atmosphere that ranges
from satire to sitcom
.
Julian Gorodischer.
He worked on the period before the dictatorship from the original side.
Photo: Andres D'Elia
"My great motivation was that game with the genres," says
Gorodischer
, who has been working in this line since his first books: his previous work was the remarkable
Road to Auschwitz
, a graphic novel that was based on the real stories of his family during Nazism.
In
Claudia Vuelve
, she constructs a text that shoots out in various directions.
The reader follows the plot like a theatrical spectator peering into the backstage of two great machines
to produce reality
: political power and the media.
And from the present, he also looks into a past where everything in Argentina -
Claudia
included - was about to sink
into the blackest night
.
-How did it occur to you to cross a women's magazine with the figure of Isabel Perón to build a novel?
-It wasn't linear.
In fact, I did not start with
Claudia
but at the time, around that period 1974-1976 that has to do with
the decline of Isabelita
, a hyper-present character in the press.
I was interested in putting
the political dispute in the most marginal
and least expected place for this to happen: a women's magazine and the backstage of the television program that the magazine is going to launch.
What was left.
Fragment of the page about Isabel Perón in Claudia that gave rise to the novel by Julián Gorodischer.
I think this is what is upset in this book: in the novel it is absolutely natural
for Isabelita to visit the magazine
, to be pending… there is always a game with what really happened.
- Did the note "Isabel, Mujer Claudia" exist?
-Yes.
What I also reconstructed through the biography of the Civita family) owners of Editorial Abril) and other sources - because as unfortunately happens with popular magazines,
Claudia
has not been kept in a newspaper library, I was able to immerse myself in that world thanks to a collector - is That note caused a certain noise,
Isabelita did not like it
, although it is a
totally uncritical
note
.
Some period topics, such as why the magazine did not reveal or oppose the campaign to
ban the sale of condoms
promoted by
Isabel
, for example, realize that something was happening in a strongly anti-Peronist publishing house.
When there is no document left, well-documented fiction also comes to fill a role.
In the newspapers of that period you see inflation, the cost of living, the notes about not making ends meet, the dollar bites, the elections ...
Julián Gorodischer Journalist and writer
-In the real events, did Isabel have something to do with the model of woman that Claudia proposed?
-The book states that no, a dilemma even reaches the top offices of the magazine, when the president of Abril tells the Minister of Economy - who in the novel enters the agenda of the medium -: "Give us something
to be able to convert this character in woman of the year
”.
-But your look as an author is a compassionate point with a figure frequently mocked or satirized ...
-The book understands his suffering, but is supported by a character who was really self-
righteous
, very clear when one reads the press of the time.
Here
is the character-woman, it is not narrated to "the president
.
"
The topics that are recreated about her are what attract me: her alienation, her submission to both López Rega and her husband.
What one writes is always between what challenges the author's inner self and what history also provides.
For example,
his fixation with military domes
.
Claudia.
the last women's magazine that marked the social conversation.
-There appears Admiral Massera, what is coming is focused on that character.
-Yes, it's an editor's nightmare.
Just as the characters here abandon the influence they have had on the story, become distorted and become trivial or monodimensional,
like Isabelita and her physical appearance
, Massera is there to harass a single person with her presence.
-There is also a game with the characters: ministers, journalists, politicians appear with their real names ...
-Because it is a historical novel, a genre that
fictionalizes real events
, the peculiarity here is that they occurred in the near past.
And on the other hand with very recognizable and close characters in the collective imagination.
Part of the fictional game that this book proposes is
that the senses are completed with the real associations
that we have around certain events and characters.
-You say that
Claudia
was “the great last women's magazine before the decadence”. What made it unique, why did it become the best-selling magazine of all time in its field?
-It was the first to
have an emancipatory ideal
: it visualized a working woman, more intellectual, it spoke of feminine desire, it introduced psychoanalysis in the mass press, it renewed the fashion section, in an urban context….
It had a very elaborate prose, not only in the sections of (the poet) Olga Orozco, who came to use
eight pseudonyms
.
And it has an engaging kitsch aesthetic.
In all this he distances himself from a tradition that flatters the image of women.
It is "the last" in the sense of a magazine that is at the center of social consumption and installs themes.
In the novel, its importance is overemphasized, there were other successful magazines.
-Could
Claudia
exist today
?
-Today the gender is in decline,
the feminist revolution killed the women's magazine
.
Although they continue to exist and have female readers, they no longer have a legitimate social place because if there is something that is not current today, it is that women require certain content and not others.
They may be converted into general interest magazines.
-How was the documentation process, what things surprised you?
-The women's magazine is a place to go to read everyday life.
I was surprised to see a society with more reading, with many references to literature, with long texts ... And above all I was surprised by what is repeated.
In the newspapers of that period you see
inflation, the cost of living, the notes on not making ends meet
, the dollar bites, the elections ... the same topics that structure our life today are present there.
They are in the past, but they are all issues of today.
PK
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