Dolores Pruneda Paz
09/04/2021 7:00
Clarín.com
Culture
Updated 09/04/2021 2:50 PM
Written in a space of personal discomfort and traversed by a period climate that transports its characters, the novel
El galpón
, by
Ricardo Strafacce,
"unintentionally" reviews masculinities and feminisms as devices in frank ascent or presumed withdrawal, where they cook, in the key of police
noir
, terrible and extravagant experiences.
Published by Blatt & Ríos, "the novel is a somewhat melancholic farewell to heterosexual masculinity as the dominant ideological device and contains a certain welcome to sisterhood and that kind of thing, devices that are not yet hegemonic but with pretensions of being so", says
Strafacce,
who in addition to The writer is
Pablo Katchadjian's lawyer, whom María Kodama brought to trial for plagiarism in the case of
El Aleph fattened.
Borges' widow lost the case.
The action begins when Leonardo, a public employee still young, gray and flat, meets his wife Dolores, ambitious and proactive, private secretary and lover of the head of the ministry where he works, having sex in his Buenos Aires apartment with a group of men who they could be policemen or taxi-boys or magazine theater supporting actors.
The action in Strafacce's novel begins when Leonardo, a public employee, finds his wife having sex with several men.
Photo Télam
None of that is clear.
Men beat Leonardo, spit on him, mistreat him in general while Dolores, omniscient in her room, enjoys sex with each other and lets this happen.
The following is a kidnapping of what seems like a commando group and the development of the plot in a rather nightmarish and rather dreamlike non-place, where the reluctant and fearful protagonist will have to learn to survive.
Like an ancient voice that still mistrusts or is
disturbed
by
enjoyment
,
Strafacce's
novel
describes with amazement the new gender and gender board of the fourth feminist wave, the climate of ideas of the time that runs through it in words from the author.
That which is in the air appears very clear with the organized women of that uncertain warehouse where they deposit Leonardo, who is somewhere in the city or the suburbs, under a disco, and which could well be an illegal detention center, or not , where they achieve a mechanism that allows them to even leave, but the male sector maintains a binary dynamic where it is random to know if they will have dinner or be tortured.
What is that place?
"El galpón", by Ricardo Strafacce (Blatt & Ríos, $ 890).
"For me, discos are a mythical place because practically I never went to one or I have been to non-disco events, but all that atmosphere, those lights, that music and those people who dance and dance transform them into a mythical place, that I, -like these characters hauled to that shed-, I look from below, like someone who doesn't know him or doesn't belong to that, "says
Strafacce.
"A disco is not real: lights derealize light, sound derealize music and conversations and seduction is derealized by that staging, which can have something of a ritual".
These characters "look down on the sound and the fury," insists the writer.
It sounds like a policeman from another era.
With the resources of the "Lego" and the "Studious" as characters totally external to the story, which the narrator uses to contrast evidence, or the "little reader", we, who reads, to whom he speaks directly in several passages, leaving the omniscience to make him participate in his doubts and fancies about the plot he is weaving.
There is a detective, a mean and sensual woman, there are some beings that get lost, in a shed, a delocalized world from which no one knows how to escape.
There is something about males that get lost.
"We are in a time when men are lost, they are worth less than nothing. For example, in the sale of books, people buy women's books, not men," says the author.
"The masculine word is very devalued. There is one thing that is true and there are other things that are fashionable, such as that there are different types of feminisms, different types of masculinities, but in general we are living a very new stage, where everything is still very confusing If you look at the list of 2020 bestsellers of the Eterna Cadencia bookstore, there are nine women and Eduardo Sacheri. In general, there is a devaluation of masculinity, "he says.
- Could it be because of a satiety, an overproduction of speech?
- Yes, from a hegemonic device that comes from centuries ago.
We are at a stage where the new is the voice, the presence and the female story.
There is a lot of accumulated feminine capital that has not been used, so now nothing that is not feminine is interesting, or less interesting, if you see a bookstore table you will see that half of the novelty books have to do with gender issues.
That fashion has valuable things and a lot of litter.
It happened with Marxism, it happened with psychoanalysis, it happened with structuralism and it will happen with this too.
–In terms of devices, what does the character of Dolores represent?
-The feminine power, that kind of historical revenge of the feminine.
"Girl power, that kind of historical revenge for the feminine," says Strafacce.
Photo Télam
-It would seem to represent, rather, the mandatory quota.
- It could also be thought of as the envy of not being a woman.
In masculinity there is a historical envy that has been sublimated in different ways, rather a nostalgia.
It is seen very clearly in the sexuality of the characters of writers such as Osvaldo Lamborghini, or in Nestor Perlongher's appeal of the feminine, before this inclusive language began, he designated himself in feminine and had the pseudonym Rosa.
–Tell me a little about Leonardo's path towards his new masculinity.
- I can't say much about that, what I can tell you is that I have sympathy for silly characters, or rather I have an aversion for the cancheros characters of Argentine literature, who already have enough: Horacio Oliveira ("Hopscotch"), Emilio Renzi (writer and alter ego of Ricardo Piglia), Esteban Espósito (alter ego of Abelardo Castillo).
I find silly characters more sympathetic.
- Humor gives you other possibilities, was it a deliberate search?
- When I start a novel I only want to write a novel. In August 2019 I was admitted for an operation and I ended up hospitalized for three months. I wrote this novel in January 2020, I left the clinic on November 23, 2019. I was convalescing and I came out with two absolute prohibitions, tobacco and alcohol, life itself for me, and I felt that I was not going to be able to write without smoking and without drinking, in fact, I would finish a paragraph and make a mechanical gesture of grabbing a cigarette . There are many years of these habits or those addictions, as doctors say, and then, which is never before, because publishers don't usually despair that I deliver a novel to them, I had a great urge to write it because I was going to do it under very hostile conditions. For me, it was without smoking and drinking Terma.
- Do you distinguish something in the structure or the plot that you say was a lot of Terma or lack of pucho?
- Luckily not, but I was very afraid that that would happen.
I was afraid that I would transform into another kind of writer, like those who write by stopping at all corners.
I was always afraid and in fact I am not so happy now, of becoming a writer without addictions.
I always loved addictions, I never had chaste friends.
Strafacce defended Pablo Katchadjian in the plagiarism trial with María Kodama, and won.
Photo Télam
–What does one lose when one loses addictions?
–I lost my joy, all the pleasant moments of my life were linked to tobacco and alcohol.
They tell me about a city and I wonder what the drink of that place would be.
When I see in a movie that they smoke, I get nostalgic.
But I can't, as Lamborghini would say, Osvaldo, "life has already been banqueted too much."
- Is this the first novel of this new stage?
- Well, it is the first abstemious novel.
Did you see that Macedonio Fernández wanted "Museum of the Eternal Novel" to be a joint and obligatory purchase with "Adriana Buenos Aires", because the "Museum?"
It has a subtitle "first good novel" and "Adriana ..." has a subtitle, "last bad novel".
Well, this is my first abstemious novel and it may be my last bad novel.
Basic Strafacce
Born in Buenos Aires in 1958,
Strafacce
is the author of
Osvaldo Lamborghini, a biography
and more than 10 novels, among them,
The Bolivian
,
The crime of the black Reguera
,
Carlutti
and
partner
,
The transformation of Rosendo
and
Frío de Russia
.
He also wrote theater and poetry, teaches literary classes and, as a lawyer, defended writers against accusations of plagiarism and fraud.
PK / PC
Look also
María Kodama and 80 other women of culture ask that Argentina receive those fleeing the Taliban
Kodama's lawyer responds: "Borges's rights are not seized, they will be paid and we are evaluating initiating a lawsuit for damages."