Julián López and his new book: "It is a pop love novel"

Julián López

(57) points to the balcony that opens to the furiously blue sky of the Constitución neighborhood.

He, who was never a soccer fan, who did not understand why his father was fascinated in front of the radio on game days, he, a professor at the National University of the Arts, a poet, a novelist, tells that the day of the final against France

towards that void that was beginning to fill with the bodies and voices of a country in ecstasy.

“

.

I still watch a little video and start to runny nose.

See him play Messi!

That skinny plays like he's blind, he's like a Yoda!

.

It was like finding a reason to fall in love and recover why one is Argentine ”, he says.

But we are not here with López to talk about football but about literature.

, as he defines himself, he debuted in the novel with A Very Beautiful Girl (Eterna Cadencia, 2013), the moving voice of a child who evokes (and thus, somehow, recovers) his missing mother .

.

Then followed The Illusion of Mammals (Random House, 2018), an exquisite, melancholic and unanimously celebrated story about the love of one man for another, whom he only sees once a week.

Now it is the turn of

(Random House), a book totally different from the previous ones and that began to make its way in the midst of World Cup enthusiasm.

López, son of parents who met in the office of the famous doctor and psychoanalyst

, raised in the south of Buenos Aires, who saw the

at the Riestra club, who set his stories in small Buenos Aires apartments rent, suddenly changes.

.

A journey of the imagination

The Infinitesimal Forest is a delightful parody of 19th century gothic horror novels

.

Everything happens in a fictitious city in Eastern Europe, where a young and arrogant doctor supports his mentor in the adventure of kidnapping, for the benefit of science, a strange vagabond.

López not only creates a wonderful character (the petulant sorcerer's apprentice who will be in charge of the story of the incident):

.

And it is this language, full of archaisms and neologisms, the structure from which humor and poetry will unfold.

"It's a pop love novel,"

says López.

The text is traversed by references to psychoanalysis and anthropology, but also to the occult sciences and the romantic ballad.

The unpronounceable name of the tramp is that of the son of the Icelandic singer

.

The mentor's surname is that of Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), a Russian writer and legendary occultist who founded theosophy.

The attentive reader will also find references to songs by the Mexican Cristian Castro or the Italian Ornella Vanoni.

The Forest... was the first novel I tried to write.

I started it 20 years ago and abandoned it because even my friends didn't get the parody tone.

Julian Lopez

Julián López (57) published his first novel, A Very Beautiful Girl, at 46. Photos: Alejandra Urresti.

-How did you create that wild universe?

-

was the first novel I tried to write.

I started it 20 years ago and abandoned it.

My motivation was a book by Jorge Salessi,

, an extraordinary essay on hygiene in Argentina.

I have always been interested in the history of medical sciences, mainly from the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.

I was dazzled

.

And when I read that book, I immediately began to imagine a world along those lines.

But I also wanted to write the story of a kidnapping, a very Argentine subject.

-Why did you leave her?

-Because I gave it to read to some friends who didn't like it at all.

.

"What is this frightful congestion?" they asked me.

I thought: "Bué, I renounce the narrative, that's it, my thing is poetry."

But I didn't throw away the material and every once in a while I went back to it, until I lost track of it.

At the end of the quarantine, a friend asked me to zoom in to read some material to me, but she made it a condition that I also read something of mine to her and she had nothing.

I then remembered that project, looked for

.

Eighty pages.

I started reading it and suddenly I said to myself: "This is not so bad."

And I went in to see what came out.

-It is curious that this sarcastic look at the arrogant aspect of science has appeared to you just at a historical moment when everything that was said in the name of science was a holy word.

-It's true.

.

When an acquaintance asked me a question, he would tell him: "This is not the time for that, now you have to get vaccinated, we'll talk later."

Because I believe that there is a part of medicine that is crazy, although it is indisputable.

But in a pandemic, the issue with vaccines had become very thick.

Somehow, I channeled this into the sly look you say.

-The key is in that idea of ​​capturing a human being and studying it as an object.

-You see a lot in our history: the family of onas that are taken from the South to be exhibited in Paris, the ona that they transform into an English gentleman…

I am interested in the nineteenth-century head on the object, because for her everything is an object.

I was recently invited to an ecological park in La Plata and when I arrived it was the zoo.

The person who explained it to us tells us: "Unfortunately, the maned maned man we had died."

I eat?

Forgiveness?

How could you have only one individual of a species?

Science as an idea of ​​nobility that is always about the body of others.

Cover of the new novel by Julián López: The infinitesimal forest (Random House).

Political correctness clearly brought me here alive, which is great.

Now, when all aspiration becomes and speech becomes, it is something else.

Julian Lopez

-In your novel there is something from

, that film by Mel Brooks from 1974.

-Nobody will be old enough to remember this movie, except us.

.

Mel Brooks, someone who manages the Jewish codes of a type of urban middle class in his country, boldly enters a story from the 19th century, appropriates it and does a genius that, for me, was clearly a model.

I was trying a construction of that type:

.

-I wonder if humor and irony have a place in the literature produced today.

I don't see it that much.

-I don't see it that much either and it was one of the things that most interested in the project.

Write a parody, keep it in tune, make it funny and work as a desecrating force.

The references to high culture are placed in a vulgar, ordinary and very pretentious context.

-Current literature seems to compete with journalism.

A literature that in its fictions seeks to denounce or narrate real stories and what it does, finally, is to eliminate the incident.

is pure fiction.

-I wanted an ultra fiction.

In any case, I build storytellers who from the start try to convince you that this is me.

I didn't want that anymore.

Fiction is the most effective method to traffic a lot of things.

The literature that you mention is less rich in that sense.

It is very attached to true stories or to this widespread idea of ​​denouncing and falling paradigms, which I particularly don't enjoy.

-There is a political correctness that does not let you move too much.

-For me, writing is very difficult: when I manage to do it, I do what I can.

I'm super ambitious within that range.

Now, when all aspiration becomes and speech becomes, it is something else.

.

Then I regret it, I come and go, I want to like it, I regret it again and I want to like it badly... But writing is so difficult for me that, in order to do something that doesn't excite me, that doesn't challenge me, I don't do it.

A very beautiful girl (Eterna Cadencia), the great literary debut of Julián López.

-Is it true that you didn't plan to be a writer, but the success of

opened an unexpected path for you?

-Yes, although I have been writing since I was a child.

-Are you one of those who enjoyed “composition”, that extinct genre from elementary school?

-Yes, yes, no way.

I even won a couple of intercollegiate awards.

The feeling I remember was: "Getting off this is going to be very difficult."

.

-Why?

It seemed very pretentious to me.

That's why I started writing seriously very late.

I was 46 years old when I published

What happened was a complete surprise to me and yes, it put me in a place...

.

At one point I realized that the cost of not writing was very high, of not inhabiting what I had been doing since I was very young.

-Your three novels are very different from each other.

The market must not like that very much.

-Nerd.

And I know that my readers will also find it difficult.

But I can't negotiate that because I write what I can.

I write this book and after it is burned, in the sense that it is consumed.

Writing is very exhausting for me.

I don't want to produce in a way that is not my own.

The Illusion of Mammals (Random House), the second novel by Julián López.

-What did you live on before?

-My old man always worked in a car filter factory in Valentín Alsina and also made planograf screens to print the filters.

He came home from work and put it on at home.

And at one point I started collaborating with him, a task that didn't take too much time and that left me some money, not much.

Simultaneously I started doing something in journalism.

Until, at one point, my old man's factory decided that planograf screens should be made inside and not outside, so our little workshop disappeared.

I was left in the void.

But I was already writing, all my friends were writers and had started to publish, the situation was kind of obvious... I was desperate.

In the end I had to inhabit literature, that which I had taken care of all my life .

-You said that you are a writer from the Buenos Aires middle class, a highly demonized social sector.

He is saddled with the great evils of the country, but at the same time he produced valuable personalities.

Is it an insult to be a Buenos Aires middle class?

-No.

I bring a concept from the historian Ezequiel Adamovsky, who speaks of "the middle classes" because of the level of complexity they represent.

The Buenos Aires middle class has historically been a very interesting cultural bulwark, very powerful and in some sense very distributive.

I am a Buenos Aires middle-class writer, that is undeniable, for better and for worse.

I am from a family in which my old man came from the southern neighborhoods of the City and my old woman, from a slightly more affluent middle class.

It is of an atrocious political complexity.

Do you regret not having had an academic training?

-Yes, of course.

I dropped out of high school because it was a dictatorship and I couldn't believe what was happening.

In addition, what was studied seemed inadmissible to me.

"I don't want to participate," he thought, and

.

I was left out of everything, I wanted to be a film director and I couldn't start studying because I needed secondary school... That defined my life in a very particular way.

I had to do it in other ways.

Now I don't regret it, because I managed to do something.

look too

The stripper who hid her life from her family and now reveals it in a novel

Pablo Ramos, from novel to rock: "I spent my money on records and on falopa"