Juan Pablo Villalobos: “The peaceful place where I grew up is now a setting for a crime novel”

There are multiple Juan Pablos Villalobos.

The writer left Mexico 20 years ago to settle in Barcelona, ​​where he makes a living writing and giving literary workshops to young people who are starting out in the guild.

The protagonist of his latest novel,

The Past Is Behind Us

(Anagrama, 2024), shares his name, his career and his family ties with him, but his return to his hometown, Lagos de Moreno, triggers a series of circumstances that They are the fruit of nothing more than your imagination... or not.

“Any resemblance to reality is not a mere coincidence, this is how fiction works,” the Jalisco native (51 years old) warns on the first page, and with that warning he seals the same pact with the reader that he began in I'm

not going to ask Nobody Who Believes Me

, 2016 Herralde Prize, and which he maintained in

Peluquería y Letras

(2022), the other novels that make up the cycle of autofiction that closes with this book.

“There is a liberation that I think we all look for when we leave, whether to go to your own home in the same place, in the next city or 10,000 kilometers away,” Villalobos, who opted for the last option, explains via video call from Barcelona. : “The point is that you come back.”

That return unleashes a conflict between those who stayed and those who left, a game of crossed reproaches that, in the case of the writer, always comes loaded with a good dose of humor, picaresque and paranoia.

Laughing at what hurts is an art that Mexicans have perfected over time and books, and this one is no different.

“It is a kind of exaggerated estrangement, because the paranoia is justified.

When [the character] hears gunshots in the street it is because there is a shooting,” says the author, who has been observing the growing insecurity in each of his visits.

“It has been very brutal to see how the place where you grew up, which was a boring, quiet and peaceful place, has suddenly become a crime novel setting.

“This lurking danger represents the transformation not only of Lagos de Moreno, but of that entire region of Mexico that is now one of the most dangerous in the country,” he says.

Reality proves his fiction right.

Just two weeks ago, five shot bodies were found in a ravine in this Jalisco town, where a presidential candidate would begin his campaign a day later.

That violence that keeps Mexico under siege runs through the entire novel, but always as a backdrop or an accompanying atmosphere, rather than as a substantial part of the plot.

Villalobos does not put limits on his humor, always black and incisive, but he assumes a certain responsibility as an author.

“There are different levels of exposure to violence, and it is something that sometimes does not seem to be reflected upon enough.

There are those of us who are more protected.

If I am using my name and that of my family, it seemed somewhat dishonest to exaggerate those risks,” explains the writer, who in other of his books does represent more explicitly that layer of brutality that covers the country like a cloak. heavy.

Its protagonist, in reality, all he wants is to return for a few days to take care of his elderly parents.

Accompanying her mother to undergo tests for medical treatment and returning to her life abroad as if that short break was not truly part of her reality.

But reality is stubborn and imposes itself with all its force, as do the memories of him and all the unresolved issues in the past, which explode in a cascade like an inevitable destiny.

Chance and coincidences were phenomena of big cities, not of towns;

In the towns, historical causes and effects, the logic of routine and repetition, predominated.

Nothing had been a coincidence that night

, his character admits after one of those realities explodes in his face.

Returning is never just a harmless pause, just as memory never refers only to yesterday.

“On a psychoanalytic level, on an autobiographical level and on a political and social level, we live in all times at the same time,” defends Villalobos.

The past is behind us

.

But the protagonist is on a flight forward that does not stop until he is forced to do so and assume what is in front of him.

For example, that parents will not live forever and one must learn to let go of the identity of their child.

For example, that he no longer fully understands the social codes of the place, that he has continued to transform after his departure.

—I

was having breakfast with your sister and she disappeared

, his character says to another at one point.

—How

did she disappear?

, responds this alarmed.

It was a poor choice of vocabulary;

At that point in Mexican history there were verbs that should only be used in very specific situations

, the narrator Villalobos finally reflects.

“It is one of the most problematic questions,” the writer now recognizes: “There is one thing that is poorly resolved and that begins with language.

It happens to all of us who migrate and want to continue writing about those places.

The language continues to transform and we remain not only frozen in one state of the language, but we begin to mix it with other ways of speaking.”

For those who migrate, home is a limbo made up of fragments from many places.

As a reader, however, Villalobos remains attached to his homeland more than his host.

“I practically don't read Spanish literature, 99% of what I read is Latin American literature, which I think is very porous and open, less self-referential,” he explains.

Although much of that work is also written far from the continent, like his own: “There is a literature of displacement that has always interested me a lot.”

Like him, his novels have also expanded into other areas.

In November, Netflix released the adaptation of

I'm not going to ask anyone to believe me

, a bet that has also reached

Fiesta en la burrow

, from 2010, which will be released in a couple of months on the same platform.

The possible adaptation of this book is still unknown, but Villalobos is already working on his next publications: a compilation of texts that have appeared over the last 20 years in magazines and newspapers, which “is coming into its own,” and a fiction in the which emerges from the prefix

auto-

that has defined his previous novels and that “it will take its time.”

Meanwhile, he will return to Mexico in the summer to give presentations and literary workshops, which is his way of being and connecting with the country's young writers.

She will arrive in the middle of the electoral hubbub, a process that is followed more with concern than interest.

“I'm seriously thinking about whether or not I should follow the mental health campaign, but unfortunately I'm following it,” she admits.

You leave, but the country is always behind you, hot on your heels.

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