Although “schools” is his first novel, Adriana Lover is an outstanding nineteenth -century Argentine literatureprofessor of the UBA, of the University of Tres de February and the New York University in Buenos Aires; which has published essays in his research field and editions of classics such as “Facundo” and “Martín Fierro”.
In this short novel published by Tusquets, a lover rescues a particular story of his past: A youthful friendship born at school where she studied her secondary studies That, over the years, it becomes an unexpected closeness with one of the most cruel characters in the dictatorship. His childhood friend is the daughter of the director of an non -commissioned officer And intimacy with the family is transformed over time, into a disturbing closeness with an unknown horror.
An interesting fact is that the real names of “the schools” are never explained as well as that of the sinister character, who in the innocent look of the narrator, is only her friend’s father.
Here, the dialogue that news maintained with the author.
News: Why did he have the idea of rescuing this story in his first novel?
Adriana Lover: It is a story that I have been ruminating for at least twenty years. Because, despite what the novel appears, there is no story that precedes it: the one that the novel counts is urging (it happened to me that it was urging or that I was warming it) as the writing advanced, almost literally as the phrasing advanced, I could say. But it is true, of course: there is something in the context in which the lives of those two teenagers who know each other in 1978, barely enter the high school, which was narrative or interesting to narrate. Because that friendship that had elapsed in the general context of a country that was under a fierce military dictatorship. And, in particular, they become friends in a school to which children of military and very few children of civilians went. There the decisions of the de facto government had a more directly impact and perhaps that is why then more intense, because perhaps they had a more immediate echo, in a tune that duplicated, at a smaller scale, I do not say the climate of the whole country, but precisely the climate of that part of the country that imposed the political, cultural, social and human directions that that government wanted. And that climate tripled, expanding now yes outside of full scale, in that other school to which the title also alludes, which is the non -commissioned officer directed by the father of the narrator’s friend. The most ineffable and infamous horror center in Argentine history, where things happened, hidden, clandestine, terrible, that seemed so far to what happened to those two girls of thirteen, fourteen years. At the same time, despite the ignorance that they could have about that, it was so close that everything ends up being almost a perfect act of the definition of the sinister of Freud: how strange it is revealed so familiar. Because something of that strangeness, of that alienity, was gradually manifested as deep and literally Familiar: They were revealed, as they emerged towards the truth, each one, as he could and with what he could.
News: Why hadn’t I written fiction so far?
Lover: Nice question! I could answer saying that because it was fiction by other means, less predictable in any case, such as the essay. But surely my answer is not quite certain, although I think it is not entirely false. Because I think the essay (well understood and well practiced, the critical essay and the call – general with disdain – academic) It is also a genre of literature. And that the best essay is the one that uses the same procedures and protocols of fiction, including that of the invention and arbitrariness, provided that in the case of the essay it is well founded. In 1997 and 1998 I wrote some critical essays (about the Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar, about the American poet Elizabeth Bishop and about the Portuguese letters attributed to Mariana Alcoforado) playing or flirting more fully with certain forms of fiction. But not as a specific literary project, that’s true.
News: Is this story completely autobiographical?
Lover: It depends on what is understood by autobiography or narration of a life, whether the one or that of others. I believe (and in this I inevitably filio to my teacher’s work, the writer Sylvia Molloy) that we always work with remains of our life and with that of others and use them strategically, adapting them to the purposes of the narration. Molloy says, Clara: “In short, the only ‘truth’ of autobiographical exercise is a ‘truth of writing'”. The truth is not necessarily in the way in which it fits a reference that might seem (that is the illusion) that precedes it or that would justify it. And to answer I can also use the end of the story “Emma Zunz”, by Jorge Luis Borges, and say that in “Schools “ True is the tone, true modesty, true hate – even, in the case of my novel, also love and pain. Only some circumstances and one or two proper names are false.
News: Why did you prefer that names of characters not appear and, in particular, the school where the story takes place?
Lover: To universalize from the particular. In order not to anchor the issue of the novel, which inevitably refers to a context, which refers to a story, which refers to certain specific spaces and certain characters in the political history of a country, such as Argentina; Not to anchor them and that they are bound only to that context, to that story, to those spaces and those characters. I was interested that the novel could also be read without knowing what exactly refer to, that you do not need previous knowledge, nor that it is sustained only by external to the novel itself. I wanted and I want, if there was something to go looking outside the novel, it is because of the effect that the novel causes on the reader and not because without that it cannot be understood. He needed that the story would not eat literature. Or, in any case, that literature was a way of responding to intervening in some aspect of history.
News: What did this episode of his life represent in his memory when he later knew the truth about your friend’s family?
Lover: In my life, as in so many, especially so many of my generation (a kind of intermediate generation, the one that comes back, by age, of the militants), the unveiling of the horror of which we were so close, was an unfortunate TURNING POINT. Obviously: determinant. Of course, the revelation of horror was produced progressively, even inadvertently (and I think that is what puts into play above all my novel); I don’t think it is given as a divine revelation. Because even when there may be some lighting or lighting scene, such as the one that occurs in the chapter on “the village” in the novel, what is revealed there is nothing but a confirmation, orderly and complete of what had already been manifested partially, fragmentary, perhaps not entirely clearly, but insistently. In personal terms it broke me in two: it was difficult for me to process the paradox, which is also part of what the dictatorship submitted to us: to that small episodes of our life cannot be resolved only by a Manichaean solution, where everything is clearly inconcilable opposite. And that the pain that my volunteer, conscious and full decision to assume the truth that was revealed to me and that of positioning myself in the denunciation of that horror (the existence of the kidnappings, that of the systematic practice of torture, that of the commission of crimes against humanity by the military) in which it was difficult to advance without hurting or without deposing convictions. In all cases, there would always be suffering.
News: Are you already writing an upcoming novel?
Lover: I am finishing closing, in parallel, several long -standing and some extension trial projects. A book about the large site of Montevideo, which goes from Sarmiento Traveler to Miter Poeta, which is a book on issues of visual culture and literature of the nineteenth century Rioplatense (which is my specialty). A critical edition of “Campaign in the big army “ (My preferred book by Sarmiento, which is my weakness) for the El País del Sauce, Eduner / UNL collection. And I am already delivering to the printing press (it will come out of eternal cadence) a book that Sylvia Molloy left unpublished, whose edition I set and to which I added an important epistolary exchange between her and her friends (Title of the book, in addition, as Sylvia had planned): Victoria Ocampo, Manuel Puig, Edgardo Cozarinsky, Enrique Pezoni, Silvina Ocampo, with many reconstruction notes of their lives, works and circumstances or situations to which they allude.
Some fiction Pure “Let’s say- I am around, I must admit. But I don’t know what he will give. Because having a material, an issue, some ideas even, I do not guarantee that there may be or that there may be text until the text does not begin to try itself, or to try, simply, that it can exist, that it will be able to collect existence. For that, of course, you will need to concentrate on what I have and together, and that I decide to write.
News: In relation to your fiction production, what are the authors that most interest you?
Lover: I will try to circumscribe to a few examples, perhaps the most functional to my own novel. Not because they are a direct influence (maybe everything I did was – just because of that – try to avoid it), but because inevitably, as a reader, if they have touched me (I say it in the sense of what affects you, even lovingly), they have constituted me. Undoubtedly: there is something catchy in the brief texts with which Molloy can make a situation so many times domestic, sometimes even inconsequentially (such as folding the edge of a tablecloth as she has seen the mother, self -absorbed in the pain of a loss), a true lighting, as is the case in her “Various imagination “. Or, with María Negroni, share and understand the deepest implications that what happens in a fiction, rather than an issue – or beyond any matter – is language, as can be perceived in all her work and, masterfully, in “in”The heart of the damage “. From Borges, or Borges that I learned to read with Ricardo Piglia: the way in which the elements of an autobiography can be forced to make them enter fiction. From Sarmiento, along with his fury political and his encos and his magnificent staging, he can honestly can the tender freshness with which he, self -absorbing autobiography, always gets so in evidence; and the –his And also my– Belief in the power of writing to intervene on the real.
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