In “To save the beat”, the Argentine writer Ernestina Perrens returns to the estuaries, A literary territory that had already explored in its acclaimed novel “Tacurú” (Paradiso). The protagonist of this latest novel is a violet, a woman in constant conflict with herself and her surroundings. Fleeing from urban life, Violeta takes refuge in a rural landscape that is part of its origins looking for an anchor not only geographical, but also spiritual. However, this new world, with its own codes, is revealed as Hostile and mysterious land. In that land dry out for fires he finds evening threats and challenges that, far from intimidating her, force her to undertake a self -discovery and survival trip. Opening the unknown, Violeta embarks on a new transit towards herself.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1965, Perrens was a student of Abelardo Castillo and Juan Martiniand is currently coordinator of literary workshops. Her work as director and producer of the “El Narrator” cycle, issued by Channel A, and her role as director of the Farber Irupé Editorial Collection, an editorial seal that aims to promote the dissemination of artists from the coastal areaaccount for their commitment to the dissemination of literature. In his books he usually creates somewhat mysterious atmospheres, for which he uses a lyrical and fragmented prose, which leaves room for the reader’s intuition, who must complete the meaning of what is hinted. His style has been praised by writers as Sylvia Iparraguirre and Jorge Consiglio. The first said of “Tacurú” (2020) that it was a “beautifully written” novel, while the second pointed out about his story book “Black Cáscara”, edited by Paradiso in 2023: “Ernestina Perrens’s stories are high voltage cables: they electrify the reader from the first sentence to the last.”
With “To save the beat”, his second novel, already in bookstores, Ernestina Perrens spoke with news.
News: Why did you need to return to a fiction zone that we could describe as “the estuaries” in “To save the beat”, an area in which your first novel, Tacurú is also set?
Ernestina Perrens: In these two novels I chose the estuaries as a literary homeland. Corrientes was a return place and since everything returned quite complex. I needed to narrate it to understand and be able to inhabit it. At first I was manifested as a hard, impregnable territory to which I believed I managed to enter. I was born and grew up in Buenos Aires, although part of my origins are Correntino. This urban look, from the capital, always produced a place of strangeness that challenged me. He did not understand many of his codes and translated badly. This produced a sense of instability that stimulated my writing.
News: What do you find in that desolate landscape, a little abandoned and wild, which is interesting narratively?
PERRENS: Writing is always to witness a world. This bleak and abirmed landscape, a bit abysmal, perhaps reflects a certain sense of finitude that manifests in these times in a stronger way. A world where the limits, the edges that protect themselves are violated, violate and are exposed to the weather, to chaos.
News: The protagonist of “To save the beat” feels that she does not finish standing anywhere. What was interested in exploring with this “discomfort” of the protagonist?
PERRENS: I write down, I don’t know what I explode while I do, I let me go for word and then shape it, work it, I rewrite it many times. The protagonist of the novel is in a moment of crisis, walks on the edge. Each collapse echoes its previous falls that are amalgamated in their present. In turn, he does everything to save the beat from what he can rescue.
News: Your writing does not throw closed senses; Somehow, behind each sentence, some kind of mystery seems to hide. What are you looking for with this type of prose?
PERRENS: I think the most difficult thing is to convey the mystery, that moment where reality is torn and something else appears. Do not handle the gaps, nor the silences, they appear to me. I am overwhelmed to tell everything, I tend to write in a fragmented way. I follow the disasons because they always take me to another place. I do not want the reader to be outside, I try to invite him to enter those gaps and silences that at the time of reading they no longer belong to me.
By rn
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