“It is very difficult to unravel how far the mandate goes, how far the desire and how far the obsession; “what is expected of one, what one expects.” This is how it summarizes the writer and journalist Ana Wajszczuk the question she addresses in her new novel, “Fantasticland”, a true treatise on modern motherhood, in which no question is left out. Why be a mother, why look for a child of your own blood, how far to go in that attempt, how to raise without disappearing in the task.
If in your first novel, “Boys from Warsaw”, Wajszczuk He traveled in time to recover the history of his father’s family, Polish by birth; in “Fantasticland” fictionally inspired by her own life, the plot is centered on a present in which her partner and her daughter occupy the foreground, and her mother becomes an unavoidable figure: parenting is learned from childhood, from the person who brought us to the world.
What is the narration like?
The story begins long before Renata, the desired daughter, appeared on earth; when the narrator and her partner meet. That romance transforms into a relationship (one of the most beautiful moments in the book) and goes on rails until the great wall of infertility and the impossibility of conceiving breaks. Then, medicine makes its entrance, an essential path but one that ends up becoming hellish, as the studies, hormones and fertilizations are repeated without result.
With wild humor, the writer makes implausible lists of the things she tried to achieve her goal, an inventory that includes dozens of medical interventions but also less conventional practices such as acupuncture and healing parents.
“No one around me had had problems having a child. For me it was a blow to realize that she couldn’t get pregnant,” says Wajszczuk about her own experience, through which she was forced to navigate the complex terrain of treatments. “I had to set my own limits because otherwise the medical system will take care of you. The idea is that you leave there with a baby, whatever. You begin to record those micro-violences that until a while ago women did not record. They leave you waiting four hours in a waiting room. Or you always see a different doctor. This ends up burdening you with one more mandate. We have to leave the clinic like Pampita and have children at 50.”
Age is closely related to the inability to conceive, a concern, the writer points out, that men do not have. And they are the eggs of a “post 40” woman those that are beginning to be the great obstacle for pregnancy. The moment of greatest tension in the plot of “Fantasticland” is the protagonist’s decision to resort to donating an egg from her sister.
“I cared a lot the right to identity. I worked at Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo and for me the issue of biological and genetic identity is very important. I am against not registering the identity of the donor. In reality, they preserve the business. If each person goes to a fertility clinic with their donor, it throws a wrench into a mechanism that is very oiled,” she explains.
The question arises, inevitably. “Are you worried that some facts from reality could be read into this fiction and bother people in your family?” “The only person I really cared about was my partner, because it seemed to me not only that I was using him as a basis for the character, but that I was exposing something of our daughter’s life; and he gave me a very good return,” answers the writer.
The task of raising
The revolution that the appearance of a boy in a woman’s life implies is so strong that it was inevitable for Wajszczuk to write about it. The hours without sleep, the confusion, the overwhelming sensation of a life completely occupied by the demands of the child, happiness and anger in massive doses, emotions at maximum voltage. “I think that constructing stories about motherhood means that we can begin to see it as a social issue and not as an issue in which you have to manage alone, as best you can.”
During the time she incubated the book, the writer reviewed all the bibliography available to her on the subject. From the essays and novels of Rachel Cusk to those of Annie Ernaux. She was working on the text with the editor and writer Juan Forn, when he died, in 2021. “It was difficult for me to finish the novel after that. Juan always told me, ‘shake it up, I want to see that protagonist go crazy.’”
Responding to the madness of the early years, with enough distance to tell his story, Wajszczuk brings into play an enormous talent to make the adventure of creating an exciting story. Enjoying and suffering with her is inevitable, whether the reader is a mother or not.
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