"The Family is a Mafia Institution"

Argentine writer and essayist Guillermo Saccomanno has just delivered to the press 'Arderá el viento', a book written against all odds and with which he won the Alfaguara Novel Prize. He faced numerous hardships, including a delicate operation that required a costly expense to save his life. However, he overcame adversities, including two pneumonias and the coronavirus, and completed the fiction in a very modest dwelling. Perhaps for this reason, he feels morally justified in giving importance to money, the driving force that sets many wills in motion. In his novel, Saccomanno uses an oppressive atmosphere and the creation of an imaginary territory, in the manner of Faulkner, to weave a fiction about a coastal town in Argentina that closely resembles the place where he lives, Villa Gesell.

-Why does fire play such a prominent role in 'Arderá el viento'?

-It has a very powerful and atavistic symbolic value. I have been fascinated by it since childhood. I remember the bonfires of San Pedro and San Pablo in my neighborhood, where children would go from house to house asking for wood or kerosene to feed them.

-The genesis of the novel dates back to the 1990s, when you published chronicles for the newspaper 'Página 12' about the place where the novel is set.

-Many locals were displeased because it revealed murky stories, but it eventually became a local classic that sells like hotcakes in summer. Later, I wrote a more ambitious novel, 'Cámara Gesell', about 600 or 700 pages, in which I invested six or seven years while working on other books. Over time, I realized that this was my private territory.

-The family does not come off well in your novel.

-The family is a hell and a mafia institution: whoever leaves takes a secret, and if they reveal it, they must be eliminated.

-What do you feel when you burn a draft of a novel that hasn't come together?

-I love it. It gives me a sense of liberation and purification. Here I was writing the beginning of a story in a notebook. It seemed so abominable that I destroyed it; I didn't burn it because I'm staying in a hotel, but I tore it into pieces.

-Is literature more than just entertainment?

-Yes, I believe literature should disturb, unsettle, amaze, and shock. If there's a sex scene, reading it should make you feel something.

-And can it change things?

-No, but it can correct perspective, illuminate areas of reality that are not always evident. It can show you something you don't see even though it's right in front of you.

-Your novel has been compared to the imaginary world of David Lynch.

-I share with Lynch the vision of the town or territory as a universe of its own, with absurd and delirious characters.

-Unlike many writers, you don't mind talking about money.

-We live in a capitalist system. It's absurd not to think in terms of money, class struggle, economic power. It's what moves the world.

-You have faced economic difficulties to bring the novel to light. Will the $175,000 prize money be a relief?

-Last year I had to undergo surgery for an aortic aneurysm and needed some screws for the stent. I could have easily gone to the other side. The health insurance didn't cover the materials, so my daughters had to find $15,000 that hasn't been reimbursed yet. The prize helps a lot to live, I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

-Why do you compare literature to a religion?

-Because it demands a devotion similar to mysticism. It requires an act of faith in what you do. If you don't have faith in what you do, why the hell are you writing?

-Has journalism helped you in your literary work?

-I have never separated journalism from literature. For me, the chronicle is another form of literature. Even Christopher Columbus's letters are literature.

-Do you have a hopeless view of humanity?

-I'm not optimistic. My father used to say that when the catapult was invented, people thought it was the end of the world. The world goes on, but we keep inventing weapons.