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Miguel Lorenci
Madrid
Viernes, 24 de enero 2025, 17:41
"Family has more of hell than paradise." So claims María Fasce (Buenos Aires, 1969), who publishes 'The End of the Forest' (Siruela), the novel that earned her the Café Gijón Prize in its 74th edition. "The forest is a metaphor for darkness, madness, and secrecy," she anticipates about a story that explores family demons and miseries and the sometimes blurred line between reason and madness.
A nightmare sparked this novel with a dark weave. "In everything I write, there is a mystery," says this renowned editor at the helm of imprints like Alfaguara, Lumen, and Reservoir Books, author of a dozen books who writes "to understand the things that disturb me." She has kept her promise "never to publish myself" and knows from experience that "the novel and the book are more alive than ever."
"The unreliable narrator suits the crime novel," says Fasce, justifying the choice of a protagonist on the brink of madness: Lola, the eldest of three siblings, who accepts Juana and Andrés's proposal to spend some time in the Peralta Ramos forest, a mythical enclave of her Argentine childhood. They lost their parents long ago, and the reunion, which promises to be healing, turns terrible. The fragile Lola is only heard by her young neighbor, whom she meets secretly at siesta time, until a brutal incident changes everything.
"Madness is sometimes the refuge of sanity. When reality becomes unbearable, we cling to unreal things, and this brings peace. We live in doubt, in uncertainty, but the mad do not doubt, nor do religious fanatics. Madness can be comforting," asserts Fasce.
She wields the scalpel in the family to show its darkest side. "Sartre might well say that family is hell before others. Family has more of hell, of nightmare, than paradise or dream. We can choose a partner, friends, but no one chooses their parents or children," she says, adding that "what doesn't kill you makes you freer."
"I am a writer before an editor. From a very young age, I sent my stories and poems to newspapers and publishers," says Fasce, who harmoniously combines her two professions. "An editor is like a good mechanic; if you have a good engine, you'll get the best performance from the car, but you can't do anything the author hasn't done," says the discoverer of the Carmen Mola trio, advocate of the forgotten stories of Lucia Berlin, the novels of Elena Ferrante, or Sara Barquinero, protagonist with 'The Scorpions' of one of the most recent literary phenomena.
Of 'The Gypsy Bride', the first novel in the Carmen Mola saga, she was fascinated by "the moral violence, much more than the physical." "The chilling part wasn't the 'gore': it was the protagonist's suffering for her son, Elena Blanco, a Shakespearean torment," she says of the character of the criminal inspector whom her creators have retired after five installments.
"I get bored quickly with books," confesses someone who can detect an author's talent or lack thereof in just a few pages. "Sometimes I resort to the trick of page 99, as Ford Madox Ford, who was also an editor, stated," she explains. "It's clear that the author puts all their effort into the beginning and the end, but it's in the middle of the story where they might let their guard down and where you can gauge what they truly offer you."
"Literature and publishing are experiencing a sweet moment, yes, but they have never lived a bitter one. The novel has been killed in vain so many times... the book has been buried, and it turns out they are more alive than ever," she boasts. "Fiction is in our DNA; we are born and die telling stories, and it will always be so. What the reader creates in their imagination, spurred by the story, is unbeatable. Nothing is more powerful than a book," she concludes.
Editor since the age of 23, Fasce has worked as a translator, journalist, and literary and film critic. She is the author of novels such as 'The Truth According to Virginia' (2003), 'The Nature of Love' (2008), 'The Woman of Isla Negra' (2015), and 'The Lives of Elena' (2023), with which she was already a finalist for the Café Gijón Prize. With 'Two Strangers', she won the Buenos Aires City Prize and was a finalist for the Nadal. She has been included in various anthologies and has also written the play 'The Sea'.
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