2024-09-08 03:01:00
Was there any way that the pandemic was even more disruptive? In March 2020, when the world was closing in on itself, the writer Luciano Lamberti He went into the machine room of the building where he lived. He was carrying his notebook and one of the oldest known treatises on demons: The Lesser Key of Solomon. Among those pages –written throughout the 15th century– he was looking for a spell, a forgotten rite, the steps necessary to revive a person. They appeared hidden among the witches’ requests to make a murderer fall in love or to make the sky fall on the villages. For Lamberti, they were the bleeding heart of the story he was pursuing.
Four years later he launched what is perhaps his novel more finished, To bewitch a hunter (Alfaguara), a profuse and disturbing story that simmers among the shadows of the last civil-military dictatorship, and then sinks into its own mystery, the story of a marked family where cruelty and terror reach proportions metaphysicsThe pact was sealed.
“I started studying that book on communication with demons, which was passed on to me Mariana Enriquez when I told her I wanted to get into witchcraft. Witches asked favors from entities that are beyond good and evil, which are two human concepts. Demons are rather Buddhists,” says Luciano Lamberti and lets out a thick laugh. “Then I entered the Satanism. This idea that you have a God who represses you, who takes away what is vital from you. And another who tells you I lived, I experienced the pleasure. Who is the true God? All of that was sedimented in the idea of the hunter, which runs through the entire novel.”
Lamberti is sitting in the engine room where he wrote To bewitch a hunterwith which he won the 2023 Clarín Novel Prize –and dedicated to the thirty thousand missing people–, a place that has since become his office. It is a large space where you have to walk bent over to avoid hitting your head, as if it were the hidden mezzanine that led to the mind of John Malkovich. They are notebook is lit on a long wooden board, just below the water pipes that run outside the walls, next to a volume that brings together the complete poetry of Nicanor Parra. “In addition to the multiplicity of characters, their moments of truth and the strength of this story, It is a complex and uncomfortable book,” said the writer Samanta Schweblin, one of the judges who awarded the novel. “Open it with caution because, like great books, “It’s not exactly what it seems.”
It all begins with a chase. Julia, a woman who is the daughter of missing people and leads a stormy life, is approached in the street by an old woman who claims to know her. The phantom thread that unites them begins to become visible and they agree on a trip to San Ignacio, a town embedded in the mountains of Córdoba that, in its peaceful everyday life, hides the doors to the horrorFrom that moment on, the novel works by putting together the beads of a cursed necklace in which the stories of Julia, her father Luis – a playboy turned Catholic and political activist who disappeared – and her grandparents, the Laras, illustrious representatives of the aristocracy of San Ignacio, who find in mysticism the weapons to stay alive, are woven together. Each one will live his own nightmare; and will make others live it.
“The basic idea of fantasy is that if you lead a trivial life, you don’t have access to the other side”, says Lamberti. “Cortázar starts from that, The pursuer They are ordinary people who want to access that other side. It’s not about ‘Oh, look at the monster.’ In the novel, the idea of the hunter bounces off of all the characters, who are looking for signs of the sacred in the world. That can lead you to terrible places also”.
As if he had invoked a delicate transformation, Lamberti turned on his own truths to reorder the fantastic that he has been working on for more than ten years. There where the abandoned factories were, the roofs rotting in wastelands like the waste of the menemism –The Pig Killer; The parrot that could predict the future– now the remains of torture, kidnappings and disappearances. The multiplicity of voices and characters that made what they observed more strange –The rural teacher; The Kruger massacre– become a proliferation of minimal stories where the boundaries between victims and victimizers, crossed by brutality and magic, become increasingly blurred.
-The book is full of lives that grow up far from the main plot, but that take on an unexpected meaning. The boy who can’t support his son, the girl who takes the wrong path on her bike, the man who falls in love with Luis and writes him a letter, the Taking of La Calera. What interested you in telling these other stories?
-I was attracted by the fact that the story covers all social classes. Many characters, many stories, over many years. That is Vargas Llosa. At the same time, these “realities” hide the fantastic. The Calera story was a delirium. Kids taking over a police station, a post office, leaving the Peronist march on a tape recorder, which is dismantled by the bomb squad. It is the most fantastic element of the novel. (laughs).
-The fantastic elements are revealed little by little, always within a realistic narrative. Why did you work on it that way?
-The realistic leg is seventy percent of the novel. That’s it. Stephen King. In a framework where you feel comfortable, you put the supernatural. I was interested in going slow. It’s something that grows. I based it on Pet Sematary150 pages pass until the cat is revived! (laughs). But you are leaving elements. It’s all about the apparent and the real. Why are madness and hallucinations not considered part of reality? What we say is “real” is also a projection of our minds. But you have to get there little by little. In the novel, the character of Luis understands this in a poem by Calderón de la Barca: What is life? An illusion / a shadow, a fiction / and the greatest good is so small / that all life is a dream.
-Does the fantastic arise from one’s own experiences?
-I don’t know if it takes a long life to write. For me, it takes having experienced things that you already experienced when you were twenty. Falling in love, being betrayed, living alone, going a little hungry, fighting with a friend. All those basic things of humanity that you later camouflage. It all comes from childhood. And then from my imagination, which is quite lush. But the landscape is that of childhood. Writing is also about making a reference to yourself. You give life to a character who is perhaps a murderer or a butcher, and in the background you see your neighbor, a relative, and you say to yourself: “Do you remember this?”