2023-11-06 20:03:35
The winner and the finalist of the Herralde Novel Award 2023 They have some common denominators. Both cultivate writing, but at the same time they have worked as filmmakers, both were born in the 80s and although they do not practice generational literature, they are in tune with the concerns of the moment. He is Luis Lopez Carrascor (Murcia, 1981). She, Camila Fabbri (Buenos Aires, 1989).
Lopez Carrasco He is almost unknown in the field of literature, but he has a consolidated career as a film director, to the point that when he talks about his book when it comes to saying novel, the word ‘film’ invariably escapes him. There are many years behind the camera and in writing scripts that he had his documentary highlight ‘The Year of Discovery’, with high social content, which won a Goya. ‘The white desertthe novel with which the Herralde obtains is no less politically committed and with echoes of science fiction or speculative fiction as they call it now, because the action takes place in the near future, in 2035 with some characters remembering their past, that is, ours. present.
The opening anecdote of the book may be misleading: a group of people escape the final world war in a hot air balloon and the dilemma arises as to who should jump into the sea so that the rest of the crew can save themselves and re-found a new humanity. In reality, it is a group dynamic proposed by a department store of culture and what is sought is a temporary job as a salesperson. Something that the author knows well because he worked there and because many of his friends had to leave driven by the crisis that began in 2008. Gonzalo Pontón Gijón, one of the jury members, reviews the concerns of the novel, which are those of current society: “modern work, organized tourism, friendship and its rituals, family history and memory.”
An unspectacular end of the world
Ultimately, what Carrasco is suggesting is how this end of the world with which we are so obsessed in the 21st century may be not so much the product of a Hollywood catastrophe “as of a series of more imperceptible circumstances that lead us to live in a place where we do not belong, lives that are not worth living.” . The novel also has a high political component, there is alienation in the world of work, which has a lot to say about how we relate to new technologies. “One of the questions is whether we can put distance between things in a world where everything is immediate and automatic,” the author accuses.
Camila Fabbri, finalist with ‘The dancing queen‘, debuted this year as a director at the San Sebastián festival with the film ‘Clara gets lost in the forest’. Although her circumstances as her director are more circumstantial than in Carrasco’s case, the author has a longer career as a playwright and storyteller. The work is, according to Gonzalo Pontón, “a novel that works at full speed from start to finish, without risk of accident”, despite the fact that its beginning is exactly an accident, the one suffered by the protagonist, “a woman who perceives herself in a very broken way from a self-destructive perspective”, explains Fabbri.
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