By Gustavo Borges |
Mexico City (EFE) with his books.
“I have never really liked what I have written, I am not very proud of my books. Until recently, if a colleague asked me what I was writing, I would answer, I am a former writer; They took it as a joke, but he was sincere, ”says Azócar in an interview with Efe.
The author, born in 1959 in San Fernando, in central Chile, has risen as a novelist with “El silencio del mundo”, a powerful difficult love story between a mature woman and a young man involved in the riots in Santiago, in 2019.
The 187-page work flees from the common places of couple relationships and with direct prose recreates an unusual love between the poet Elisa, an older woman secluded in her books, and Diego, a rebellious young man. They are not willing to come out of their shell, but unforeseen events happen to them.
“She thought that at most she was going to have some autumnal relationship, some partner, not a furious relationship, a moment of high eroticism, despite the fact that I avoided erotic scenes because in general they rarely work in literature,” she says.
Virginia at the kitchen table
Elisa, the protagonist of the novel, lives hidden behind her books, interacts with many people, but almost all of them live inside the pages, which moves young Diego, who reads little, when they sit in the kitchen to read Virginia Woolf.
“She shows him Virginia Woolf and tells him about Greco-Latin authors. Somehow Virginia acts as a bridge between them, he takes the book ‘To the lighthouse’ and when he goes to the protests he does it with the novel, which he reads during the breaks”, explains Azócar, referring to one of the keys to his story. difficult love
The woman hasn’t written for a long time, she works in translation and is a kind of alter ego for Azócar, who, referring to the times of his previous novel, “The man who appears from behind” (1997), remembers that when the he wrote there were almost no cell phones and his head had hair.
“I had been chewing on the idea of difficult love for a while, using the concept of Italo Calvino, that idea that difficulty is the very essence of the loving relationship. Then the social outbreak appears and served as the setting for part of the novel. I used it as a prop item,” she explains.
Azócar and the prose of a frustrated musician
As a young man, Pablo Azócar played the flute and later learned the saxophone. Music continued to be present in his life and it is in his new novel in which Miles Davis appears and the Tunisian composer Anoar Brahem enchants lovers with his work.
“I look with envy at how the musicians enjoy when they play. On one occasion I had to read poetry with Cristian Cuturrufo, a tremendous jazz musician. He was a great friend who died of covid; we read poetry with music and it was exciting. I have an affective relationship with music and jazz”, he confesses.
Azócar narrates with a musical prose in which he sometimes takes out his status as a poet, perhaps the main one in his profession as a writer.
“I am surprised by narrators who do not read poetry, it is as if you played the piano and did not use the black keys. For me poetry is crucial, I first of all feel like a poet. I feel that the use of poetry to handle prose is fundamental, ”she confesses.
When referring to Parra’s compliments, years ago the narrator Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) assured: “Nicanor Parra ponders Pablo Azócar and I completely agree.”
Azócar does not swell with pride. He has returned to the novel, however he is not sure if there will be another. “What I have always liked is reading; reader is my true profession ”, he confesses.
