By Laia Mataix Gómez
Bogotá (EFE).- During the pandemic, the Mexican writer Jorge Volpi had an explosion of creativity and turned to the subject that has always obsessed him, power and violence, which mixed with the rage that currently floods social networks and life of people, form a cocktail that explores the depths of human beings.
A play, a novel and a book of short stories were the results of this creative outburst, of which Volpi presented the last two in Colombia: “Partes de guerra” and “Enrabiados”, two proposals that have a common edge.
“I think the issue that has always obsessed me more than violence is power, and sometimes power is expressed through violence,” Volpi tells EFE in an interview at the Bogotá International Book Fair (FilBo ), which ended on Tuesday.
That obsession is reflected in “these two books, perhaps because they were written during the pandemic and in Mexico, which is experiencing a tremendously violent society at a time.”
In “Partes de Guerra” (Penguin Random House), the author explores the real violence of children and adolescents through a murder in a town in southern Mexico. A group of adolescents and children murder one of their classmates in a story that, although not real, is an anthology of “many real cases of violence between children and adolescents.”
This novel “is still somewhat detective, a novel about the origins of violence,” according to its creator.
While in “Enrabiados” (Foam Pages), the author focuses on symbolic violence, rage and anger that is present in many sectors of society, including social networks.
A kind of “social thermometer” in which readers can find themselves with “situations typical of our time, where anger dominates.”
Mexico and violence
Mexico has always been a cornerstone of their stories, and it is “very hard because we know very well when violence begins: in 2006 or 2007 when, as a result of the war against drug trafficking, the spiral of violence really increased to proportions unheard of”.
“The country of my childhood was an authoritarian country, but not a country of explicit violence, perhaps of hidden violence (…) instead, as an adult, it is a country of extreme violence” which is evidenced in the number of murders and disappearances, it is “a country where Justice does not exist, it does not work”, for this reason “it has become a subject that I could not not talk about”.
That is explicit violence, but “linguistic, symbolic violence is everywhere”, which is why “Enrabiados” talks about “our time and a certain propensity for rage and anger, which I think dominates us”, in Volpi’s words.
Anger is “in many sectors of our lives: as a couple, as a family, among friends, in the workplace, among artists, among writers, on social networks,” he adds.
The networks
In Mexico and other Latin American countries, “this violence from outside is reflected in the networks,” and the networks have been “like a social spirit that has been exacerbating.”
“Democracy, neoliberalism, the free market. They sold the idea that we were going to reach a utopia and a perfect society”, but when this did not happen “the disappointment with the model rightly provokes anger”.
“If we add to that social networks and particularly the architecture of certain social networks such as Twitter, which basically promote anger (…) there we have the conditions for why anger can be our emotional thermometer,” concludes the Mexican writer.