Rose Mary Salum: Abundance is a novel that flows beautifully and very visual. Could you tell us your creative process? In an interview already mentioned that you are not a visual person and yet the novel it is premeditated. How to travel between the rational and imagination that the creative process required to conceptualize a world so foreign to you? Mori
Ponsowy : is curious ... since the publication of Abundance many people have told me that the novel is very visual that I have now begun to doubt this assertion of mine that I'm not. Will I always was visual without realizing it? Could it be that I did try both visual? I think I felt like a flaw in my writing descriptions and shortages, so I forced myself to describe each scene as much as I could. I remember writing and ask: if a camera records this moment in history, what would it look? I saw the scenes before me like a movie. My job as a writer was, then, to count that movie as closely as possible, not to miss too many details. Sometimes I decided to zoom-in and there's the scene of the spider and the fly on the bathroom window, the yellow eyes of the worm in the water, and many others. But of course there are things that the inner eye sees better than the camera: fear, envy, sorrow, hope. To describe why the camera can not see you have to use other tools. However, even then I tried to tell him she "saw" with faithfulness, keeping his eyes open but what they found was not pleasant. Although I am scared.
RMS: En Abundancia subyace un cuestionamiento sobre la libertad. Ahora yo te pregunto, ¿crees que existe la posibilidad de la libertad o somos el producto del proceso natural del universo y el producto de reacciones químicas y físicas de la naturaleza como se sugiere constantemente por las imágenes que utilizas?
MP: Estamos acostumbrados a pensar que somos libres. Creer que somos dueños de nuestros actos es halagador: nos sitúa en un lugar privilegiado del universo natural. Cuando empecé a leer trabajos científicos relacionados con el libre albedrío me indignaba la manera tajante en que biólogos y neurólogos afirman que nuestra libertad es un espejismo. Después, Sapolsky said he considered that freedom did not exist and said it with such aplomb, that I could not believe it. Perhaps Abundance is a rebellion against it. What sense is literature if not we free? How can we care and passionate about the fate of a character if that character represents "us" is the most pure biological determinism? Moreover, what sense does it try to be better people, to straighten our lives, change our vices and virtues, if not we free? All this thought while writing. But now, two years after finishing the novel, each time I am more convinced that we are hydrogen carbon, oxygen ... electrons born in the stars.
RMS: Writing Abundance is light and very agile. It is a way of talking about a society that slides into the surface of language without much philosophical support, without a clear sense of the future. This way of being, this survival (constantly reinforced by the slogans of the products that bombard the life of every individual) appears as an animal attitude and you constantly make reference to that. Could you elaborate this?
MP: I often wonder who is going to think in the near future. What philosophers try explain this fast-paced world we live in and changing so much and so far each day? To be more precise, the question is not "what philosophers", but: there will still be philosophers? I see children and adolescents abstracted behind screens, with a diminished ability to focus attention due to multi-tasking, with a reading capacity also decreased because every time we read less deeply, and then it occurs to me that instead of starring in the ascent of man, we're starring in his descent into the most primitive instincts. The same instincts that advertising appeals. The same instincts that appeals to today's politics. Because politics born in the polis, which at one time claimed to be a construction of citizenship, human elevation, also now handled through advertising. Who we think, then? Who or what saves us? It strikes me that one possible answer is: art.
RMS: On your website published a chapter that never made it to the book, however, mention "the difference between a straight line and a rounded line, between points strictly always move in one direction, and points that rotate and spin in the plane, as if dancing. I like to think that the difference between a line straight and a curve is the same as that between the monotony and surprise. "Abundance has been a surprise?
MP: The surprise was winning the prize. He had been a finalist in two major awards before, but had not won and I was beginning to lose courage. And finally won!
RMS: Could you share how the idea for this novel?
MP: was writing a play and some of the players were the same in this novel. It was all very raw and I was pretty disoriented. One morning, suddenly, came the text of the first chapter. Full, well, fluently, as if someone was dictating me. I left the play and I turned to the novel. I realized early on that the basic idea would be the opposition between freedom and destiny. Science does not believe in freedom, but the art and, above all, the novel is not possible if the characters fail to change, transform, reinvent.
RMS: Do you happen frequently in writing that experience that the text came as dictated by someone who is not you?
MP: Unfortunately, no! That was a hook delivered those life throws you to cheat, because no other chapter went well easy. Or rather, yes, there were two chapters that also emerged as dictated ... but then did not work within the novel and I had to press "delete"!
RMS: How literature after Argentina now "in good health?
MP: If health is synonymous with vitality, Argentina literature is healthier than ever. Just go to the library or buy any cultural supplement to see how we write the Argentines. Poetry, essays, short stories, novels ... just in Buenos Aires, every week, dozens of poetry readings. Sometimes I think this is a country where there are more writers than people. And while that is an exaggeration, certainly, there are more writers than the number of readers can assimilate. That, perhaps, is the unhealthy. We write to be read as a reader would need to import! But, where? Because I think it is a global problem: the number of readers grows arithmetically, while that of published books seem to increase exponentially. One might ask: why write so much? "For the love of literature? How creative need? Why pure desire to be read?
RMS: What book literature Argentina universal or you would have liked to have written and why?
MP: At last an easy question! "The Human Stain" by Philip Roth. And then: "American Pastoral" also by Roth. I admire him deeply. I read these two novels many times and each reading back to was shocked by his narrative talent, the depth of his gaze, which has tremendous compassion for his characters. The only writer I admire and love you more than a Roth is Joyce.
RMS: The obvious question what are your future plans?
MP: want to be happy. Not all the time, clear. I know that's not possible. But I wish shedding unnecessary worries and sorrows. Is it possible to learn to be happy? What do you think? I spend more time doing nothing, looking at a tree. I swim, dance anymore. I also want to write more and better ... and win prizes!
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