Chilean novelist Alberto Fuguet said media fame is one of the most dangerous things that can happen to a writer, speaking to La República during a visit to Lima for the city's International Book Fair (FIL), where he presented his new novel, Ushuaia (un destino melodramático), published by Tusquets.
In the interview with Gabriel Ruiz Ortega, Fuguet said there were many ways for a writer to lose their way, including drugs, social media, politics or party affiliation. He pointed to writer Gustavo Escanlar as someone who lost himself early by moving into television.
A mother and son across five decades
Ushuaia follows Leticia, a woman shaped by the 1980s, and her son Bruno, tracing their relationship from the 1970s to the present through a fragmented, multi-voice structure. Fuguet said the novel's biggest achievement was that readers did not feel that structural scaffolding while reading it.
He said he had read the writers of Latin America's Boom generation and believed their experimental techniques could be reused to reach a wider, popular audience without abandoning ambition. As an example, he cited the upcoming remake, starring the daughter of actress Andie MacDowell, of Possession, the 1981 film by Polish director Andrzej Żuławski that was once considered unwatchable art-house cinema. What was once avant-garde, he said, no longer is, and he felt many of his fellow writers had been left behind.
Revisiting McOndo
Asked whether that critique extended to writers linked to McOndo, the anti-magical-realist literary movement Fuguet helped found in the 1990s, he mentioned that an Australian author had published a book in its favour the previous March. He said today's readers live across multiple registers at once and that writers needed to connect with 21st-century readers rather than mourn the 20th century.
Fuguet described Ushuaia as an experimental novel that is nonetheless conservative, comparing it to a film that wants to reach a mass audience while still winning an Oscar, and said it was a book that could be read on the metro. He added, half-joking, that some people consider him a genius, which he said he is not, blaming the state of the literary world, particularly around Peru's Alfaguara prize, for a split between commercial or youth-oriented pop literature and what is deemed serious, with little acknowledged in between. He said he believes there is a middle ground.
On the lack of risk-taking in fiction, Fuguet described some older, established writers as gatekeepers protecting a legacy while disconnected from the wider world. He also pointed to a kind of fiction built purely on plot and romance, with little attention to prose, that is winning large readerships even though he was unsure it produced great books. Still, he said he was glad people were reading at all. One reason he wrote Ushuaia, he said, was realising that his students read plenty, just not what he or his own readers typically read, gravitating instead toward romance and stories of contemporary life.
Leticia, Bruno and a hidden political novel
Fuguet said Leticia is a woman of the 1980s who washes dishes and watches soap operas, but that women of that decade also had full lives, danced and dated more than one man at a time. He noted that Laura Branigan's 1984 hit "Self Control", once dismissed as disposable pop, functions almost as a feminist anthem today and would likely be controversial if released now.
The novel also centers on a disappearance involving Bruno, who keeps a blog almost nobody reads and is drawn to telling stories. Fuguet called Ushuaia a political novel in disguise, saying everyone has a mother, though not everyone has a father. Leticia lives in Maipú, a Chilean district he compared to Lima's San Miguel, which he said he wanted to give the texture of any ordinary suburb found in any country. He said literature has written extensively about fathers but not enough about mothers, many of whom raised children alone while carrying their own dreams and desires. He said several women had told him they identified with Leticia, and that the novel let him explore why some women are drawn to unusual men, including straight men who are failures in conventional terms. Many younger readers, he added, identified with Bruno, whom he described as a freak who writes and watches obscure films.
On censorship and being literature's "punching bag"
Asked about Peruvian literature beyond Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa and Oswaldo Reynoso, Fuguet said he liked Óscar Malca's Al final de la calle, though he said other authors are usually recommended to him instead.
He agreed that writers today are often judged more for their political positions than their books, saying that seems to be all that matters now, and that a book itself is treated as secondary to whether its author counts as an intellectual voice worth claiming. He said this does not matter to him personally and is not a new phenomenon, but that there is now an opportunity to break the pattern, comparing it to the line from Jurassic Park that life finds a way. There will always be officially sanctioned writers, he said, but he believes something exists beyond what is offered to readers.
Fuguet recalled leaving publisher Penguin after writing about Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, saying no writer deserves censorship and that readers are entitled to say a book is bad or failed to interest them, but that is different from censorship. He said he had recently read a thesis written about him describing him as literature's punching bag, the one figure who can be hated with total transparency to purge collective neoliberal guilt. He suggested it was harder to attack someone who was dull but decent, especially if that person was also a communist and a feminist, than to attack someone who was gay.
