2023-04-29 11:24:00
An intimate and deep book. A hybrid genre for a work that is born from the bowels. Gloria is its title and the author is Andrés Felipe Solano.
The writer Andrés Felipe Solano has been living in South Korea for ten years; However, the Colombian author has deep roots that have not been lost, which is why they appear in his books in the middle of a fine fabric. In his most recent book, titled Gloria, he writes regarding his mother at a very specific moment, when she lived in New York and he was not born. In the story, everything is connected from the notes of a concert by Sandro, on April 11, 1970, which moved the fibers of the Latino community in the Big Apple.
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Living in El Poblado spoke with Andrés Felipe Solano and this narrated regarding what it meant to immerse yourself in a personal story that touches on universal issues.
Writing regarding the mother or the father is not easy. How was that process? Did you feel shame? How to free yourself from the affective bond? How was the “reporting” that gave ground to the book, understanding that this is narrative, not confessional? Did you make a real pact?
Here there is no pact of truth like the one you mention, it is a novel with all the possibilities that a novel offers and in that sense, when I decided that it was that and not a book of another type, I freed myself from all moral constructions. That is why talking regarding reporting, even in quotes, can lead to confusion. With my mother’s elephantine memory, mine, a television series called The Deuce, and a very detailed report on Sandro’s concert at Madison Square Garden, I put together the initial material. After having it, a centrifugation process began and finally it was the literary imagination that began to take the reins. The feeling of truth that the reader can take is due precisely to the power of the literary imagination.
How was the writing process? There is the common thread of the concert, the before, the during and the following. She is there, your Gloria, however, you are there too. You leave the narrator and put the reader in your experiences and in that bond that unites the mother and the son in New York. You arrive there at the same age that she was when she migrated.
That narrator you mention, who is very strange because he comes and goes whenever he wants, who forces Sandro, for example, to watch Gloria at the concert, who suggests things to Gloria and then disappears for thirty pages, that narrator is the real find. of the writing of the book. Without him it would be impossible to condense all the days of Gloria into one day, those jumps to the future would be in a more conventional way. On the other hand, that narrator, who is Gloria’s son, allows me precisely at the end to talk regarding that filial relationship without reaching the confessional tone that I decided to avoid. He has qualities of a ghost that becomes corporeal at the end, but also a prenatal voice, as someone told me in a talk.
There are real elements and other fictional ones that achieve the fabric of a plausible narrative, inhabited by a certain mystery. It is not only your mother, there is also a reflection on filial relationships, on the being that exists in the one who emigrates and on time, topics that you have dealt with in other of your books. Do you feel that you manage to fly over the mother-character?
Yes, I wanted the book to have many more layers of meaning than just the fictionalized anecdote of the concert or my mother’s lives, I wanted what you mention to slip through in the most natural way, without the reader feeling, ah, ok, now comes the part regarding immigrants, here the violent years in Colombia and finally what you point out, a reflection on time, on how this conception of the arrow of time that goes in only one direction, past, present, future, we has parted ways with the idea of a complex time that actually travels in all directions. And precisely walking, as Gloria does that April 11, is perhaps one of the actions where we most clearly feel that complexity. In the street we are bombarded by hundreds of stimuli and at the same time we can be thinking regarding what we did in the morning or twelve years ago or what we will do at night or when they tell us that our mother has died.
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Moving on to another topic, how do you define South Korea? And in particular to Seoul, where you have lived for a decade? What has he given you?
“Sometimes I think of Seoul as my big cabin in the woods. Despite being a megalopolis, it allows me to take refuge to write and that is priceless”.
The work of Andrés Felipe is made up of essays, fiction and chronicles. Among his titles are the novels The Raven Brothers and Neon Graveyards and the non-fiction Minimum Wage. Live with nothing; Korea, notes from the tightrope and The days of the fever.
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