Claudio Zeiger: Deep autobiography as a novel

Lyric, shocking, controversial scenes travels through a boy who at age 17 decides to live experiences to the burning margin to become a writer in “Initiation at night” (Emecé), the new book of Claudio Zeiger. Editor and critic, Zeiger He is the author of an admired work that extends with this remarkable story. We dialogue with him.

Journalist: add experiences in order to tell true stories, is it what drives the boy of “Initiation to the Night” as the way of becoming a writer?

Claudio Zeiger: When I started writing this book that was something hacking. It was neither an aesthetic definition nor a defined narrative program. However, I was going in that direction, I was going to tell true stories. That is what the 17 -year -old impetus is crossed for writing the first book. It is the story of a beginning.

Q.: Did you tell some previous moments of adolescence to contrast them with those that would happen later?

CZ: When the book was almost finished, it seemed to me that it was too abruptly in that weather where life is complicated and darkened. I decided to make a farewell link of my previous book, “Childhood in Mataderos”, where my childhood, my adolescence, the secondary, my first adventures, and then move on to the hard, rough stage. There is something of that anguish that causes uncertainty to Silvio Astier, Arlt’s character. That distressing search of wanting to get to something and not know if it is going to arrive. I remembered Carlos Correas saying “What if the depths I was looking for were empty?” I chose to temper the crudeness of the rigor of experiences with the reflective nature of writing.

Q.: Are the experiences that allows you to narrate from the truth?

CZ: It is an issue for the search for truth in literature. One does not investigate the experience to transmit it in an orderly or anecdotal way, but to make a distillate. It is the great lesson of “perpetual prison” of Ricardo Piglia. It is far from my book that other initiation of a 17 -year -old boy who counts Piglia, but not so much. You do not work the continuous plot of a narrative to convince life elapses badly or in a novelistic way, but to offer an immersion in the flow of life. Experience has to do with that notion. And a special experience: the burning experience, which is a moment of crystallization of the experience. In literary work is to carry the flow of narration, which is the flow of life and experience, in search of the heart of experience, the burning experience.

Q.: Does that search lead you to mix literary and reflective moments, rugged adventures?

CZ: I was guided by a narrative line with an essay. That every story was experience and immediately reflection on experience. In addition, I was guided a rejection of the mere anecdote. That they will not remain, especially the sexual adventures of the last part of the book, such as an anecdotal gloating. At the same time not hide them. Nor does it seem to indicate: this is the anecdotal, the important thing is the other.

Q.: Was the end the book becomes a chronicle of the gay stage of the 1990s and the taxi Boys?

CZ: No, that is in “War name”, my first book. But the taxi Boys are not such, they are like amateurs of the movie “Lost at night.” In that book are the Boliches, the streets, the nightly wandering, how people are socialized, the strict scope of that scenario. In “Initiation to the Night” that is, but from the experience of who is running from the margin. If before it was the backstage, the friendly part, the party, the background of the scene, now goes out to the margin, the margin margin, the place where the possibility of self -destruction begins. Where the narrator feels the need to go to work, there is the limit, now there is the book.

Q.: Do your books belong to the fashionable “literature of the self”, the time chronicle or autobiographical fiction?

CZ: When I started publishing, there was no talk of literature of the self, and in a very incipient way, of “autobiographical turn.” For me “autobiographical literature” is when you have something to tell, and literature of the self is when it is said that nothing happened in life, it is the autobiographical story about the void. Something very different is when you are writing, especially if what is being written is a book played, putting the cards on the table, being confessional but not to give pity or victimize but to give testimony, and at the same time make literature that confronts other literatures. Because as long as you get something strong on the table you think about those who are considered not being true when they write. There is contemporary tension in that. I try to do something that at least shockee and cannot be described immediately.

Q.: In “Initiation to the night” – where its reference authors are belts, Masotta and Piglia – rescues the Ernesto Sábato from “Abaddon”.

CZ: With Sábato there has been a fierce attitude. “On heroes and tombs”, like so many others, adolescence marked me. The inclusion of Sábato in the book, and “Abaddon”, does not have the goal of causing progressive readers. I don’t know if remembering Sábato deserves the word tribute. I maintain that Sábato was the writer who spoke most to adolescents. That is worth the moment my book tells, a time when one began imaginary relationships, and dialogued equally, with living or dead writers. In adolescence, I got into my slaughterhouse, I read “Abaddon”, which my old man had bought. When I read “Abaddon” at night I was frightened and I couldn’t sleep for sex, torture, madness and sex scenes. That magma marked me deeply. I wanted to talk about that, and in this book I talk about adolescence, I could do it.