The manabita writer Jeovanny Benavides, born in 1981, won the Miguel Riofrío short novel contest with his work ‘Pillars of Vain Night ’. The corresponding book was edited and circulated briefly before the pandemic wreak havoc on cultural activity.
Waiting for the situation to normalize and bookstores resume shipments, this newspaper spoke to the author.
Was there a special reason to set this story in Argentina and Spain ?, because the story is universal and can work in almost any country.
Yes, indeed, my story could unfold in any setting, but I set it in Argentina and Spain because the four years of my doctoral training (2012-2016) I spent with one foot in both countries. Perhaps now, already in Ecuador, the time spent away from La Plata, Buenos Aires and Barcelona made me feel a certain nostalgia for those cities and the description of the parks, the streets, the squares, I could do better because something inside me missed everything how long I lived there. I didn’t think about it initially; Later, when I started writing the novel, I thought that it would be ideal to place my characters in those places. Maybe I was caught by an unconscious morriña, or what do I know, something similar had to happen to make that narrative decision.
A theme of the story is the sudden and unexpected change that a person’s life faces. The protagonist’s problem is that she has no weapons to face her new reality. But taking into account this global crisis that has put millions of people in trouble, is it possible to acquire them?
I think so. Human beings have an impressive capacity to overcome barriers, but we do not know until when life confronts us with those challenges that we were so afraid of. How many of us don’t ever say that we couldn’t live if something or someone were missing? And when it is no longer there, yes we can, the cold of absence may cost us at first, but we keep on going. In ‘Pillars of Vain Night’, the protagonist is stripped of practically everything and it is her turn to search, delve, rediscover herself, to find her place in the world. It is clear that each one is discovering and using each one according to his circumstances, as happens in my novel.
There is no recipe for dealing with a crisis.
There is no magic recipe that we can follow to the letter to solve our problems. Hence, most self-help books are a complete lie. What exists is the desire, the hope and the desire to get up to undertake the journey in which, finally, our life will become. The global crisis of today, for example, confronts us with a situation that until recently was unimaginable. We are going to get ahead, I don’t know the way or the way, but we will. And when this happens, we will look back and think that everything that is currently happening has been a gross nightmare taken from the tenth circle of hell that Dante Alighieri failed to create.
The love between father and daughter is another of the great themes of the book. What does the novel seek to reflect?
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Yes, it is a leitmotif present throughout my novel. With this, it seeks to show that, despite the adversities, the bond between father and daughter is strong, indestructible, eternal. In my work that love is exposed to complex circumstances at various times and out of all those conflicts both come out unscathed and stronger. It is a link that raises affection to its highest point. Despite this, my novel is not a manual on how family members should behave, nor does it have the sobering scent of a fable with morality, because, in fact, both characters make gross mistakes, but they always try to understand each other. another and shake hands.
Nothing and no one overcomes the love of a father who is united with his children, despite the distance and obstacles of those who struggle to separate them. There comes a time when the protagonist, Victoria, calls her dad and says, “I just killed a guy, what do I do?” In other words, it is a message that unsettles any human being, but you know that you have to intervene, do something, and not abandon your loved one to their fate. If the novel is looking for something with this theme of filial love, it is the understanding that is needed to overcome even the situations that we believe impossible at the time.
Every text has inevitable references, what are the ones that have inspired this work?
Borges said that you are what you have read, not so much what you have written. A good author is, above all, a good reader, and from his readings he gathers some lessons. No great writer, or who has pretended to be, has learned something valuable in a creative writing seminar, he takes it all in and absorbs it from the learning that he has been given by emblematic works and authors who left a good part of his life in them. For this reason, I would not speak of inspirations, but of certain marks and traces that certain books and authors are inevitably making present in my work and in that of any novelist. In this way, and keeping the enormous distances that separate me from the great masters, I can say that a diligent reader of my novel can perhaps find, and only perhaps, distant echoes of Javier Marías, remote resonances of Mario Vargas Llosa, vibrations distant from Heinrich Böll, close reverberations from Octavio Paz, slight murmurs from Coetzee and slight effects from Garcia Marquis. Perhaps from all that melodic narrative hybrid rises a story with its own voice, with a well marked and powerful style, called ‘Pillars of the Vain Night’.
A debate of these times is centered on the ‘commitment’ of literature. Does the writer have an ethical duty to fulfill?
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Stephen King says the writer’s sole responsibility is to search for the truth within his heart. In this sense, the commitment that every author has is contingent on finding certainties that transcend their own reality; like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Flaubert, Dickens and so many teachers that they got the answers to their daily lives in the writing of their plays and in doing so they also found literary eternity. The writer is not, should not be, a puppet of power or society; when it claimed to be, bad literature emerged, because there was a certain type of author who wanted to become the voice of the people and failed miserably, says Gao Xingjian. Writing is, above all, the voice of an individual who rises at a specific historical moment to tell a transcendent literary truth, different from his ephemeral reality.
The so-called “ethical duty” should not matter, either; otherwise Sophocles would not have written the Oedipus story, because his ethical commitment to society would have questioned him: “How can you think that your character will kill his father and marry his mother? Better write something else. ” Neither Dostoyevsky would have written “Crime and Punishment”, because ethics would tell him that you shouldn’t kill defenseless old women, however usurer they may be. And so with thousands of works that were momentous because their authors skipped the ethics class at school. The type of words “ethical duty”, “literary responsibility” and all that fallacy, has tried to limit creativity when literature is an exercise in and for freedom. When in congresses and literary circles, which I attend less and less, a colleague says that in his work he practices “ethical duty” I think he has committed the worst sin that a writer can fall into and that is self-censorship. I still believe that writing is the only way capable of leaving a mark on the fleeting transience of the days we are destined to live. And there I try to address myself as a writer.
What will be the subject of your next work?
I have a fairly advanced project for my second novel, but I have tried to “detoxify” myself from “Pillars of the Vain Night” by writing some stories. It happens that one as a writer is sometimes so imbued with a work, that it has been dense and that it has taken so long, that later it is difficult to get away from the story and its characters. I am in the final phase of that process. My new novel addresses the journey into the troubled waters of heartbreak and betrayal; visit the port of conflicts and marital disagreements; navigate the dangerous frontiers of conformity and marital apathy; it passes through the emporium of jealousy and sickly possession; and culminates his journey with the deadly and inescapable impact on the iceberg of indifference, daily monotony and total breakdown.
The purpose of my work is to transcend my reality, my time, my history, because, as García Márquez said: “You have to start with the will that what we write will be the best thing that has ever been written, because then there is always some of that will. ” And that pretends to do, that type of author I try to be.
Author data
Benavides has a PhD in Communication from the University of La Plata, a Postdoctoral Degree in History from the Institute of Latin American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin and a Master’s in Publishing from the Complutense University of Madrid. He won the International Cover Story Contest of Nicaragua, in 2011. He is co-author of books of chronicles and stories.
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