Fernanda Trías: "The struggle is to avoid falling into absolute pessimism."

Fernanda Trías is passing through Buenos Aires. She's lived in Colombia for a decade. She's currently speaking at a café in Palermo: "I started writing this novel during the pandemic , during quarantine. In Bogotá, we were locked down for about four months. It was one of the longest quarantines in the world. There was also that loneliness of mine, that isolation in my apartment, which, whether you like it or not, makes its way into the writing. I think that without the radical confinement I was in, staring at the mountains all the time, I don't know if I would have been able to write that novel . I sort of took a lot of things from that extreme experience and transmuted them. Because I do like to take characters and push them to their limits to see what a character is made of, what they're capable of. That comes out when you corner them and take them to their limits. I like to take my characters to extreme environments where we see their potential."

A woman connects with a mountain; everything happens at that point of connection and encounter. The Mountain of the Furies (Random House), the most recent novel by Trías (Uruguay, 1976), is a reading experience that shows a woman within a series of boundaries (geographical, emotional, linguistic, and psychic) ​​that are very difficult to pinpoint (and, above all, to navigate). Her only guiding light/anchor, which is also not a certainty and cannot be guaranteed to be reliable, is her writing: she fills notebooks, and those are the signs of this strange world reflected in the novel, which seems so distant yet so close at the same time.

Ambiguity is part of the journey of entering this story . In this instability, and with the ominous and very dense silence that lush but threatening nature always brings, the protagonist's own—sentimental? ecological? friendly?—bond with a mountain appears. This is how things are in this story: the rarefaction puts reality on the ropes and leads us to constantly reflect on the power of language to convey the inconceivable.

In any case, isn't this work the fertile ground for literature? Literature, then, seeks to make the impossible a new possibility, a new enchantment in a disenchanted world. This is how this novel operates, where a mountain speaks and a woman, whose everyday life is on the verge of rationality, find a place of rapprochement, but to consider when the human appears and disappears to arrive at other forms of existence.

The novel alternates between the voice of the mountain and the protagonist's notebooks . She writes at one point (p. 165): "Whoever truly loves something will call it by its exact name. That's why it saddens me that the language of plants is secret. If I could listen to the plants, what would they say about my grandmother?"

The protagonist, in a very physical setting, is constantly trying to convey something for which words seem an insufficient tool. It's a theme—language and its implications—that seems to obsess Trías and runs through his work: "I make variations on a series of obsessions. Although sometimes new obsessions are added, and that's good."

From her first novel, La azotea (2001), until now we've seen the obsessions that have imposed themselves on me without the author deliberately seeking them out . Namely: female protagonists, first-person narrators always alone, who are usually in positions outside the norm, in uncomfortable places, and who are transgressive where they're not supposed to be; it's always in that clash between the inside and the outside. An inside that is a house and represents the safe space, but who are then expelled from that safe space, thrown into the elements and into that outside they so resisted leaving. Then there's the whole claustrophobic theme, that feeling of suffocation even despite being in an open space, a kind of suffocation. And without a doubt there are the themes of family relationships, mothers and daughters. Trías is attracted to those expelled from paradise.

She says: “All of these elements ultimately unite the books, even though I try to write a very different book from the previous one because I want to be interested in the challenge of what's next, what I want to try to do next. Without that risk, I don't feel the thrill of sitting down in front of the typewriter. In this novel, I felt like I was taking new risks, and I'm excited by the possibility of taking a leap into the void in some aspects, and there are others I feel comfortable with because they're my lifelong obsessions. These aspects included formal explorations: working with a human character, images, line breaks, and breaking up sentences.”

The Mountain of Furies is written in prose that ranges from simple to lyrical, creating an organic whole that blends with the wild nature it depicts. He shares a bit about the behind-the-scenes writing process: “I read a lot of things aloud. I read the entire novel aloud several times because that's where I work hard on rhythm and sound, and a certain cadence that depends on each book. And that's how it's refined.”

In an interview with Clarín , Fernanda Trías talks about this new work, which has her unmistakable stamp but, as a tireless seeker, adds new spaces of confrontation, tension and, of course, beauty to her narrative.

–How did you find the tone of dialogue between this woman and the mountain?

–I jumped right into writing this story as soon as I finished Pink Mugre . I was coming from a very different perspective. Maybe it was a pendulum-like feeling that you want to go in another direction and explore a very different perspective because you've already been in the other perspective for four years. I wanted to work on a very simple way of speaking, a woman who had a simple way of speaking, but at the same time could, little by little, reach very deep and perhaps even lyrical places without ever losing that simplicity. That was very different from the protagonist in Pink Mugre . The truth is that this voice reached me, as it always does because I start writing by hearing the protagonist's voice. Hebe Uhart said she built her characters by hearing them and by how they speak, and by listening to them speak, she understood them and let them graze in her head until she started writing. I have a similar process. I started listening to this woman. I let it graze, I watched it a lot, and at a certain point I said, "Okay, I've got this tone," and from there I started writing. When I understood that the mountain was the other protagonist, I wanted to differentiate its tone. I wanted the mountain's voice to have something tighter, more dense. That's why those chapters are shorter, so that the density wouldn't collapse. And the other thing I kept in mind when constructing this book linguistically was the mix. The mix of a Uruguayan language, a River Plate language with a Colombian influence, and trying to make that mix a way of speaking specific to these characters that would contribute to the rarefaction of the story and the place. Why speak as River Plate people in such a Colombian or Andean environment? I felt that this contradiction between imagery and speech allowed me to work on the rarefaction I wanted to achieve.

–There's something about the protagonist's gaze that reminded me of a certain way of looking at Agota Kristof's characters.

–I really like Agota Kristof and The Big Notebook, which is a book that fascinates me. I thought these notebooks in my book were a tribute to those other Kristof notebooks. But in Pink Grime, I had already transfigured Montevideo and changed the names of places. You saw the city in disguise. In The Mountain of Furies, I create an imaginary world because this geographical configuration of a poor town doesn't exist. The language of the novel contributes to this delocalization.

–It seems that in the novel the question of what is human always reappears: whether it is language, whether it is writing, whether it is contact with others.

–I'm interested in that reading because I, too, started from the idea of ​​thinking about how to undo ourselves as humans. I had in mind what I wanted to get to: the idea of ​​becoming vegetal, or becoming something else. It can be a post-human thing, which is this kind of metamorphosis or hybridization of the woman's body that embraces something more primal within her. Even her body, as she comes closer to understanding this other corporeality that is the mountain, and approaches a kind of intimacy with the mountain, her body too was mutating, or coming closer to being alongside the mountain.

–The protagonist is an extreme character, and at certain moments the question arises as to whether she's experiencing what she's writing or hallucinating it. How did you work on those edges and ambiguities?

–These are issues I've already written about; they're like my obsessions. They often appear unintentionally, until I finally realize it. In The Rooftop , my first novel from 2001, there's already a protagonist narrating in an unreliable first person. It's not clear whether what she's telling us is real or a complete paranoid delusion. She says there's a group outside that wants to destroy her, and everything she has and loves, so she barricades herself in. Actually, that's what I like about protagonist narrators: they're always straining what's real and what's a borderline with delusion. It's never clear whether they're out of touch with reality. In this novel, an interesting component was added. In addition to the extreme loneliness and her talking to herself—perhaps one thinks she's going crazy because she only talks to herself and the mountain—this whole bond she thinks she's forming with the mountain could be a delusion. But there was also the possibility that it was all because she's bordering on a mystical state. And that mystical state seems interesting to me because the mystical experience is incommunicable. If you read the texts of mystics who are trying to share their experience, you realize they can't communicate; when they're put down on paper, they sound like madness. I thought about that, and that's why it was so important in this novel to play with the limits of what language allows you to say. And to think of the theme of language itself as a limit. Because perhaps a mystical experience, if it could be communicated, wouldn't be through language as we know it. Language itself immediately distorts it. Then you're left isolated in your experience. And since the woman, deep down in her notebooks, wants to communicate things that are incommunicable, it was logical for me to explore the limits of words. It's about learning another language, and if she could decode it, she would understand the message of the mountain.

–What work did you do to arrive at the words of the mountain?

–Working with the language of the mountain was my own experience of colliding with my attempt to break away from an anthropocentric, human perspective on the mountain. The whole time, it was an exercise in trying to distance myself and stretch my gaze and decenter myself, even a little, even a degree, and be able to try to imagine that experience of being in the world and being in the time that the mountain could be. But I knew, because I can't be naive, that from the moment I was using human language to write about the mountain experience, the language itself was limiting me. I was having to work with an artifice and the very limits that writing imposed on me. The difficult thing was stretching myself to try to touch a little bit of the other side and return, touch and return. And to be on a border, because if I wanted to imagine a mountain language, it would be illegible. I could go that way, but I didn't want to. I had to touch and return and try to reach moments where I could twist and break away from the human experience of looking at and understanding the world.

–How does the fact that you've been living in Colombia for some time influence your work with language?

–At one point, I decided I had to open myself up to contamination, not fight it. It was a very conscious decision because I realized at one point that I was acting as a policeman for my own language when I wrote, because things got in the way, and I'd say, "This isn't Uruguayan," and I'd cross it out. I was exercising that repressive position. I decided to do something else: generate an aesthetic proposal from language, embracing the mixture I'd become because I've been in Colombia for ten years. El Monte de las Furias was that experiment. I tried to figure out how to write a novel that combines these two things that I am. And that's where the idea came from, quite a risk, to construct this very Colombian, Andean geographic and natural universe, from the mountains and the native forest. I went on many field trips to get a feel for the atmosphere. But at no point did I say, "I'm going to write about Colombia" or try to sound Colombian. I'm not interested in representing a Colombian way of speaking because I was looking for a mixture, a blend. And that was the strangeness I was looking for. That's what I became through life's twists and turns; I am the result of these intersections. And I wanted that to show in my writing.

–How does this present world feel to you?

–I'm deeply distressed by the rightward shifts in politics and the acceleration of environmental disasters, which prompted my previous novel , Pink Filth . The struggle is to avoid falling into absolute pessimism. I see it as simplistic; it's not a constructive energy that leads to construction, but rather to despair. We must sustain a vital energy that allows us to create ways to organize ourselves and build community.

The Mountain of Furies , by Fernanda Trías (Random House)