With one of the best-selling publications at the Guayaquil Book Fair 2022, the author Andrea Crespo Granda hopes that her work the skies of march continue to find your readers, those who are willing to embark on a sometimes complex path, he expressed in a recent interview for this newspaper. “And especially I hope that those who read it have the patience to face a novel that does not provide answers and, on the contrary, hopes to leave more questions than certainties.”
Essay, fiction, poetry… you did not set limits between genres when developing this publication, what was that process like?
The limit of the genres is a fiction that we place on ourselves because the categories (literary and in life) give us “calm” and structure. Language builds, because “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”, in my case I conceive of writing as an act/leap into the void.
The use of free-form genres is the result of a writing process that draws on various sources, since the protagonist is an anti-heroine. She at times stoic, at times dramatic, at times punk and at other times calm. She herself is a cloud; that is why all this amalgamation had to be contained in a dissimilar voice and resources.
I write a book and in that writing I demolish everything, because worthwhile writing can only be done from pure risk. The initial quote, which is from Wittgenstein, contemplates a fundamental value in my writing; both in my previous books and in this novel I use different textual categories to address/approach a force, a mobilizing question that is the throbbing point of the story. In this case, The skies of March beyond the plot, it tells us about the constant walking and falling into the desire of a protagonist throughout different stages of her life.
How long have you been working on the skies of march until its publication?
I started writing it towards the end of 2018, after a visit I made to my sister based on Martha’s Vineyard, but I realized that it was a story that I had been thinking about for a long time. He had a kind of “mixture drawer” in which he kept several stories that in 2019 took the form of the current novel.
That same year the book won an honorable mention in the Miguel Donoso Pareja short novel award and in 2022, thanks to IFCI incentives for unpublished works, it was published under the independent Guayaquil label Cadáver Exquisite.
Who is Aurora-Aura? What happens are your personal memories?
Aurora-Aura is a heroine and anti-heroine protagonist at the same time: romanticism and punk or neo-romanticism. Aurora is displaced from the norms in search of the ever-present desire. At the beginning of the story, she describes herself as “a hole”, “something dark” and that is the key to knowing that she is, above all, a force/vortex. Something that she attracts towards an interior from which we will not know how we will get rid of.
The book is fiction. The protagonist is a 64-year-old woman, married with three children. In my case I am neither the age nor the maternity of Aura, but all the memories are real; that is to say they are pure story.
What themes did you want to address in your book from the main character?
I wanted to address a subject as basic as love, but not in its limited version of the couple, but in the full range that can be presented to a person: love for the mother, for children, for ideas, for oneself.
Although the central story is a supposed “relationship”, this is an excuse because throughout Aura/Aurora’s life I write about what we love and leave, because sometimes we don’t understand the dimensions of love. Love can be a flame, but also old hands feeding another. Loving cannot be the tyranny of a heterosexual relationship and only at certain ages. We even have to expand the notion of love to compassion, to forgive ourselves, to be able to embrace who we were.
Another topic he wanted to address was transgression. From myths like Medea to reports on women victims of femicide, we see how our transgressions are not forgiven. Aurora is a woman who commits the worst of all: abandoning her children because of desire. She did not want to focus on the moral judgment on disobedience, but on how the “heretic” person lives it, who has decided to burn everything down, to be an outcast, to renounce peace.
How do you feel that you changed yourself as an author after the production of The skies of March? What teachings did this process leave you, perhaps his character?
I learned something very valuable: what kind of writer I don’t want to become. I hope to find a path that allows me to continue making books-houses, books-heavens; books-objects, novels-poems.
I hope I don’t become someone who speaks from the commonplace, who exoticizes her gender/identity/thought to say what is expected of being a Latin American woman. I hope I am not a writer who tries to teach readers what is wrong and what is right, or that there is one ideology better than another; it’s easy to stop writing literature and write conduct manuals or, what’s worse, airport novels.
In what ways do you expect this book to accompany the readers who bet on it?
As I said, I hope this book leaves more questions than certainties. And that they find something in its pages, a phrase, an image, a desire that resonates
Do you already have another project underway?
Yes, a couple. One is already finished and the other is a work in progress. The novel that I have finished is about an exiled couple who observes night skies and walks sleeplessly through the mangrove swamp. I started the other one in mid-2022, in this the character is a girl. In the three novels the common thread is love and families… and politics.
where is it available The skies of March?
In Guayaquil at La Casa Morada, La Madriguera and Librería Española. In Quito at the Cosmonauta, Rayuela and Fondo de Cultura Económica bookstores. In Cuenca in Palier.
Source: Eluniverso
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
