The Alfaguara 2022 Prize is for the Chilean writer Cristian Alarcón for a novel that “honors nature”

Christian Alarcon, award-winning writer and journalist Alfaguara Award 2022 for his novel the third paradiseensures that his work “honor nature”: “We should be much more protective and jealous of the planet we inhabit”, he maintains in an interview with Eph.

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“We are immersed in a kind of dystopian sensation but we consume and allow governments to make the worst decisions without paying the consequences, when we could be much more guardians and jealous of the planet we inhabit”, Alarcón, a Chilean-Argentine writer and journalist, has indicated.

Excited and surprised by the award that the jury of the Alfaguara Award, chaired by the writer Fernando Aramburu, Alarcón has explained that his novel is actually “two novels and a botanical essay”.

“The jury has told me that they have loved it and that from the beginning they fell in love with the text and have highlighted the deeply Latin American and botanical condition of the novel, and how it challenges a possible reader in the midst of this pandemic and this climate. of extinction that we live in the world”, he has stated.

Thus, the jury has highlighted “the narrative vigor of a beautiful novel, with a dual structure”, which is set in various places in Chile and Argentina, and whose protagonist reconstructs the history of his ancestors, “while delving into his passion for cultivating a garden, in search of a personal paradise”.

“There are two novels in one in such a way that short texts conceived as unique pieces are linked with the structure like an atom going back and forth between a past and a present: a past narrated in the third person and a present in the first, with the idea of the paradise that crosses both histories”, the author has indicated.

One of the two stories begins in the 1940s with some women in the south of Chile, in an invented town, peasant women who later move to the city and become proletarians “and survive violence, hunger and poverty to end up living the glory of Salvador Allende’s socialist revolution and endure the beginning of the dictatorship.”

The other story is that of a writer who retires to the outskirts of the city shortly before confinement due to the pandemic and rediscovers his relationship with flowers, which he grew as a child with his grandmother.

The protagonist begins like this, Alarcón has pointed out, an investigation into how to make a seed sprout and with which an essayistic investigation of the origins of botany begins and arrives at the concept of the “third garden”, the one that grows on the train tracks, in the abandoned territories, “and that is the one that expresses today in a more forceful way the defense of biodiversity”.

Alarcón believes that his book refers “to the survivors of the most violent plots in Latin America who at the same time cultivate beauty in their gardens and orchards, from which they live. That relationship that exists between man and nature when there is not only admiration but they need it to feed themselves and give themselves shade”.

And now, consider, we are “Given the evidence that the human has caused so much damage that it is impossible to even be certain about the origin of a plague that devastates humanity.”

But he believes that the pandemic has caused something contradictory, on the one hand an “unusual and folkloric interest in gardening” that does not understand the need “to put a stop to the climate crisis motivated by the decisions of the most powerful countries in the world.”

Considered an outstanding Latin American chronicler, the award-winner assured during the press conference that he offered after hearing the jury’s decision that does not believe in the separation between journalism and literature.

“We have to get rid of generic and binary borders”, has emphasized the writer, who has stated that he is “very” bored by political correctness. (I)