Moshfegh: “When the language is powerful, the relationship with the text is more interesting”

The writer American Ottessa Moshfegh, who established herself worldwide with ‘My year of rest and relaxation’, is in favor of novels being constructed with a language “powerful”understanding that this favors the connection with the reader, a relationship that becomes “more interesting”.

Accompanied by her editors from Alfaguara and Angle, María Fasce and Rosa Rey, respectively, on her first visit to Spain, the novelist spoke this Monday in Barcelona about the novel that is now published in Spanish and Catalan, ‘McGlue’, the first that he wrote and which was published in the United States in 2014.

At a press conference, he addressed issues such as when there is “something powerful in the languageeven something that causes disgust or discomfort, the reader’s relationship with the text becomes more personal, even if the feeling is not positive”.

“It is a relationship that becomes more interesting,” he added.

Precisely, about ‘McGlue’ the publisher highlights that it is a work halfway between a pirate story and a western, which smells of “vomit, blood, gunpowder and whiskey”which takes place in 1851, starring a rude and deceitful sailor, always in a state of drunkenness, who may have killed his best friend.

He began to prepare this story in 2009, although when he finished it he kept it in a drawer for a few years, after reading a news story in a New England newspaper from the mid-19th century about the sailor McGlue, acquitted of a murder crime in the port of Zanzibar, being in a drunken unconscious state at the time of stabbing his best friend.

Looking back, the writer says she is happy to have taken on a project in her thirties. “so difficult for a first novel”, always worried about language and voice, feeling in that case like a medium for that sailor.

A demanding novel

“It is a demanding novel, a challenge for the average reader, perhaps this is the beauty and originality of the work. You have to let yourself be carried away by it, not try to interpret or understand it. It’s a bit like a piece of music.”argument.

As for acting as a medium, I had to get inside McGlue’s head and have him talk.

“My writing processes are not always like this,” he confessed, “but he was a man who had lived and died with an interesting story and that was how he had to speak through me.”

At the same time, he needed to work without preconceived ideas, beyond the events narrated in the 1851 article.

“What I discovered at the end of the novel is that, in reality, I was writing a love story, the story of a character repressed by his memories. “Someone who goes so far as to kill the man he loves,” accurate.

As in her other books, from the one that made her world famous, ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’, to ‘Death in Her Hands’ or ‘Lapvona’, she was already about what it means to exist, about having a “soul trapped in a body.”

Born in Boston in 1981, the daughter of an Iranian father and a Croatian mother, she says she does not have the experience of a first-generation emigrant, nor does she identify as an emigrant.

Her parents always spoke to her in English and, watching a lot of television and listening to a lot of music as a child, she has become more interested in American culture than in that of her parents’ countries of origin.

The author is writing a new novel, set in the nineties and with a teenager as the protagonist.

Although he does not yet know where the story will lead, it is clear that this young man will be separated from his father for a year by a judge.

“I think it will be about immaturity regarding the relationship with parents, which makes us always be children,” he added.

In addition, he is working on adapting some of his novels to film, something “liberating”, because it is not so much about duplicating the work, but rather about “reproducing it in a new language, concentrating more on the plot and the characters than on the most basic elements.” aesthetics of writing.

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