Malena Newton Maurtois publishes her literary debut: “My stories are an accumulation of attempts.”

A common place runs through literary reviews: the common place of “one’s own world.” It is often said that a young storyteller or narrator prefixes his “world of his own” when he suggests language, territory, and a gallery of characters that feel very personal. But in “Only one way to grow up in public”, debut Malena Newton Mortua in Peruvian literature, published under the publishing label Tusquets, it would be more correct to get rid of this cliché in order to make room for the look. A very unusual way of seeing reality.

The look of this storyteller, who is currently studying for a master’s degree in modern history in Barcelona (Spain), spoils all her stories and is imbued with a bizarre sense of humor that sometimes directs its ink against our politicians or Lima’s upper class, but not to portray his caricature, but in order to criticize him from the inside. His characters, moreover, can evoke the most absolute rejection or deep tenderness: exemplify “Is the password a name or a lie?” or “Roof on the ground”.

The eye is trained, as is the prose, which in the case of Newton Maurtois has a degree of maturity that is hard to find in a debut book. As he commented RPP News, his stories emerge from “a free idea, conceived at random”. “It is set in a specific context and sets certain conditions that force you to imagine a series of events and a story. He forces you. I don’t like determinism, but it’s obvious what will happen,” he said.

I read that your first literary passion was poetry. How natural was it to take another step towards storytelling?

It was quite natural. Even before writing poetry, I studied acting and theater professionally for two years. So going to poetry was like rejecting the theater and looking for the purity of language that supposedly exists in poetry and trying to master it. It was like going to the extreme, gradually admitting that I like the characters, the plot, the conflicts, which has always attracted me to the theater. Poetry does not carry this, but narrative does. I think it was extreme to move away from theatrical drama entirely and then slowly admit that I liked the mix of characters, plot, conflict and language.

In the Peruvian Selection 2015-2021 questionnaire, an anthology prepared by Ricardo Sumalavia, you talk about your favorite authors. You list foreigners – David Foster Wallace, Roberto Bolano, Susan Sontag and others – but not Peruvians. What would be “obvious” for you?

It was a provocative answer, because I feel that to name any Peruvian for a Peruvian is obvious. From what I call Lucho Hernandez or Lisardo Cruzado, it’s obvious to me, because that’s what we carry in our tradition. I had in mind not only Vargas Llosa, Ribeiro and Varela with the obvious, but the entire Peruvian Olympus. But I will answer you more sincerely: in Peruvians, I feel close in most cases to poets. It seems obvious to say Vallejo. But any case will seem obvious.

“The Only Way to Grow in Public” suggests an established voice, or rather a mature piece that has been consciously edited. How was your songwriting process?

It’s been a few years now because I didn’t write it for the specific purpose of publishing, but to learn how to write. My stories are an accumulation of attempts. For many years I was part of a group of writers who are now publishing their first books, and then we met regularly. A lot of the stories were conceived in there like this… you should have fucked up your writing, got all the criticism, and then we’d go have a beer. It was like a general workshop. There were many stories fabricated. And perhaps related to the discovered editing process: many texts had to be immediately criticized or rethought.

One aspect of your style that caught my attention is your tendency to get distracted. The narrative continues, but your narrators stop and stare in a rather peculiar way, which in many cases has the effect of alienation. Do you think poetry gets in there?

Of course. If we understand poetry as a digression, of course, yes. Essentially, poetry is empty spaces filled with thoughts, reflections. I think my mind works like this: with digressions and flashes and everything that goes through me. But I agree that it can be a poetic element, because it breaks away from a specific story and we can look at it from a different point of view.

Popular culture is another feature that appears frequently in your writing. The comparison, for example, is built with references to films. There is Matilda, or Star Wars, or Flubber. Do you think this is an inevitable generational problem?

I think so. But I was very struck that a phenomenon that took place in the United States before the 1990s, namely this influence of pop culture on literature overloaded with television and cinema, did not appear with such clarity in Peruvian literature, with a few exceptions. Maybe it has to do with sociological things, I don’t know, I would guess. The so-called American postmodernism here in Peru is not so strong. There is a very interesting essay by John Barth based on Borges and rescuing him as the first postmodernist. Exhaustion literature, which is very much from the 20th century, says that there is an exhaustion of narrative forms, stories, and what made it much more playful, making collages instead of linear stories, which Borges finally does. I think Borges’ influence in Peru has more to do with talking about the horizon and time and things like that rather than playing around with the idea that everything is already more or less broken and you have to find different points of view and ways to talk about it. . We get tired faster, and literature must find new mechanisms to tire readers less. I get really bored with what I write, so I speed up.

Perhaps not since the time of Bryce Eshenik, who has not seen such a freshly reproduced speech of the Peruvian elite. In your case, it comes out updated, without mannerisms. Are you in constant attention with this tone, which we might call “apitukado”?

That’s the tone that, you’re right, Bryce or Jamie Bailey used, representatives that come to mind right now. But I think they have nuances. The portrait of Lima’s upper class is always very banal. It’s always the old woman cursing Velasco. But we can move on to another type of analysis, somewhat more interesting, which approaches it from a different point of view, critically, but with more originality. You don’t need to dwell on what everyone already knows, but look for darker or more hidden aspects. Language seems important to me because it defines a lot. You understand how a certain culture or a certain social group thinks by the words they use or the way they express themselves.

There are some stories that may have political readings. “The Ceiling on the Floor,” for example, could be a parable about the inaction of our political class in the face of certain unfortunate events. But also a Kafkaesque story that reveals the search for identity in a group of children. Are you aware of these readings as you write?

Fully. It’s a story that makes me suspicious because it has that parabolic quality that usually makes me raise my eyebrows when I read something. This is a parable, a social story, and it starts with the fact that we are fed up with everything that we have experienced in recent years regarding infrastructure work with Odebrecht. And yes, this building is at the center of the story, and it should raise the possibility of how Peruvian society will move around work that was not planned by them. I am interested in solving these issues, because it is impossible not to do this as a Peruvian.

Scott Fitzgerald wrote in the 1920s that irony is the holy spirit of our time. And this is still the case, because in more than one storyteller of your generation I see this tendency to cultivate it. How do you see humor in your work?

Ironic humor … I feel that irony is not part of our it with social, our idiosyncrasy. Peruvian writers tend to be more prone to Asperger’s in the sense that they often don’t get the jokes. I have a feeling that Peruvian literature is well-intentioned, literature that is very easy to ridicule because it is very soft, very good. It does not have as many ironic defenses as, perhaps, in Anglo-Saxon, in which it is very difficult to make fun of the type of narrator, who is very mobile and you feel that if you say something to him or do something fun from something that he wrote , he may answer you with something even worse. Perhaps it is interesting that a generation is emerging that uses irony more. And this is due to the emergence of pop culture, television and cinema, which have a mobility that is equal to irony. Irony, not falling into cynicism, allows you to meaningfully criticize or analyze reality.

EER 4×05 Series and movies we always come back to + our recommendations

Each of us has a series or a movie that we never get tired of watching. If we find that it is running, we leave it on or go to our favorite app and it becomes our “old good friend”. In this episode, we’re talking about those productions that don’t have breaks, as well as leaving you our recommendations, and then ending with Father’s Day recommendations (yes, we’ve recorded before, but you just listen).