‘We need to focus on class differences’: Chilean writer warns that crises in Latin America are social inequality

Chilean writer Alia Trabucco believes that the crises experienced by some Latin American countries inequalityand adds that little progress has been made in addressing them and there is a risk that they will be exacerbated by the dismantling of public service systems.

“You need to focus on class differences,” he says in an interview. EFE.

Lympia, published by Lumen, deals with these class differences, Trabucco’s new novel (Santiago de Chile, 1983) starring Estela, a woman who leaves her mother in the south of the country to work in the family’s home. in the capital.

There he will spend the next seven years cleaning and raising the anxious girl whose death is known at the beginning of the story.

“Workers in private homes always appear in the background, like minor characters, they rarely speak, and I wondered what that voice would be?” the author explains.

Alia Trabucco I wanted to explore “anger as a predominant affect” and class contradictions, as well as one of the facets of silence, the “silence” of a woman like Estel, who observes and records everything that happens in the house, and decides to tell “her” about it. break the silence of those who care.”

“Space of Great Exploitation”

She explains that although workers in private homes have received some minimal rights, this is still a very unregulated area, a space where there is a lot of exploitation, since the fact that they are usually migrants adds a component of vulnerability.

“The word ‘class’ is rarely used: we emphasize other forms of inequality, such as gender, and class distinctions continue to be a central theme,” the author states.

she faces it inequality as a political and social conflict from literature, because, in his words, unlike politics, writing allows “to enter these gray areas”.

She does this with a suspense structure based on the girl’s death: “The question of who did this raises a lot of expectations,” she explains, and the main character uses this interest to tell another story, her own, a story about everyday household chores.

That’s why Alia Trabucco he believes that his novel practices both “flirting” and “betrayal” of the thriller genre.

The “Devastation” of Neoliberalism

The book is also a portrait of the crisis of the modern family: apparently successful parents living a simulacrum of happiness, with an anxious girl who reflects those models of today’s lonely childhood, with many of the demands of perfection that parents place on them. he points.

The author also believes that there is a “general weakening of society”, a dismantling that will lead to even greater inequality.

“IN Chile neoliberalism has sowed chaos in the public sphere, Chile is the world’s neoliberal laboratory,” emphasizes Trabucco, who believes that in his country the social discontent of recent decades “could not be channeled into the constitutional process” and remains latent, experiencing a moment of “great tension”

The writer received the Anna Segers Award, the British Academy and the Chilean Ministry of Culture Award for the best unpublished novel, and also became a finalist for the Booker Prize with the novel La Resta.

(As reported by EFE)