Agustina Bazterrica (Buenos Aires, 1974) studied at a nuns’ school and after a terrifying experience decided to enter the world of religion and cults for her new novel, The unworthy ones.
“In 2018 I was invited to the Cusco fair in Peru and I visited a monastery called Santa Catalina set up like a museum and it was quite sinister. I was the only tourist and suddenly I entered a room, I saw a nun praying and I almost died of cardiac arrest from terror. I left there saying that I had to write something about them and it was also influenced by the fact that I went to a German nuns’ school where I didn’t do well at all,” says the author in an interview with MILLENNIUM.
In The unworthy ones (Alfaguara) the world has disappeared after a great blackout and several climate crises. The story takes place in a strange convent where several women live in a kind of religious sect. One of them narrates in the shadows torture, sacrifices and terrifying ceremonies in the name of enlightenment, in a post-apocalyptic environment.
Without genders
Although Agustina Bazterrica is identified with the horror genre (her previous novel is called exquisite corpsewhere she touches on the theme of cannibalism), the author does not consider herself an expert in this genre, for her, everything is literature.
“What genres do is frame and provide a frame of reference, but I move as if in the interstices of genres, in the cracks, and in some countries my novels can be dystopias, in others they are considered horror, and there are others. who call them ecofeminism or realistic novels. But well, clearly I have a tendency to go to the dark, to the violent.”
The interviewee explains that she likes her novels to be very visual and captivate readers.
“I studied art history at the University of Buenos Aires and for many years I analyzed works of art and many images from different periods. All that baggage is inside my head and I have it unconsciously. So, when it comes to writing, I see what I want to write, I don’t think about it exactly, but I see the images as if it were a movie and that is why I am so interested in creating a kind of sensory universe.”
For Agustina Bazterrica it is important that the reader not only understands the plot, “I also want them to feel it, to feel the cold, the weather and everything the characters see. It’s a bit of narrating the horror in a beautiful way, it’s something that I tried to do in this novel, use a lot of poetic resources, because I really like poetry, even though I don’t write it, but I do think that I try to use it in different ways. texts and I want readers to feel that beauty is in language.”
The writer thinks that the world is unfortunately full of sects or coercive groups “where different types of gods are worshiped, where people are made to believe implausible things and where there are abuses. Not in all sects, but in many there are abuses, crimes are committed and people are manipulated, so my big question is where is the sacred really? where is that god? Does that god exist or does he not exist? It’s a little bit of what I’m trying to work on and I hope that each reader can reflect on it.”
Active readers
One of the characteristics of The unworthy ones It is full of riddles and the writer plays with that on every page of her novel.
“I am interested in writing books as I am interested in reading them and that require an active reader. I don’t want to give everything to the reader, I don’t want to inform the reader, I want to work with ambivalence, with paradox, with silences and I want him, when reading the novel, to also complete the senses.”
—As in the case of the narrator?
Exactly, it’s an example. She is writing a clandestine diary and there are some readers who say “why doesn’t it have a name?” Well, they won’t know because if you’re writing a clandestine diary and if they find it, you don’t want people to know that it’s yours. I’m interested in getting readers to think about those kinds of things.
I am interested in working with the economy of resources, trying to say a lot with little and when they intervene as readers, the novel takes on another dimension and if you discover what they symbolize, all the circles that are in the novel, you start thinking about a hypothesis and that The meaning of the novel is expanding, and I hope that all of this happens.
The author
Agustina Bazterrica has a degree in arts, cultural manager and literary contest jury. Published story books Before the fierce encounter and Nineteen claws and a dark bird; the novels Kill the girl and exquisite corpsewinner of the Clarín Alfaguara Novel Prize in 2017. With the latter, Bazterrica established herself as an author best seller worldwide, with more than half a million copies sold. In addition, the novel is being adapted to audiovisual format.
PCL
