Paulina Flores: "I write about love and death, and I never realized they're a couple."

Even if she tries to hide behind a cap or a hat, Paulina Flores (Santiago, Chile, 1988) and her literature emerge with force, expanding the battlefield . In 2016, she presented a collection of short stories that generated admiration in Spanish-language literature. With Qué vergüenza (What Shame) she left a profound mark at the Guadalajara International Book Fair, for example, and won over readers from there to the deep south. Later, she left her beloved Chile and settled in Barcelona, ​​where she studied and acquired new ways of looking at people and interpreting situations in a permanent and vital intersection between what she saw and what she imagined.

Then she published Isla Decepción , a novel with which she began to tame the genre, and now she brought to the Buenos Aires Book Fair her very successful and moving book with a highly controversial title: La próxima vez que te vea, te mato (The Next Time I See You, I'll Kill You ) (Anagrama), in which she portrays (and portrays herself?) three young migrants in Barcelona, ​​creating a social painting with nuances of comedy and drama. A coming-of-age novel that put her in the spotlight of a literature that Alejandro Zambra described as “fascinating, delicate, shameless, vertiginously contemporary.”

On a sunny autumn afternoon in spring, the writer reveals some of her secrets of a literary passion that always burns. Enchanted by Buenos Aires, she emphasizes that she wrote a short story called "San Telmo."

–In your stories and novels, you connect the imaginary with the lived. How do you navigate the back and forth between reality and fiction?

–Good. The truth is, in fiction, I know when something is real and when it's fiction; but in real life, they blend together. I'm a fervent defender of fiction as something important. Javiera, one of the protagonists of The Next Time..., is a Chilean woman living in Barcelona, ​​just like me. On a more biographical level, I feel like you work with the characters like someone teaching someone to ride a bike. You give them a lot of yourself to ground them in the fictional reality, to make them feel real, and then the most beautiful part comes when the character leaves, slips through your fingers, and pedals off. And it's also beautiful when you start talking about the characters as if they really existed, like giving each one therapy.

Javiera, the protagonist of the novel, is a migrant, a character who seems to know everything and then becomes tiny; she's very brave and at the same time, she's fearful. Complex, right?

Javiera has those qualities. The novel speaks a lot about death, about accidentally lost life. There's a suicide mission in the plot, and Javiera could be a murderer who could lose her life in society, because when we become criminals, we die socially. She's very imaginative. She's a slave to her fictions. And I, too, as a writer, am a slave to my fictions.

–One always wonders if cities influence or shape us, or if we actually give them their identity. How do you see Javiera and Santiago, Laura and Barcelona?

Javiera is archetypically in love at first sight with this city that presents itself to her. She belongs to a very aspirational class, excited about things, and full of guilt. At some point, she's trapped: she's undocumented, in that dream of migration. Dreams can also trap you.

–And she says, "Barcelona doesn't love me."

–She says, "Barcelona doesn't love me." She's disappointed, yes. She's bad at love in every way; she's very romantic, and cities don't love her.

–Is it very difficult to write about love?

–While writing this novel, I often asked myself: how can I be writing a romance novel in a time of uncertainty, mediated entirely by capitalism and survival? That turns any alternative, disruptive, rebellious discourse into a product, and it sells it to you. The novel asks these questions, or at least it allows me to ask them, I think. There's something that remains very much within me, in my three books, a kind of feeling of love that won't go away. I can't stop talking about it; I feel like I can't get over it.

–And is writing about sex difficult?

–Yes, very difficult. It always feels like something revisited. It's about telling a story from a female perspective without it sounding super-duper trite. It was also important for me to capture the erotic language I wanted to develop. It's like counting a rose, which is always interesting, even if it's been seen countless times. It's about trying to see the rose from perhaps a new angle.

–And what about death? Or at least its imminence. This is how the book begins: “Laura commits suicide in a few hours, and I'm late for our last date.”

–I knew I wanted to write about death because it was something that called to me; I needed to write about it. After the pandemic and the experiences I had firsthand, I was deeply affected by death. It's the quintessential literary theme. I talk about love and death, but I had never realized they were actually a couple.

–What generation is the protagonist of the book?

It's associated with a class, a welfare state, and precariousness. They want their papers; they're hopeless. It's a group of people who, unlike their parents, don't have any concrete stability. And they know they won't have it. So, they live on a kind of tightrope. It's not a suffering of poverty: it's joyful because of that same hopelessness of having some kind of peace of mind. There's also a lot of vertigo about the present.

–What place do young people have, in fiction and in reality?

–Young people are cheaper, we're permanent interns, our probationary periods are extended, we don't fully mature because if we do, we'll ask for more money. So we're all cheap freelancers. Javiera says: "Weren't I the world's littlest cousin?" She's super pedestrian, she's quite quixotic, because she makes everything into a hyper-mega event like fireworks, important and revealing and magnificent. But in the end, she's just a girl meeting someone while looking for an apartment; she's sold out by the Barcelona real estate system.

–There are different moods and nuances in the novel. How would you describe it? If you were a bookseller, on which shelf would you place it?

–I think it's a coming-of-age novel, but also very satirical. There's drama, but no tragedy. There's comedy, thought, reflection. Javiera speaks in a mocking manner, sometimes with rage. She wants to be a murderer, and she's also tired.

–What happened with the title of your novel on Instagram? Did you think it might be reported?

–I never thought about it, and in fact, when it happened, when Instagram started taking down my posts, I freaked out because I said, "Oh, how silly of me. I wrote a novel with a title I won't be able to advertise." Then it passed; it's not the end of the world. But everything changed…

–Yes, it's a shame that the internet has become a place of censorship, like Instagram. I feel like the internet has become a paid streaming service, a commercial, just like television. Now it's all full of ads and things you have to say to yourself. All that matters is the likes.

–You've talked about certain influences, about how your mind was shaped by the books of Natsume Soseki and the films of Raúl Ruiz and Lucrecia Martell. How did you build your worldview, which you then reflect in your books?

I like to think that my mind is constantly evolving. I studied literature; university was a very important moment because I was able to access knowledge. When I left university, I realized I wasn't going to have a job, and so I hated university. Now I'm coming to terms with all of that, with the idea of ​​being proud of developing myself as an intellectual. I had my period of resentment, very punkish, saying I didn't want to be an intellectual, a product of my own stupidity for questioning how to study literature in a country like Chile, being from the working class. I was very idealistic. Today, people say that books are considered a waste of money, that culture wastes money; that's incomprehensible. We have to embrace the idea that this has to do with another system of values ​​that has nothing to do with the market, and that's important, that an alternative still exists.

–You talked about resentment in your novel…

Javiera gets angry and says, "These are rich, these are poor, this is how we rich love, this is how we poor love." She's constantly making distinctions. That obviously has to do with me, with my way of life, with my understanding of the world from a very young age. It's very present in how she defines people based on how many opportunities they had and who didn't.

–You once said, “I came with a politically broken heart because of the situation in Chile” when you arrived in Barcelona? Was that the feeling you wrote the novel with?

–It has to do with the outcome of the social uprising that began with a very interesting process to write a new constitution and finally abandon Pinochet's. And that was a process that was interrupted by the pandemic. Then the first constitution was rejected, and the second as well. And now we're still stuck with Pinochet's constitution, amended, but it still exists. That was very devastating.

–Later, I realized there was a total disconnect from reality… I was super excited. I said, "I've been fighting for this since I was 15, with the Penguin Revolution to change Pinochet's education law." You know what I mean? And that was very painful. It made me feel really bad, like so many people, blaming themselves: "How did you think I was going to change anything? Who did I think I was to change anything?"

–After Buenos Aires, you're heading to Santiago. How do you feel every time you return?

–Very well. My friends tell me: How is it possible, it's like I saw you the day before yesterday and everything's still the same? In Barcelona, ​​in other cities, I feel like a stranger, but I am a stranger, so it makes sense. But when I return to Chile, I feel like it permeates me. Whether I like it or not, I am completely permeated by the experience of being Chilean. I live, think, laugh, and love like a Chilean.