Rosa Montero: "It's time for the ultras"

She has just arrived from the Bogotá Book Fair, energetic and ready to meet the public. Rosa Montero feels like an old acquaintance : she says she knows Buenos Aires like the back of her hand, with old and new friends, counting around fifty visits , and at one point even coming three times in one year. Among the writers who have influenced her, she mentions, of course, Borges, but also Claudia Piñeiro – “I think The Time of the Flies is a brilliant work” – Guillermo Martínez, and Samanta Schweblin. In the references for her latest book, Anímales difíciles (Difficult Animals) , which she is presenting at the 49th Buenos Aires International Book Fair , she even cites readings such as that of neuroscientist Mariano Sigman.

“I don't believe in genres. It's a debate settled in the 21st century. Our literary fathers and mothers broke the mold and gave us the opportunity to write freely,” she says, talkative and friendly, sitting at the bar of a downtown hotel.

“My detective Bruna Husky novels are based on science fiction, because they're futuristic novels, but they're a hybrid where there's a thriller, metaphysics, with existential and social overtones,” he explains without preamble. “She, a human clone who works as a detective, is counting down the time she has left until she dies, and there's even a psychological plot. There's still a huge prejudice against science fiction ; it's still said that it's a minor genre that deals with technical, cold, or esoteric subjects. A huge mistake. My Bruna novels are the most realistic thing I've written , and Animales difíciles , although set in Madrid in 2111, speaks to the world today.”

Born in Madrid in 1951, the writer and journalist, whose work has been translated into nearly thirty languages, winner of the National Journalism Prize and the National Prize for Literature in Spain , laughs at the times the Spanish literary world considered her work not to be "serious" literature, perhaps because it was prejudicedly pigeonholed as science fiction, perhaps because of her work in journalism. Rosa Montero was 29 years old when she received the National Journalism Prize in 1980. At that time, she was already working at the newspaper El País, where she rose to become editor of the supplement and continues to write a weekly column today.

“Ever since the novels starring Bruna Husky came out—from 2011 until now, with the novels Tears in the Rain, The Weight of the Heart , and Times of Hate — I've felt somewhat creepy because much of what I wrote in fiction has come to fruition in our reality. The blackout that occurred a few days ago in Madrid and Portugal is a main theme in Times of Hate, in this case due to a terrorist attack concealed by electromagnetic radiation. I'm afraid to write what I write because we'll end up disappearing,” jokes the author of The Crazy Woman in the House, The Story of the Transparent King, The Ridiculous Idea of ​​Never Seeing You Again, and The Weight of the Heart, among other books.

–In Difficult Animals , we witness Bruna's farewell. Not her death, but her long goodbye.

–From her first novel, I said I would never kill her off, and I kept my word. It's not a saga, because it's not something that continues. Bruna Husky is a series with its own world, which is the ambition of every writer, with stable characters that I could visit whenever I wanted. They can be read independently, although if you read them as a series, you have a plus. I wasn't going to kill Bruna off because she's a character obsessed with death, and it's something that unites me. I feel close to her; I've felt a great intimacy; I'd say she's my favorite character in all my work. The farewell was casual. When I started writing Difficult Animals in my notebooks by hand before transferring them to the computer, I didn't know it would be the last, although I did sense it as I developed it. There's always a criminal case she must solve, and this is the darkest, most suffocating. And there's also another brutal war front. Bruna is a two-meter-tall combat technohuman, and at the end of The Age of Hate, to save herself, she enters an experiment where engineers transfer her memories to another computing body, a weak and small one. Being reborn in a different body was a struggle of recognition that drained her energy.

–The theme of identity runs through all your novels, and here it is notably heightened, something that spirals out of control despite technology and superintelligence.

–In this novel, identity occupies a gravitational center. Bruna's superhuman effort in pursuing the criminal plot and, on the other hand, her ability to put herself in a new skin. Everything has an epic dimension. Then, I realized I wasn't going to be able to write another novel with her as the protagonist. When I write a new novel, I have the ambition to do it better, to tell a story and explain it in a more beautiful, profound, different way than the previous one. And I told myself that it ended there, with that twilight ending of Difficult Animals, which has consoled me and helped me lose my fear of the meaninglessness of the world, in this confusing catastrophism in which we live. Finishing the novel gave me a certain relief. An Argentine friend of mine, Susana Pedroza, who is an astrophysicist, told me that at the end she felt like a caress.

As in Blade Runner—the film adaptation of her much-admired Philip K. Dick novel—in which robotic beings called Replicants exist, Bruna Husky inhabits a borrowed body with her own computer rep personality. In Difficult Animals, Bruna is hired, in Madrid in 2111, to investigate a suspected attack on the facilities of Eternal, a tech giant . In a kind of interior monologue, she defines herself: “I am unique in the world. A solitary oddity. Although I was odd before. Being different is my destiny. The old Bruna had an artificial memory much more extensive and true than that of the other techno-humans; my disreputable memorizer, Pablo Nopal, illegally implanted his own past within me. All of that is still here, inside this messed-up head.” And later, when she realizes she has too many conflicting lives inside her, she exclaims: "Damn humans, who cloned me and raised me in a steel tank. Who gave them the right to make me a creature condemned to such a swift and cruel death sentence, because it's so familiar?"

Difficult Animals states that the truly problematic aspect, the thing that set off all the alarm bells, was the beginning of experiments to implant nanotechnology in the spinal cord and brain . “Is a mind modified by Artificial Intelligence biological or robotic? Then the Human Integrity Law appeared, establishing a complicated and rather absurd table of percentages of humanity measured in Bio points, depending on the organ to be modified or replaced,” writes Rosa Montero.

–In the novel, Mircea, a journalist, emerges. And his reporting is a key link in the plot, given that investigative journalism is repeatedly heralded as being on the way out today…

Journalism can't die; it would be the apocalypse. We've been traversing the desert for twenty years, which is a bad sign. Initially, there was a market shift, with an economic crisis that culminated in the disappearance of 90 percent of all the world's newspapers, a catastrophic event for democracy. It's no coincidence that the free fall of democracy's legitimacy and prestige goes hand in hand with the agony of the media. But we mustn't allow it. Artificial Intelligence contributes to this chaos, to the uncertainty of what is true or false, and to the terrifying reality that more than 60 percent of young people under twenty get their information only from social media. That could mean that tomorrow a friend tells them something they saw there, and they believe it without hesitation. We are in a world of hordes, hordes of confrontation and hatred. No one has spoken of flat-earthism until the 21st century. A character in my novel says that there are times when people choose suicide through ignorance. But journalism can't die.

–And what can we do to prevent him from dying?

–We'll stick to digital publications, because paper newspapers have already disappeared. El País has 400,000 subscribers; we must seek out new communities and insist on understanding the world. The meaning of writing is the meaning of existence. The meaning of shedding some light on obsessions, on obscurities. One writes not to lecture, but to learn.

In another excerpt from Difficult Animals , we read: “The world, he told himself once again, was a shitty place. It wasn't the bravest or the one who tried the hardest who won, but the one with the most money and the most resources.” This contrasts with an opinion piece by Montero when he recently visited Valencia and found a city rebuilt after the flood, with people encouraged to stay afloat.

“Human beings' capacity to overcome is infinite; we have to put our shoulders to the wheel,” she reflects. “ We can't sit around watching Netflix while the world falls apart; we have to combat hopelessness and depressive apathy. Human beings are essentially good. There's a smaller percentage of people who are psychopaths, who are usually the presidents or CEOs of large companies. Out of fear, insecurity, or immaturity, we can't allow ourselves to be dragged into the depths of violence and hatred. I have hope in humanity; we're always finding new ways to survive, and there are strategies of cooperation that surpass those of predation. I'm a huge animalist and believe we can learn a lot by studying the behavior of certain species. Humans' lack of awareness of being animals is symptomatic. Many said that the cover of the book didn't feature an animal like Bruna's previous ones. Hey, we're here, the most difficult, most predatory animals of all!” Kant, with his categorical moral imperative, told us that a starving soldier in a devastated land would resist killing old and young to steal their food, even though this was part of the logic of war. We are born with a very strong moral imperative. However, that doesn't mean we should stop accepting a shattered present. I don't have children, and I'm glad because these are very difficult times."

In a column she published in El País on April 20, titled “The Majority of Writers,” Rosa Montero spoke of the mistreatment writers often suffer at the hands of a cruel system, and once again demystified the romantic notion that those who write live a wonderful reality, encapsulated in a sort of unique and special sensibility. “Not being published. Being published and your own publisher ignoring you. Getting horrendous reviews. Not getting any reviews at all. Or being asked to write a 600-page novel and then being dumped,” she wrote.

–Although in your case you travel to festivals, publish with major publishing houses, and have your literary agents, it's a harsh reality for most people.

–That's true now, but it's something that's always happened to me, especially as a woman. The system is extremely tough for writers who want to publish; there are very humiliating steps to follow. Everyone is filled with the word culture. And then the decision-makers cut budgets, and cultural supplements are reduced. Once, someone I objected to about downloading texts for free responded to me: "On top of having fun working, you want to charge me."

–A book recently came out that compiled your journalistic reports, True Stories . Do you remember which one was the most difficult of all?

–They were reports on the Spanish transition. I feel the hardest one for me was the massacre of the Atocha lawyers in 1977, two years after Franco's death. When I reread those chronicles, I was struck by how much we forget, how fragile our memory is. I knew those lawyers, but I wanted to understand those murderers, how they managed to do that. It was very difficult for me because of the emotional burden, talking to the murderers in prison, their far-right friends. I was very scared. And I had to give it a narrative that felt like a novel, something that would move the reader from the start.

–Today it seems that memory remains hidden in oblivion…

–It's the time of the ultras. Dogmatism reaching its extremes.

–For many reasons. We're like in the Weimar Republic. We emerged from the 2008 crisis with global impoverishment, but those responsible for the crisis became increasingly richer. According to the Gini coefficient, today we have the poor increasingly poorer, the rich increasingly richer. The social compact and the brief dream of the Welfare State that had emerged after World War II were shattered. Democracy didn't take care of us, didn't defend us, didn't create the conditions for access to and the preservation of social rights, and then tremendous anti-system groups emerged. It's the same thing that happened in Weimar, more anti-system than Hitler, who was released from prison after staging a coup, and then the crash of '29, which brought him directly to power. Today we live in a world of threats and confusion on a massive scale.

–The Times of Hate, as you premonitory titled your novel.

We don't know what might happen to us, whether it's a blackout, a pandemic, or an environmental catastrophe. We're suffocating. There's a kind of retro-utopianism, with people inventing a simpler, less nightmarish past. That's not true, but we can't stand this world any longer and we need to breathe fresh air. Democracy demands a huge effort of solidarity; it's sophisticated to be a democrat. Allocating more money so more of the poor can go to school, for example, isn't happening today. The poor and the marginalized are to blame, the enemies of the system. And all of this is exacerbated by single-minded thinking and the madness we experience on social media.

–What is your opinion of Javier Milei?

–He looks like someone who's taken LSD. It's very much a part of this era: leaders are on acid.

This Saturday at 5:30 p.m., Rosa Montero will present Animales Difícles , the highly anticipated conclusion to the Bruna Husky series featuring Hinde Pomeraniec. It will be held in the Victoria Ocampo theater.