Argentine writer Guillermo Saccomanno wins Alfaguara Novel Prize
Argentine author Guillermo Saccomanno wins prestigious Spanish-language literary prize and US $175,000 for his novel of "rare intensity."
Argentine writer, essayist and cartoonist Guillermo Saccomanno has been announced as the winner of the Alfaguara Novel Prize for his work Arderá el viento (The Wind Will Burn).
The news was announced Thursday at a ceremony in Madrid staged the president of the panel choosing the award, Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez.
“Written in a sparing style and with a rare intensity, the novel is the careful construction of a deterioration,” Vásquez explained at the ceremony, staged at the Círculo de Bellas Artes cultural centre in Madrid.
Saccomanno, 76, wins a prize of US$175,000 and a sculpture by Spanish artist Martín Chirino.
The novel tells the story of the Esterhazys, “an eccentric couple with no clear past,” who arrive in an Argentine coastal town to run a hotel, Vásquez said.
“These two beings and their two children” produce "the effect of a sickly particle that slips into the cracks of a small society and sweeps away its seemingly calm daily dynamics,” added the Colombian writer, who was himself honoured with the Alfaguara in 2011 for El ruido de las cosas al caer ("The Noise of Things Falling").
Saccomanno, who spoke at the event via videoconference, said that winning the award was “an intimidating surprise because of the responsibility that accepting this award implies.”
Faulkner, Lynch...
The writer, who presented the novel under the pseudonym Jim — in honour of the character Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad — related his novel to “the class struggle” and assured that “the equation that moves this country, sorry, this world is sex, money, power.”
“I think this is the crux of the novel,” added the writer, who lives in Villa Gesell, a town similar to the one in his novel, “which vibrates and explodes in the two summer months and is sad, grey, deserted for the rest of the year, like all the towns on the coast,” he said.
“And if one pauses their ear and pays attention, one finds that there are stories everywhere,” that if “the roofs of all the houses were raised... what stories we would find.”
Saccomanno explained that he works “chapter by chapter,” without a preconceived idea of everything that is going to happen: “I move forward as phrases arise, situations arise, and as situations are triggered.”
In the work he acknowledged influences by the recently deceased US film director David Lynch and US novelist William Faulkner.
“I was thinking of cinema, I was thinking, for example, of David Lynch, who passed away recently,” and of “how such a crazy story is constructed and is yet so plausible, so plausible, because many of the situations that arise in the novel, if they are not the same as reality, are similar,” Saccomanno said.
More than 700 manuscripts were submitted for this year's edition, from Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia and Uruguay.
The winning novel will be published simultaneously in Spain, Latin America and the United States on March 20.
This year's jury was chaired by Vásquez and included, among others, writers Leila Guerriero and Manuel Jabois, Argentine and Spanish respectively, and Spanish film director and screenwriter Paula Ortiz.
Saccomanno joins a distinguished list of writers honoured with the Alfaguara, including Mexico's Elena Poniatowska (2001, La piel del cielo), Argentina's Tomás Eloy Martínez (2002, El vuelo de la reina), Nicaragua's Sergio Ramírez (1998, Margarita, está linda la mar) and the aforementioned Juan Gabriel Vásquez.
Last year, the prize went to Spaniard Sergio del Molino and his work Los alemanes ("The Germans)".
The Alfaguara publishing house was founded in 1964 and a year later created the prize that bears its name.