Patricio Pron: "The queue of cheesecake buyers often prevents me from entering the house"

BarcelonaIn the novels and stories of the Argentine Patricio Pron (Rosario, 1975) nothing is simple or obvious, but readers who delve into them will find a sophistication, both in form and content, that will reward them handsomely. In En todo hay una grieta y por ella entra la luz (Anagrama, 2026), the life of the poet, filmmaker, and artist Benjamin Fondane (1898-1944) motivates the initial two-page paragraph, but Pron immediately dynamites his plans: the rest of the novel is a succession of notes and footnotes that cover the year the writer himself spent in New York and stimulate reflections on climate change, gentrification, the rise of authoritarian discourses, contemporary art, and romantic relationships.

With the project that eventually became En todo hay una grieta..., you won one of the annual Cullman Center fellowships to spend a whole year working from the New York Public Library.

— My objective was to write the novelized biography of Benjamin Fondane there, a figure I find fascinating. He still attracts me very much and I think about him often. I went to New York to write this book that I had planned, but a sum of events made it impossible for me.

What you have ended up doing immediately moves away from Fondane, even though we learn a lot about him: we note, above all, that we should not read his life from the end, when he died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau at the age of 45.

— I tried to be faithful to the conception of literature as an improved life, a place from which to see who we are, but also who we could be, if we so desire. If I had limited myself to writing a biography of Fondane, deep down I would have betrayed the spirit of the author.

You mentioned a "series of events" that made you change your plans. Which ones would you highlight?

— One of the questions was my maternal great-grandfather. The other, and in a more general way, our connection with the physical world, related to the disappearance of the landscape.

In one of the footnotes that make up the novel, you explain how this destruction of the landscape influences the narrator's unease based on a trip he takes to Rosario to say goodbye to the house where he grew up. His parents are selling it to move to a smaller place.

— My personal unease may have appeared in a different way than the narrator's, but it is not far from it. Like my other novels, En todo hay una grieta y por ella entra la luz is made up of mostly real events. The passage where the narrator crosses a curtain of fire that has formed on both sides of the road due to an uncontrolled fire is inspired by what happened in Galicia a couple of summers ago. My unease and that of many other people is fed by the realization of seeing how the landscapes we love disappear. By this I do not only refer to the natural landscape, but also to the urban one, to the way our cities transform and expel us.

The novel addresses these transformations in New York during the past academic year. In September you returned to Madrid. What city did you find?

— I live with my wife in the Malasaña neighborhood, which has recently been in the news for the closure of the Tipos Infames bookstore.

Some articles have appeared in which it was said that Tipos Infames had contributed to the gentrification of the neighborhood. What do you think?

— I do not share this view. Gentrification is a fact, and the role the bookstore may play in it is negligible. The queue of cheesecake buyers often prevents me from entering my home. When I cross that wall of people eager for sweets, some get angry and look at me badly. This is the image I can share of what I usually experience in Madrid and which is closer to gentrification.

In the novel, your sense of humor mixes with despair. The narrator doesn't know what's wrong with him, but he feels worse and worse and ends up visiting himself in various New York hospitals, which allows him to realize the extremely high cost of healthcare in the United States and how it separates the rich from the poor.

— New York represents the quintessence of cities just as Rome did in antiquity. One of the dominant characteristics of contemporary cities, which is the increase in inequality, is very visibly reflected here. Addressing topics like this allowed me to show how a wonderful city like New York can also kill you. After I had been there for a few months, my wife visited me and pointed out that many people walked in a particular way. Until then, I hadn't noticed. Do you know why people walk strangely in New York?

I don't know, no... Why?

— Your vision of New York is quite critical.

Your vision of New York is quite critical.

— Which authors and books were important to you?

Which authors and books were important to you?

— A great danger I wanted to avoid was falling under the influence of the New York Trilogy, by Paul Auster. When I reread it, fortunately, I was much less interested than the first time and that, in a way, saved me. I reread Joseph Mitchell and it seemed magnificent.

Joe Gould's secret, perhaps?

— Yes. Much of American poetry from the last 125 years also influenced me. I would say I read more poets than fiction writers. Natural writing has also been important, to write There is a crack in everything... Thinking about it a little more, books by Vivian GornickThe conversations the protagonist has are very rooted in the present.

The conversations the protagonist has are deeply rooted in the present.

— I arrived in the United States shortly before Joe Biden announced he would not run for election. I left months after Trump had settled into his second term.

One of the various particularities you share with Benjamin Fondane, the author who inspired this novel of yours, was that both of you left your country of origin at 24 years old. He grew up in Romania. You, in Argentina. You have spent more than half your life without living there.

— I thought this milestone would be a kind of threshold and would inspire some kind of personal reflection or transformation. None of that has happened, at least not yet. When you write, living far from your place of origin is not a problem. The feeling of strangeness has accompanied me for a long time. Sometimes it can be painful, personally, because I always feel out of place, even in a Spanish-speaking country. Strangeness is permanent in me and I cannot prevent it from always creeping into my books. In New York it was a different process: it consisted of feeling strange within strangeness itself.