Laura Gost: “When a price is put on life and death, morality changes”
Writer. Publishes the novel 'The price of being born'
BarcelonaWhat has happened with The Price of Being Born (Proa/Temas de Hoy), the fourth novel by Laura Gost (Sa Pobla, 1993), is quite unusual. Before publishing it –it arrives this Wednesday in bookstores–, it already has seven translations lined up and an audiovisual production underway by a North American company. From the very first pages of the book, it is clear that we are facing a well-rounded thriller, full of twists, with a voracious story that takes place in a dystopian future and that maintains narrative tension thanks to a surgical pulse and precision. The book starts from the desire of Rai and Liza to be parents. The couple lives in an overpopulated world in which, to carry out a pregnancy, one must first obtain a "replacement": someone who yields their own life for the child.
You have written a book about having or not having children just after becoming a mother. How has this experience been linked to the novel?
— It happened that I started writing this novel when I was pregnant and I finished it when my son had already been born. Although there is surely some unconscious connection, they are independent facts. The novel cannot be understood without very current issues, which are part of the daily conversation and occupy headlines: climate change, the aging of the population, overpopulation, sustainability. From this is born the premise: what would happen if, to institutionally regulate the people who can live in the world, having or not having children ceases to be an individual or couple's decision and becomes a collective one?
What leads you to build the story in a dystopian setting?
— The format was important because I was looking for a present that was not the one of now, but that was plausible enough to be able to imagine a near future. I placed a hyperbolic mirror to take all these themes to the extreme and, at the same time, create a situation in which the reader could empathize. Whether you have children or not, whether you want to be a parent or not, this scenario where life and death are commodified poses a moral dilemma that you cannot avoid.
The story places precisely the fact of having or not having children as a desire, not as a right.
— This struggle between individual selfishness and social and collective responsibility creates the great dichotomy. What concessions are you willing to make to have a family? I wanted to explore what the characters do in this scenario and, above all, what they end up thinking. It is a world in which, when they witness an accident, instead of wishing that it is nothing, they think: “I hope they die, because that will mean moving up one position on the waiting lists to be able to have a child”.
Would you say that, as a society, we are closer or further away from this loss of value of life?
— The question that has accompanied me throughout the writing process is: what would I do if this were real? The truth is that I do not know. In what way would we people adapt to it? There would be a will to rebel, there would be skepticism, there would be a moral alibi and the defense that the desire is legitimate, there would be renunciations of this vital expectation in order not to have to comply with perverse and macabre norms. I have written without making moral judgments. The characters move in ambiguity.
Rai has a major role. Why do you channel the desire for fatherhood through a man?
— Because, in this case, the desire to have a child is not so linked to gender. Unconsciously, I wanted to distance myself from the parallel of the fact that I am a woman and a mother and I talk precisely about that. Rai and Liza want to start a family, and each one experiences the dilemma in their own way, because it is applicable to everyone. In the end, the novel talks about what we do when the desire to have a child ceases to be a free decision to become a bureaucratic, political issue with macabre consequences.
One of the most macabre consequences is the regulatory abortions. If a replacement has not been found by the 14th week of gestation, the State forces the woman to abort.
— It is a world in which even a person who intends to commit suicide becomes an asset. People consider that at a given moment they have the right to ask their parents to die so that they can start a family. All of this has an impact, it changes the codes. If you have not achieved a successor, this implies aborting. Having a child can no longer be a spontaneous whim. You must be very convinced, it must be born from a deep conviction.
Are the characters more dehumanized by this situation?
— When a price is put on life and death, morality changes. Some characters knew the previous stage and did not suffer the ordeal when it came to having children. They have the nostalgia that any past time was better. But with the characters who have had to play in this scenario, empathy is clearly damaged. When you consider that it is justified for a person to die for you, this inevitably dehumanizes.
If a replacement is not found, one of the two parents may decide to die in exchange for the child to live. This is a decisive element because it directly impacts the protagonist couple and begins to break them down. How have you worked on the intimacy of these characters?
— It was important to enter into everything they imagine, into the hypotheses they come to propose, into what they desire and think. The bond erodes not only because of how they act in the face of this situation, but also because there are moments of very dark thoughts of survival, which are chilling.
Despite the harshness of the situations you present, the book takes a breath with characters like Teo, a friend of Rai's family who views life with lightness. Why did you decide to include him?
— While creating him, I imagined him as a bon vivant with that sarcastic and skeptical take on life. He is an interesting counterpoint to lighten the tension of the book. At the moment when the plot highlights very transcendental decisions, which mark a before and after in the lives of the protagonists, Teo's character puts everything into perspective. He is someone cheeky and relativist, with a touch of humor, who uses cynicism to dodge painful situations. He is an escapist.
Why did you convey this dystopian story through the thriller?
— In every novel I have tried to demonstrate that I mastered a different register. As a reader I really like the thriller and I wanted to create dramatic situations that would allow me to play with this narrative and psychological tension. An author that I love and who performs biting, sharp and poignant autopsies is Gillian Flynn. She does not fall into stereotypes and it is hard not to connect with what she presents to you, even if you might consider it a monstrous thought.
Just before being published, the book already has seven translations and a movie in the works. How are you experiencing this?
— I feel very fortunate, everything that comes I will receive with much joy, but I am also cautious. I am at a moment in life where many priorities have been rearranged. My son is the first, and I try to fit the rest in, but I live it with peace. Being a mother has led me to put many things into perspective, to live them in a more relaxed way, and that is important. When I wrote the novel I did not want to prove anything, simply to enjoy.
From the very first moment, Anna Soler-Pont and Clara Rosell, from the Pontas agency, were crystal clear: El preu de néixer was destined to make the international leap. "We were thrilled by the manuscript and worked on it quickly so it could be presented at the London Book Fair," explains Soler-Pont. The agents contacted Mara Faye, who translated the first three chapters into English, and they prepared a text to explain the novel's starting point and premise. When they took it to the British capital in March, their intuition was confirmed. "We immediately secured the French translation, and the English one arrived shortly after. Since then, Dutch, Italian, Greek, and Turkish have followed. Of the major European languages, we are only missing German," says Soler-Pont. In parallel, the agents sounded out various production companies, and one of them, based in North America, became fully committed to turning the novel into a film. "They are looking for a director; they want to make it quickly," the agent emphasizes.
"It very rarely happens that a writer who is internationally unknown, who writes in Catalan, and who has not yet published the manuscript, manages to generate this level of editorial interest," stresses Rosell. The agency recalls previous cases like Milena Busquets, but her novel was in Spanish, and Jonas Jonasson, who originally published in Swedish. "Laura has pulled off a somersault. Although she is not a debut writer, as she has four novels, she is young and a diamond in the rough, because we know her but, to the outside world, she is still unknown," highlights Soler-Pont. Their forecast for this book could not be more promising: "Laura Gost's great leap begins now. A very long career awaits her."