“After school, Tino visits his sick mother at the hospital, where he is already friends with some patients and nurses. At home, he tries to accompany his father who, distracted by his ufology museum, watches the sky waiting for the next extraterrestrial appearance. Among these absences, Tino looks for a place, pushed by the intense currents of loneliness and desire.”
This is how the editors of Laguna Libros the novel Cielos de Córdoba that arrives in Colombia for the first time. Although it was published in 2011 in Argentina, the author’s country of origin, since then it has been republished by different publishers around the world and Tino has remained alive for all his readers with his endearing story.
Meanwhile, the writer has cultivated successes such as those obtained with the novel ‘Los llanos’, finalist for the award Herralde novel and winner of the Medifé-Filba Foundation Award. In addition to this work, he has published the story books ‘222 Little Ducklings’, ‘Monkey Hour’ and ‘A Perfect Cemetery’. Also the book of poems’Made in China’.
‘Cielos de Córdoba’ has its seed in a roadside notice that advertised a UFO museum and that Federico Falco saw as a child when he went on vacation to the Sierras de Córdoba, an area known for UFO sightings. The writer never went to the museum, but the announcement and his imagination remained in his memory.
What does it feel like to have a novel that has lived so long?
It makes me happy and I’m glad that it continues to have readers, that it continues to expand and beat, but it is also strange that situation of returning to characters, to a landscape, to conflicts that, as always happens when one writes, obsessed me a lot in a moment of my life and then they passed. Sometimes the landscape of the mountains of Córdoba returns, it always summons me and always, always, returns, but I never wrote about UFO phenomena again. It’s strange to put yourself in the shoes of someone who was me. Every time the novel is republished, every time a translation or a new edition appears, it means going back to being the person I was 15 years ago.
But the searches for Tino are still valid
Yes, that seems extremely beautiful and extraordinary to me. Maybe they are no longer questions that move me or interest me to sit down and write, because life dragged me towards other questions, towards other unknowns and other places, but they are still totally valid. A lot of things have happened to me, but Tino is still a preteen.
How to get the preteen look in the book? This is not always easy
Something that interests me a lot is what the logic of towns very marked by tourism is like. What happens when in the summer the town doubles or triples its population and in winter it is deserted. These types of towns interest me a lot and in the novel I was interested in thinking what it was like to arrive at a place like these, because Tino is not from there, he is dragged by his parents from a capital city to live there.
How do you put yourself in the shoes of your characters?
Writing little scenes of what that character’s daily life is like, it’s my way of getting to know him, how he lives, what he does when he wakes up. For example, the scene in the novel when Tino arrives home and prepares dinner has to do with those things, with thinking about everyday life. Who cooks in this house? Who is in charge of washing the dishes? They are questions that you ask the character and that he answers. These are things that you had not thought about and that emerge as you move the pen or keyboard. From there the character begins to have a new face and begins to be modeled and put together.
I read that this novel had been very long
It was extensive in the writing process, it’s not that there is a longer version, it’s just that I wrote too much. Originally it was not a novel about Tino, but about a group of people obsessed with these UFO phenomena. Tino was another character and then I became interested in what his last summer in the Sierra would be like. I was also interested in the character of his father, but it seems to me that he didn’t have much more to say, it’s good that he was left in the background.
It seems to me that in the novel the things that are not explicitly said are also important, that is, there are some absences and silences that are very important, like the mother, about whom not much is said, but she plays a definitive role.
One sometimes lives with grief or with very big concerns about someone’s health or someone’s situation, one lives with separations and many times that is not verbalized in our speech, sometimes we don’t even share it with others, it is something that is down there like a tumultuous mass of things, half gaseous, that stains us, but we have to continue with life. It seems to me that in writing you also have to give room to those things that go underneath, those things that are a little underground that, at the same time, give the reader space to take ownership of the story. They are those places where the reader can imagine, can complete the story with his or her own imagination, assumptions or prejudices.
Events at Filbo
- May 1: Presentation Federico Falco. Time: 2:30 pm Great Hall C of Corferias. And in La Verbena Bookstore. Time: 6:00 pm
- May 2: Wilborada Bookstore at 6:00 pm
CATALINA GALLO FOR TIME
