A 'Lolita' in reverse. Not only narrated from a female perspective, but starring a mature woman who seduces a boy in an almost apocalyptic situation. It is Vladimir, the novel by the Argentine writer Leticia Martin (Buenos Aires, 1975) that today has won the 30,000 euros of the recovered Lumen Novel Prize, which was already delivered in the nineties -then it was called Femenino Lumen and it was won by Alicia Giménez Bartlett or Ángeles de Irisarri- and who wants to promote female literary talent.
The jury, made up of the writers Luna Miguel, Clara Obligado and Ángeles González-Sinde, the editor María Fasce and the bookseller Lola Larumbe, has indicated that Vladimir is "a controversial novel about the limits of desire and power relations". "The attraction and seduction of a mature man towards a young woman has been represented many times in literature, not the other way around. Vladimir is a reinterpretation of Lolita in a feminine key in a world that is fading away", they added, recalling that the action takes place "in a world that could be ours where a power outage causes chaos and distorts both the public and the private. It subverts customs, is tense, symbolic, questioning and agile".
The protagonist of the novel, Guinea, sees her career as a professor at a US university cut short. After discovering her relationship with a much younger student, and looking for a new life, she arrives in Buenos Aires, where a huge blackout leads to an all against everyone in the streets and she takes refuge in the house of a taxi driver who lives with his teenage son.
"This love story between quotes, many, or unleashed passions has to do with Lolita, I have thought a lot about her when writing this work, she has been a north, and in fact I chose Vladimir as the name of the boy to honor its author, Nabokov. I wanted to put a woman in that situation, I love the beginning of that novel, plus the words that Nabokov writes almost apologizing when the novel appears, censored at the time... I wanted to take it up again today when we can read some things and study in another way in relation to what can and cannot be said. Can we say everything from fiction? I think so, but it's good to see what happens." Also, he confesses, for Vladimir he reread Bernard Schlink's The Reader, which narrates the relationship between a mature woman and a young man, and "the teacher of eroticism that is Marguerite Duras."
And he believes that his new work connects with the concerns of the previous ones. "Perhaps one always writes the same book, and Vladimir is another exercise in thinking about gender roles. In Estrogens, the suspension of women in their roles worked, with men getting pregnant, replacing the issue of motherhood. Here the woman is more bigger than the boy and in the situation in which they find themselves there are no cultural limits for him to advance, he turns the roles around. Thinking about the roles that women occupy socially is a matter of my novels".
The writer Luna Miguel, a member of the jury, points out that she is particularly interested in the novel because it shows that "talking about sex and desire is not talking about love, and talking about the end of the world is not talking about heroism, and that you can write a novel hard and dangerous while also being tender. It shows that the basic instincts are not just a matter of last survival, but that they hit us in the guts at every moment of our existence, they are dangerous, painful", and the bookseller Lola Larumbe points out that Vladimir "speaks of taking advantage of the other, of power relations, and in this case it is a woman who exercises them".
The winner concludes that it is an "eternal" issue, that someone with power abuses that power in front of another. "And the situation of power can change, it can be labor, political, economic... And it must continue to be spoken, what cannot be is erased, hidden, assigned to a single gender."
