Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi strolls through the Laie bookstore in Barcelona while asking for recommendations from Spanish storytellers and novelists. She is spending a few days in Spain to promote her latest work, You shine in the dark (Foam Pages), and she wants to see what is being written around here, because she has always "searched for inspiration from other authors."
"My model for writing The Debt was a very untraditional writer, the Mexican Amparo Dávila with Destroyed Time, a very dreamlike tale with images of the unconscious that is difficult to follow. I loved the story and, as I always look for models, it inspired me. Dávila's lack of a story worked for him and that led me to an alley with no way out, so I had to overcome the model to follow," explains Colanzi during a lunch with journalists from Barcelona.
The debt is one of the six stories that make up You shine in the dark, a work that won the Ribera del Duero Prize awarded by a jury in which the writers Rosa Montero, Marta Sanz, Cristian Crusat and the publisher Juan Casamayor stood out. Colanzi tells of a woman and her niece who travel to a town to collect a debt. So far everything normal, but the dreams of the girl and the strange eternal fish they eat during the trip introduce the reader to fantastic literature.
And that is the genre in which Colanzi moves, "between the fantastic and science fiction, although there are common areas with horror, a connection that has not always been recognized and that is a derivation of Gothic, which increasingly interests me more", points out the author, who does not hide her preference "for the monster or for the double, which are around both genders". And it is that the first readings of this young storyteller, who teaches Latin American literature at Cornell University, "were the Gothic of Edgar Allan Poe, the Brontë sisters or Robert Louis Stevenson".
But Colanzi has gone much further, into the past and into the present, to merge the most traditional, the culture of the Aymara Indians, with the most futuristic, high-tech and nuclear, and create a surprising mix. In La Cueva, the story that opens You shine in the dark, the Bolivian author's pen explores "a temporality that goes beyond human life, which begins in prehistory and ends in a future where nature has already mutated and there are other animals.
The environment is one of Colanzi's and his literature's concerns: "We are experiencing a mass extinction like that of the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs, but now we are the agent of extinction." The author knows that she is not alone in warning about this situation and emphasizes that "terms such as eco-anxiety are beginning to become popular, something that I feel because of the forest fires that devastate the forests of my country every year."
These concerns will end up reflected in new stories, because "I am seeing themes that are repeated in different stories, it happens without intending it, they are organized by intuition and those issues that obsess me arise and that many times I did not even know they were there". Colanzi has some stories to rewrite and "many ideas for another book" also of stories, because at the moment he is not considering moving on to the novel, but for the moment he has not got down to work because the trips for the promotion of You shine in the dark "take up all my time"
