The first novel developed by the author and biologist, Mónica Lavin“Tonada de un viejo amor”, is reissued 27 years later, now by Planeta. This is a plot that narrates the hidden passions of characters who struggle to achieve love and accept the past. About, THE REPORTER He talks to the writer about what it was like to delve once again into the lines of this story that marked his next steps in the literary industry.
He expresses that there are different feelings when a novel is rediscovered than when one is released for the first time: “It is a very different emotion when a novel comes out for the first time because it is unknown to a reading public. I wrote this one when my daughters were little girls and now they are in their thirties. So, they tell me that their friends are reading it, they didn’t read it themselves. That is to say, I am reaching a generation that excites me a lot, they are almost the age of when I published the novel”.
Before “Tonada de un viejo amor”, Mónica had only developed the short story genre. “And when I pick it up and read it again, I feel like it catches me. A writer becomes a reader of his work and you never read it again in its entirety, but the fact that there was the opportunity to reissue a new release made me take it up again with a new skin., with the passage of time and the novels that I have written in between. And I liked to rescue the freshness of that story, the place where it happens… I myself was interested in the plot because I had forgotten certain things. So, it is the emotion of becoming a reader, seeing if your novel stands the test of time and feeling what one wants to affirm happens with books, which is that they do not have an expiration date, one does not write anything else for the moment”.
Mónica remembers that she made some corrections to the novel, which had to do with the language. “Now I have learned to delete extra words, which is a training over time where you become much more in love with narrative fluidity, that the words sound and accompany the story well, but other than that, the characters seemed attractive to me. . What I would have done differently, if I had written it now, would be a longer novel, but I came from the story”.
He points out that when the story of his protagonist resonated with him, he thought that the plot was akin to a short story, “but (at that time) I still did not understand that a novel answers a bunch of questions and a short story answers one.” And this led her to write novels because she was practicing another type of writing, “thanks to that I became both a short story writer and a novelist.”
Highlight that this work also taught him how a novel goes through many version filters. “I was a mother when I began to write ‘Tonada de un viejo amor’ and for me the story requires that I be able to write it from beginning to end, that is, that I have many clear hours, not the publishable version, but going from beginning to end. end… the narrative verve. And not the novel It is visit after visit, it is something that you can go on tacking together and thanks to that, with what I could give to the text and it what it asked of me, I entered into a dialogue with the novel which, now that I read it, I have agreed; For me it has been very pleasing what it was and in what circumstances I wrote this story ”.
“Cristina”, her character, is a woman who faces social ridicule and rejection by her family. “It was a revelation for me to know that I was talking about the few possibilities for women to have a voice.In other words, I was concentrating on the story of ‘Cristina’, who is denied a voice, a decision with her own life within the little that a woman can decide in a place where she lived, a small town in the north of Mexico, in a social sector with its expectations and demands”.
Mónica expresses that after so many years of having launched this novel, she realizes that the fact that many women are still subject to what is expected of them, “to what should be. And also, if they come out of that score, they can have tragic destinies, as we already know, we did not live in a country of femicide, we live in a country of femicide. It’s like the impossibility of choosing a free path, even choosing who you’re going to love. The feeling that someone possesses someone, simply because he has chosen her, that is still a tragedy of loving coexistence ”.
Finally, Mónica adds that she hopes the novel will connect with young generations, giving her story the place it deserves, because when it came out it was her first novel and perhaps it did not reach all the audience it was meant to reach.
Synopsis
“Tone of an old love”
In “San Lorenzo”, a wine-producing town in northern Mexico, the lives of its inhabitants are subjected to the rules, gossip and beliefs of a decadent bourgeoisie, clinging to a glorious past that was erased by the Revolution. Within this environment, the young “Cristina Velasco”, daughter of one of the oligarch families, rebels against the gray destiny that lies ahead and experiences her sexuality freely and fully, living two very different relationships, but equally passionate: the first with his uncle, “Carlos Velasco”; the second, with an American saxophonist named “Doug”. However, following his desires will bring him social ridicule and punishment from his family.
TC
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