“What if everything we are experiencing is not true? What if we are really immersed in a kind of Truman show, in which others, without us being aware, are observing us? These are just some of the many questions that Javier Argüello (Santiago de Chile, 1972) asks himself while he refreshes his throat with sparkling water. The heat has been lurking in Barcelona for days, but it may not be the high temperatures for this time of year that causes him to suffocate, but rather his constant search for the limits between reality and fiction, very present in all his work and especially in his latest book, Four Quantum Tales (Random House).
“I was very clear about the title without having written anything. So, the fact that there were only four stories that made up a book forced me to make them long. And that is something he had never done,” says the Argentine author born in Chile and based in Barcelona, ??who presents a man who meets his classmates thirty years later; to a journalist stranded in Ukraine who meets a 19th century writer in London; to a lecturer who discovers the streets of Beijing with the help of an intimate stranger; and a writer who borders on madness following the trail of a patient in an asylum.”
“Possible lives, dreamed of and imagined, but that are not always, are something that seduces me. We writers discover our obsessions throughout our careers. I was not fully aware of what impressed me so much until I wrote my first book of stories. I thought they were unconnected stories, until I read them in one sitting and realized how much I was fascinated by trying to understand how narrative rules intermingle with the provisional and random nature of reality. The answer is easy, if it makes sense it is fiction, because reality does not.”
Argüello is part of a select group of writers, such as Benjamin Labatut and his Maniac (Anagrama), who incorporate science in their stories, because “it is something that comes naturally.” There are many multidisciplinary forums, on science and humanism, in which he participates and he has already visited the Geneva particle accelerator twice. A profitable journey from which he will extract two essays that will arrive in the coming months.
It is not strange that, with this predilection, he is aware of robotic advances and artificial intelligence. “Technology is not dangerous in itself, but we must give it meaning so that it does not become dangerous. If there is no center from which we provide some meaning, we can lose direction and direction.”
It was at university when his scientific streak came out: “I studied social sciences, but I took a physics seminar in which they explained the idea of ??consciousness constructing reality, and I found it revealing.” A principle that was already present in classical antiquity, “when no one doubted that the word created the world. Now it seems that we are returning to that old possibility,” he says convinced.
The author of Being Red (2020) often wonders why the educational system separates students into science and literature, when “science is still a story. Einstein said that we have become so specialized, that we are knowing more and more about less and less, until there will come a point where we will know almost everything about almost nothing. A phrase with which he “one hundred percent agrees. He sums up almost everything.”
