The Argentine writer Magalí Etchebarne (Buenos Aires, 1983) has been awarded the 25,000 euros of the VIII Ribera del Duero Prize for Short Fiction for the four stories “about love, work, mother and death” in La vida por siempre , with characters who have been stranded in “stony” moments of their lives. The jury, chaired by Mariana Enriquez, highlighted that “she finds humor in tragedy and knows sadness with rage and tenderness.” Etchebarne works as an editor and is the author of The Best Days (2017), a reference in contemporary Argentine short stories, and the book of poems How to Cook a Wolf (2023), articulated around loss and grief.
The winning work of the VIII Ribera del Duero Prize for Short Narrative, organized by the Denomination of Origin and the publishing house Páginas de Espuma and which this year has received more than a thousand works by authors from 38 countries. will be published simultaneously in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Spain, Mexico and Uruguay on May 8.
Congratulations. How do you receive an award for a genre that doesn’t usually make the headlines?
Very happy. It is very incredible that there is such a prestigious and financially generous award. It was a total joy to know that I was a finalist, because I knew the number of manuscripts that had been submitted. It was a needle in a haystack. I let go. And when they called me to tell me that I was on the list of five finalists, it was a total joy. Of course the days go by and you say: ‘I would like to win.’ And it’s the first time it’s happened to me and I’m not sleeping.
Why a title like ‘Life ahead’?
It was originally the title of the second story. I presented the manuscript with another title that was not liked. My environment already told me, but I was infatuated. It was called Mother, Work, Death, Love. It was firm. I loved that kind of enumeration of the themes of the stories. And they told me everything was very nice but Maga, change the title. I had already thought about The Life Ahead and in the end with the editor we decided to change it. The life ahead is like a cliché, an expression that is usually said more than anything to young people, you have your whole life ahead of you and that is sometimes a bit of a lie. It’s not so true. It is not known. The only thing we have most of the time is the past. But we say it with good intentions. There will be time to, this will be able to be remedied, or you will be able to correct this. The idea of ??the stories and these characters is that it is not always true, sometimes life takes a while and gets stuck in rockier places and it is not so easy to move forward.
What does it mean that what we have is mostly past?
It gets bigger and bigger, you grow, you get older, and your past becomes more and more solid, more robust, and you start to look back more. It’s like a movie, it’s there giving a lot of information, an inexhaustible source of knowledge.
Does it mean that one cannot stop being who they are?
A little pessimistic, right? One of my favorite stories by Raymond Carver is Chef’s House. Chef lends his house to a couple in which he is an alcoholic who has stopped drinking and calls his ex-wife and tells her to go together to this house that they have lent them. They have to return the house now and she tells him, well, but let’s try it, we can still do it somewhere else. And he tells her that we are what we are and it couldn’t have been any other way. Sometimes you can’t escape what you chose and what you discarded. Sometimes the ideas of transforming, of changing, are clichés; we are increasingly traversed by those discourses that I don’t know what is true or based on reality. They work very well as a stimulus but the truth is that we are most of the time and we modify some things, but in essence we are what we are, from the beginning.
And its characters have been trapped in a rocky space. Of pain.
In one case a character was delayed in an accident during his youth. Another character tells him this is going to happen and you have your whole life ahead of you and this does not become so true. In another case there is a couple in crisis and the others are moments of illness and death, there is a delay in pain.
Characters who resist even so.
They resist and they also laugh. They look for other refuges such as love, tenderness. In life, when the weather gets worse, we look for outlets, which sometimes not only have to do with therapeutic spaces, but with people, activities. In some cases they are characters who try, who would like that to change, I don’t know if they achieve it, but there is also a power in that wait.
Most of his stories are in fact about relationships, family, couples.
Yes. One of the stories is a woman who goes to throw away her mother’s ashes and travels with her half-sister. There, her relationship with this mother who has been left behind appears like a ghost, and there is something of her individuality and self-care, what this woman has to do to move forward and bond with herself after that. There her bond is more with herself but the rest are between characters. In fact, there are two women who have a relationship through work and have only spoken by email for years and it is the first time that they are going to spend a few days together and see if that friendship is possible.
Were the four themes of the book, friendship, mother, death, love, planned?
In the end I realized that these themes were the themes that the book covers, but I also remember a nice phrase by Ricardo Piglia that says that writers have a hard time talking about what they did and that perhaps that explanation will appear in the next book . And in The First Days, my first book of stories, those themes were already there. When I finished these four stories I saw that perhaps it was repetitive, but that perhaps that repetition was what I had to write and so I put it in the foreground, as if one were putting one’s Achilles heel first.
Why write stories and not novels, what does it give you, what powers does the genre have?
Rodrigo Fresán has said that the short story genre is the king genre in Argentina. We have great writers who have been great storytellers. Borges, the father of Argentine literature, the grandfather already, was a short story writer. In Argentina you start writing and you start writing stories. It’s like riding a bicycle. I love reading it, trying to unravel how others do it, everyone takes their own license, some of you have just read it and you say to yourself ‘is this a story?’. And I love that question. Look what he did. Surprised by the author’s digressions, extension or layering decisions, which I like. There is something about brevity that has an inevitable, undoubted power, and that I really like because it is also bitter. A happy bitterness. It’s over. It’s over. It resonates with me a lot like in life. Good things don’t last long.
I also wanted to ask him about Milei’s chainsaw and all the political and cultural wars unleashed in his country.
It is a very complex situation. Personally, there is a lot of astonishment. To me, a character who comes in with a chainsaw seems terrifying. I understand that also the characteristics of a subject who presents himself as I am coming to end everything is presented as seductive for a large part of the population. The situation of discontent was such that it seemed like a way out. But if a guy with a chainsaw appears in a story, I’m sure he’s going to cause destruction. One closes the book and leaves, but here we live it as a reality. And everything he says worries me because there is extreme sensitivity about what is said in relation to him and people’s responses to any mention one makes. He even collects what is said about him and is capable of taking it and responding to any cultural agent or public figure. He has hooked up with a very young Argentine singer. He uses his Twitter account. He is very curious. He seems terrifying to me in that sense, first that he is willing to pay attention to what is being said.
Are you attacking the world of culture?
He is taking many measures of, as he calls it, adjustment, one way of calling it. It seems that it is more of a destruction. And what seems peculiar to me about this government is that there is propaganda of this destruction. There is a joy in what they are breaking. It will not be the first or the last Argentine government to break something, but what catches my attention is that it does not want to hide it. Martin Kohan has called it a celebration of cruelty.
How did you get there?
With many errors and a large amount of poverty. But at the same time it is as if something that is a global geopolitical problem resonates in Argentina. Extreme right-wing speeches, a lot of cruelty, a lot of difference between social classes… In Argentina, the middle class that characterized the country, which went to university, is disappearing, even a working class that could access the university and that would give it a promotion . That has been very blocked for years. What happens is a response to a lot of sustained discomfort.
