Gisela Leal: “Human beings are good by nature, but along the way they come across things that deform them”

Murphy’s Law is clear: everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and that’s exactly what happens at La Soledad farm. His name is a warning and a condemnation for those who inhabit it: a dysfunctional family whose members live so self-absorbed and obsessed with their own ambitions that they have no eyes for anything around them. Her myopia is also not enough to see the small and invisible Antonia, the protagonist of this tragic network that she tries to overcome over and over again with the sole objective of growing up as a normal girl, with little success.

The spiral of pain and misfortune into which the characters of La Soledad fall in three acts (Alfaguara, 2023) advances at the same speed at which they let themselves be carried away by their greatest passions, the center of the universe of the Mexican writer Gisela Leal ( Cadereyta Jiménez, Monterrey, 36 years old). Author of El Club de los Abandonados (2012), with which she became the youngest narrator to publish in the publishing house, Leal is now back with her fourth novel, a story that gives no respite to its characters or to a world doomed to technological dystopia and ecocide.

A publicist by profession, Leal does not even consider the option of turning literature into his way of life. “I like to see it as an escape,” she alleges. “It is an extremely solitary activity, I hardly leave my house. My connection with the world is work ”, she completes after several seconds to meditate on the answer, and these pauses will become the general tone of the interview, which takes place by video call. The narrator who is used as a screen thinks and judges equally at a frenetic pace, in sentences chained by commas that do not find their end point until the very end of the page. He is stern, ironic and scathing. He constantly breaks the fourth wall and it’s not clear whether he appreciates or despises a reader who does his best to keep up.

Ask. How do you imagine your ideal reader?

Answer. One with a lot of openness to criticism and with the full awareness that, as human beings, we are loaded with vices, problems and difficulties. Someone who does not have that opening would not be willing to listen to many words from this narrator who, a large part of his raison d’être, is criticism. And he is a reader who also has an intention to improve what is not right in him.

Q. The narrator’s wisdom comes largely from his reincarnations. Isn’t one life enough to understand what this is all about?

R. The truth, I don’t think so. Unless, since you are practically born, you focus on that, and not even then. There are too many things to discover, to learn, and precisely that can be reached from the mistakes and negative experiences we have had along the way. So I would like to think so, but I don’t think so.

Q. Do you have more or less doubts than when you started writing?

R. I think the same. No, maybe more. Because you start out as very convinced of something and, when you are working on it, you have to put yourself in the shoes of these people who are experiencing it and, in doing so, you find yourself with conflicts that you were not considering or did not see before. What I do know is that, despite all the occasions in which I have asked myself the same questions over and over again, far from being reduced, they remain the same or more, but they are not answered.

Q. What is the question you always come back to?

R. What are we doing here, what is this, what is it about, why. Especially what we do here. There are so many factors that can lead us to a situation, to a life, that you don’t finish analyzing all the possible paths that brought you to it.

Q. At one point you talk about a hypothetical happy Antonia who hasn’t gone through all those traumas, but the narrator thinks that her lack of internal conflicts wouldn’t provide enough drama to keep the reader in the story. Is tragedy more literary than happiness?

A. Definitely. (Laughs) To begin with, when you see a character, the most interesting thing is to see the dramatic arc that they can have. And, to have it, you have to go from darkness to light, from bad to good, at different levels. In the end, what stories do, in addition to making us feel understood, is inspire us. Seeing that character overcome the difficulties that we ourselves face encourages you. There is a lot of richness in that tragedy.

The Mexican writer Gisela Leal. Courtesy

Q. In real life, do passions also end up leading us to perdition?

R. Passions are very necessary to live, they are what moves the world. But I also think that many times they put us in situations where we lose consciousness and, when it happens, it is when there may be a greater risk of losing ourselves. Sometimes you realize that everything you could have sacrificed to get it wasn’t worth it.

Q. What passion are you most afraid of succumbing to?

R. To desire. It is the most basic… and the most powerful and the most present.

Q. All the characters are withdrawn and alone, unable to establish real bonds with others. How do you break that loneliness?

R. They have to connect, but that is the most obvious. How to achieve it? Seeing the other and understanding a little more how a relationship is built. There is such fixation of each one in their interests that they do not see around. And they miss out on many things that could help them resolve those conflicts they are having. For example, Dionisio (the father) and this excessive ambition to achieve certain things. Really all he wants is to be a great man and be the best version of himself, and he’s so focused on his goal that he doesn’t see his son, he doesn’t see his wife. Everyone is like these islands that are just there trying to fill the void in the most misguided ways.

Q. Precisely the family, far from being a refuge, is the main cause of that loneliness. Is the family a suffocating environment?

R. I think that the family is the base. The environment in which we grow up greatly defines the person we are or are going to be. A family in which there is no understanding or communication can be extremely stifling and damaging.

Q. In the dystopian future that is outlined when the protagonist is older, there is a moment in front of a book written by artificial intelligence in which she thinks that literature is the last human redoubt in the world. If she got to that stage, does she think she would be the last to resist?

A. I hope not. When I was working on this novel, the pandemic wasn’t over yet, and the whole idea of ​​artificial intelligence was out there, but in a not-so-close way and, in my mind, this dystopian future wasn’t that close. After a short time, all the things I was thinking about happened, which makes you think that the end is near. But that has always been felt very easily throughout humanity. The world as we know it is going to be ceasing, if not ceasing to be all the time, but I would like to think that life as such is going to prevail. Despite the challenges, we will continue.

Q. You are more optimistic as a citizen than as a writer.

R. Yes, the truth, yes. It is true that good and evil are present all the time, but I believe that human beings are good by nature. Along the way he runs into things that unfortunately deform him but, in essence, we all would like to move towards a light. I’d like to think that’s the final destination.

Q. Are you concerned about the intrusion of artificial intelligence in artistic creation?

A. No, no. I think it gives a lot of space for the new. Whenever these great leaps have been presented: the cinema, television, the internet… there is all this uncertainty and vulnerability and, nevertheless, if it is taken from a positive side, with a clear objective, they have many benefits.

Q. In the novel you address some political issues of our time, such as caudillismo or the relationship with the environment. However, he has avoided placing these conflicts in a specific space and time. Because?

A. For two things. My main objective with this work was to break down as much as possible the human condition, which is the same anywhere, at any time. And, on the other hand, because I believe that the scenario that is being reflected can exist in many places, especially in most Latin American countries. In previous works I had been practically addicted to references, spaces and times. And in this one, the challenge I set myself was not to use them and to make it a story that could live anywhere. Because I also saw how history repeats itself over and over and over again.

Q. Does power always corrupt?

A. Ugh! I think if you put yourself in power, you’re making it much harder not to be corrupted by it. I don’t think it inevitably happens. But wow, how hard it is to keep up without breaking down in front of him, and we don’t see that anymore in politics. I mean, wow how religion creates characters that you say, wow, the power it has to distort.

Q. What hope do you cling to to believe in the triumph of that goodness in the face of challenges and passions?

R. To consciousness. We have a lens that can be totally clouded or distorted by what we believe. But, the moment we become more aware… It is extremely difficult because we are married to our mind at the end of the day, but it is that awareness that can protect us.

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