“Lolita backwards” gives Leticia Martin the award for the revived novel Lumen

Vladimir, a “controversial exploration of the limits of desire and power relations”, awarded its author Leticia Martin (Buenos Aires, 1975) a renewed prize for the novel Lumen. With 30,000 euros awarded by the publisher of the same name, the prize is limited to storytellers in the Spanish language, according to the wishes of its creator, the famous editor Esther Tusquets, founder of the publishing house Lumen, today in the orbit of the Random House group. The winning novel, a sort of “Lolita backwards”, will be available in bookstores on September 7.

Vladimir is “heavily overwritten lolita in a feminine and dystopian key,” explained its author from Buenos Aires upon learning of the verdict.lolita It’s a classic and it was hard for me to start writing. I invited the protagonist Vladimir to pay tribute to Nabokov,” Martin admitted (no emphasis). “I wanted to put a woman in the same situation as that novel that was censored. It seems very appropriate to bring it back because I believe these issues can be addressed from fiction,” he added.

This provocative adaptation of Nabokov’s novel was submitted under the pseudonym Nitram Onerazan and won by majority vote among four finalists selected from among 407 manuscripts submitted for the Reborn Prize.

Vladimir For the jury, it is a “transgressive, disturbing and deeply disturbing” novel. In his judgment, he pointed out that “the attraction and seduction of a mature man towards a young woman has been presented many times in literature, but the desire of a mature woman towards a young man has not”.

«Vladimir bet on reading lolita in a female key in the context of a disappearing world,” added the verdict, which praised “her great narrative tension and her steely style thriller emotional and erotic, with a lot of dystopia and adventure novel».

Storyteller, poet and cultural critic, Leticia Martin graduated in Communication Sciences and Master’s in Cultural Management and Communication Policies in her country. She is the author of the essay feminisms (2017) and novels Taste (2012), estrogens (2016), rusty bulldozers (2019) and new noise (2020).

He also published several collections of poems and a collection of short stories Everything in my body that isn’t a mouth is screaming.

drive

“When it seems that everything is over, we are left with only instinct. And to survive means to allow ourselves to be carried away by that drive that forces us to suspend all prejudices, all fears and all convictions or principles to stick only to what still makes us alive”, says the author of the book Vladimirwhich he summarizes as “a novel about an impossible escape”.

Guinea, its main character, will experience an interrupted career as a university professor in the United States when her relationship with a much younger student is discovered. In search of a new life, he will arrive in Buenos Aires, a mega-city that he will find immersed in an apocalyptic eclipse. With a phone without internet, she won’t be able to locate her destination, but the taxi driver who picks her up at the airport offers her, unusually kindly, to temporarily stay at his house, where she lives with her teenage son Vladimir.

Without fuel and food, under police surveillance, the streets become a dangerous scene where everyone is fighting everyone. But the greatest violence is in the house where Guinea and Vladimir develop a sexual partnership that puts them at odds with their father. “There are two ways of understanding survival in which there appears a murky desire that orders and produces chaos, a desire stronger than blood and love,” says the author.

“I wrote it during the pandemic, which reinforced my idea that the setting is dystopian. I needed to speed up the urgency of the characters meeting and that script allowed me to. They are in a dark place, locked, no light, no screen, just them,” said the writer.

The Argentinian storyteller wanted to emphasize that her novel also has an ecological key. “There is a hidden line in the plot that refers to the animals that are trapped because of the great blackout in Buenos Aires. Two dogs, one big and one small, fight and the question of survival and the return of the wild is raised. They are becoming more and more dangerous,” he said.

The jury that ruled in favor of the Argentine storyteller was made up of the writers Ángeles González-Sinde, Luna Miguel and Clara Obligado, the director of the Rafael Alberti bookstore in Madrid, Lola Larumba, and the literary director of Lumena, María Fasce. 407 manuscripts were received from Argentina (33), Colombia (23), Chile (10), Spain (272), United States (18), Mexico (37), Peru (7) and Uruguay (7).

The Lumen Women’s Award, which was held from 1994 to 1998, was conceived as an award for discovering literary talent among women. Nora Catelli, Ana María Matute, Ana María Moix, Cristina Peri Rossi, Elena Poniatowska and the editor Esther Tusquets, creator and promoter of the award, formed the jury that awarded the Ángeles de Irisarri award between 1994 and 1998 Ermessenda, Countess of Barcelona (1994), Ana Rodríguez Fischer with lost items (1995), Clara Bound with Marx’s daughter (1996), Alicia Giménez Bartlett in co another room (1997), and Clara Uson in 1998 with Midsummer night.