"I have worked and continue to work hard to put into words what is in my head. To reach all those aesthetic and conceptual places I want to reach." After a Russian salad tapa accompanied by a beer, Paulina Flores attacks with a wine ---"a fresh garnacha," she asks--- and leans on the bar while letting herself be enveloped by the notes of Frank Ocean's Godspeed. "And it's something that continues to fascinate me ---she continues---: that capacity that ideas have to end up becoming words and phrases, and acquiring new dimensions and meanings." She sips a drink and adds, with a half-smile: "Although these are not always positive."
The first memory related to writing for this Chilean millennial based in Barcelona is that of her, as a child, banging on her father's typewriter. "For me, reading and writing represented access to a world of secrets that I wished to unveil," she recalls. In her adolescence, she encountered Camus, Orwell, Kafka and discovered that writing is baring the soul and that the poems she dedicated to a beloved boy put her fragility within reach of the world's eyes.
But reading and writing is also escaping. It is also heading towards other worlds better than this one. "There weren't many books in my house; I come from a very working-class family. As children, my grandparents didn't even have electricity in their home, so when I started frequenting my neighborhood library, an immensity of worlds opened up before me." When she entered university to study Literature, she touched the sky.
"I honed my skills during that stage writing stories and tales, surrounded by friends who wrote and who lived this fact with incredible intensity and discipline." As she narrates it, admiration still shines in her eyes. The first of many awards she would reap arrived: "Thanks to a story I wrote about a prisoner, I won a computer." And that relentless, severe, obsessive search for her own voice continued, allowing her to reach all those places that crossed her mind.
Shames, disappointments, and death threats
In 2015, Paulina Flores published her first book,What a shame, a collection of nine stories that came out for the Chilean publisher Hueders and that, a year later, crossed the pond with Seix Barral. The success was immediate and the volume garnered various awards –among them, the Roberto Bolaño–, various translations and the applause of public and critics.It was time to take another step and, while the writer planned her departure from Chile, driven by a need to see the world and live in other contexts and places, she immersed herself in writing her debut novel. "It took me five years to write Isla decepción, which came out when I had already moved to Spain after getting a scholarship for the Master's in Literary Creation at Pompeu Fabra." That book was born from a very painful reality: "That of the numerous Asian sailors who throw themselves into the water when passing through the Strait of Magellan and sighting Punta Arenas, to escape situations of slavery aboard those ships."
After the novel, Paulina was selected by Granta as one of the twenty-five best Spanish-language narrators under 35, but the search continued. "I continue to refine my technique and my ear and I believe that with my new novel I have gotten closer to those places I want to reach," she explains about La próxima vez que te vea, te mato (Anagrama), a generational novel with a deep Barcelona imprint with which the author seems to feel more comfortable, "thanks to a narrative freedom that has allowed me to play at subverting genres and be more generous with myself when it comes to finding my voice."
Rhythmic, rough, Latin, emotional and obsessive, the story is already in its fifth edition, is being translated into several languages and anticipates a future work "on which I am already working and which will be –she warns– more melancholic, with bluer notes."
Vampiric charm and countercultural soul
The writer arrived in Barcelona just after the pandemic, and found "a city without tourists, beautiful, from which to fully enjoy its vampiric charm and its countercultural soul and before whose warm and pleasant sea I came to present myself as a newcomer."That infatuation has passed, perhaps due to tourist overcrowding or maybe "due to the housing situation resulting from that scam called the real estate business," but she is still here, still fascinated by aspects "like the fact that Barcelona is smitten with books and reading, because this is undoubtedly a perfect city for writing and reading," she reflects, finishing her glass of wine.
--- It is also a perfect city to be at the bar, chatting until the early hours.
Paulina Flores reflects for a few moments. The notes of the bolero Copa de vino, by Javier Solís, resonate in the atmosphere. The Bar livens up. The regular smiles.
--- I think I'll have another ---she announces, letting herself be embraced by a Barcelona night to many of whose corners she is destined to reach through words.