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Jaime Bayly (Lima, 1965) lacked the story. He had dumped obsessions and poisons in the novel, in more than a fortnight of stories where he has summoned his excesses of unleashed Lima, of a good family son, of victim and blackbird of a high Peruvian bourgeoisie where extravagance and frivolity reach carnival status . But the story was still to be released.

Now, yes: I am a lady (Alfaguara) is a set of pieces (50) in which Bayly concentrates that singularity of her writing that has its hook on self-parody, autobiography, self-destruction and perverse hedonism. Half a hundred stories - 25 from the voice of a man and 25 from that of a woman - with which he abounds in that territory of his which is himself looking at himself in a sulfuric pond where the liquid is the others, the others to give to. .

What has happened to get into the story? Since I couldn't find encouragement or courage to write a high-risk novel, I resigned myself to writing stories. I didn't suspect it would be so much fun. What are you most madam about? In everything: in my way of speaking, dressing in old and baggy clothes, walking like I'm going to pass out, attacking the fridge at dawn. In everything: in my flabby body, my viperine tongue, my gentrified life and gaga. But, above all, in my way of writing, the equal division of male and female voice is another of the book's resources. Why that balance? Probably because ladies and gentlemen coexist in me, because I have loved gentlemen and ladies. Sometimes they speak, sometimes they speak. It is perfectly natural for me to feel like a man and a woman when I write (and when I don't write). I certainly have more fun when I feel like a woman, her mother is a great character in some of these stories, so unpredictable. Another conviction that the family is a great novel in real time? My mother is the great character in this storybook. She is also the great character of my life, the great character of all my books. I often found myself writing these stories as if my mother was dictating them to me. In these stories, as in some of her novels, there is a joy of gossip. Politics is pure gossip. Journalism is pure gossip. The family is pure gossip. Literature is pure gossip. It all starts with delicious, unspeakable gossip. How to turn gossip into a story, into art: that is the great challenge. Are you interested in literature? I am like those painters who were always making another self-portrait. But I don't like to look handsome, try to beautify myself. What comes naturally to me is ridiculing me, making fun of me, exhibiting my miseries, insolence is part of his poetry. In most of his books there is a mad spirit of nagging; the art is nagging, protesting, rebelling, mutinying, fucking, kicking the board. The art is to count what should not be counted. Every artist is a petardist, a dynamiter, a gunslinger, someone who dreams of reinventing the world. It does not always succeed. He is always or almost always left alone, but at the same time he has a moving capacity (sometimes) to reflect the different forms of loneliness, which in some way are the same. What should the writer do: be loyal to his stories or loyal To his family? Because your family surely doesn't want you to post those stories. Who should the writer serve: the reader he doesn't know or his parents and siblings? The writer who chooses to tell it all will be, sooner or later, an outcast, an outcast, an exile in his own family, a stateless person.The insistence on his family and the Lima environment of his family never seems to be exhausted. wacko, insane and orates is an inexhaustible source of stories. How much does this world have as a nest of corruptions: economic, affective, sentimental ...? The worst corruption is perhaps unhappiness, misery: that is, how our dreams are corrupted of being happy and how lives that deserved better are debased and channeled. Often this corruption occurs because people are afraid of being what they really are and end up hiding with masks and masks. Has time added obsessions, helped to appease them or has it changed one another? Time refines obsessions , it lowers expectations, cruelly draws the contours of our truest and enduring identity: that is what we are, what we cannot stop being.Which of them is more faithful to them? writing? No. Censorship almost always comes from modesty. An artist must kill modesty. Modesty or reputation is a dangerous stumbling block for artistic expression. How much are you willing to lose when you write against whom you write? I am willing to lose friends or acquaintances in exchange for gaining unknown readers: that may be a self-destructive trait that I strive for. in cultivation. How do you live this moment of pandemic? I have not changed the routine too much: I sleep in the morning, I write in the afternoon, I make television at night. What I have stopped doing is getting on so many planes. I have not traveled for months, that is rare for me. In what will we not change after this shaking? We will change, if anything, for the worse. Has age calmed it down? I would say yes. You know you have less time and try to use it better. One tries not to repeat the grossest mistakes. You resign yourself to what you are, I think you have a novel in progress in which your family, again, jumps through the air. Is it the blasting of the last bridges? I have spent years of years writing that almost a thousand page novel. But I don't dare publish it. Not yet.

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