Vanessa Graell Barcelona
Barcelona
Updated Tuesday, March 26, 2024-21:58
Books 40 years of AIDS, the forgotten pandemic
Terror The serial killer: the monster of the 20th century... and the 21st
Carles Porta "Evil exists, but a crime is always a social failure"
In the middle of the bucolic forests of New Hampshire there is an elite boarding school, Granby, a world apart in which the students dress in Ralph Lauren, a microcosm with the sculpture of its founder, its Clock Tower, its American football stadium. .. But in 1995, shortly after
Kurt Cobain
's suicide ,
the tranquility of the idyllic campus is cut short when one of his 16-year-old students appears dead in the pool. Her name is Thalia Keith, but she could be the
Laura Palmer
of
Twin Peaks
, since she brings together all the ingredients of the
perfect victim
: a white, pretty and popular teenager, who will later be speculated about her early sexuality, whether she took drugs, about witchcraft rituals... This is how it begins
I have some questions for you
(Sexto Piso and, in Catalan, Periscopi) by
Rebecca Makkai,
a torrential and addictive 500-page novel that goes beyond a simple
campus
thriller .
From the same title, Makkai poses dozens of questions - hundreds, even - that analyze the contemporary fascination with
true crimes
and, ultimately, human drives. «
True crime
is a problematic genre, there is an easy temptation to turn death into entertainment. The approach is very important to avoid falling into fetishism and sensationalism. "I don't know if I have adequate answers, but I do have some theories," the author smiles during her time in Barcelona, where in 2022 she won the Llibreter prize for
The Optimists,
her multi-award-winning novel with which she was
a Pulitzer finalist
for its portrait of the epidemic. of AIDS in Chicago.
One of Makkai's theories to explain the morbidity aroused by real crimes goes back to the very origins of Humanity: «Throughout History, since we were nomads, we have lived in more or less small communities. And when someone died you had to find out what had happened: did he die from some poison? Did someone kill him? Did some foreigner do it?
Finding out what had happened was crucial for the survival of the group
. In 2024 we all want to discover what happened to that girl who returned home at night but who only had a broken phone left on the road, what that Urban Police did to plot and/or cover up the murder of her own husband... «The problem now is that there are hundreds of cases of people you don't know, but you have that same instinct of wanting to know. In a way, you still wonder if it is important for your survival, especially if you are a woman: if you need to know what has happened so that you can be careful so that it doesn't happen to you. "This fascination with crimes has been a useful tool for human evolution, but today, with all the information at a click, we have to learn to handle it, learn to stop."
And what happens when it becomes sensationalism? When
are the most gruesome books the best sellers
? When are morbid movies or television shows the most watched? «For a long time, movies and television shows, even if they were fictional, tended to ignore the victim, they were young, beautiful women, who appeared naked. The police were the heroes, they made no mistakes, they caught the bad guy and put him in jail. But one of the good things about the multitude of documentaries, podcasts and
true crime
shows today is that the victim, her family, is given a voice. We see police errors, we understand that there are many unjust imprisonments... I think that
true crime
programs are often more responsible
than certain fictions, like
Law and Order,
for example," the writer clarifies.
If
I Have Some Questions for You
starts with the
perfect victim
, the police soon find the
perfect culprit:
a gym instructor who smokes marijuana and, of course, is black. Why is it difficult for us to imagine a cultured professor who likes opera, or the handsome young athlete with a promising career as the murderer? True crime is a problematic genre, there is an easy temptation to turn death into entertainment. The approach is very important to avoid falling into fetishism and sensationalism. «Stereotypes and racism are still very much in force. In prisons there are many innocent people serving time, especially if they are African-Americans. Cases of police brutality are also multiplying in the African-American population, we see it every day in the news," says Makkai.
With that perfect narrative of
a white victim
and
a black killer,
Makkai could have written a
most addictive
thriller
, starring Bodie Kane, Thalía's former roommate, a scholarship student who didn't quite fit in at Granby, dressed in black and He walked around campus listening to Radiohead on his
discman
. Twenty years after the murder, Bodie Kane has a
successful
podcast and will return to school to teach a two-week seminar but will be reunited with the secrets, including his own, of an unresolved past.
But Makkai has gone further and takes the novel to another level, with a complex literary architecture that, however, seems so simple. The two temporal dimensions - the analog 90s versus the 2020s of public exposure on networks - raise several ethical conflicts: MeToo,
woke
culture , cultural appropriationism, digital witch hunts,
white guilt
(can a white person write about story of a black man?)... «I didn't want to write a thriller, with that constant feeling that another murder is going to happen, that you open a door, you get too close to the truth and you have to stop... On the contrary , I wanted to use tension in a very different way: something can happen to you at any moment. Someone is not going to come out behind you with a knife, but you can make a mistake and it will ruin your entire life. Because there are always people monitoring and reporting things on social networks, often without evidence...", explains the author.
In addition to investigating a poorly solved murder and confronting his teenage self, Bodie Kane will have to
deal with the most extreme MeToo
. Even isolated in the woods, Twitter controversies lurk, and even more so when her husband - from whom she is already separated - is accused of a very vague abuse by a former artist lover, through a performance
and
, of course , of the networks. Coming to her husband's defense, Bodie Kane soon receives a barrage of accusations of hypocrisy, insults and is canceled, losing advertisers and contracts for her
podcast
... «Was there any difference between those tweets and the ones written about Thalia, getting into someone else's life in every possible way?" asks the protagonist in the book.
Is there any parallel between the fascination with crimes and the extremism of certain woke sectors or MeToo? «Yes, and again it is an instinctive part. I think it has to do with the feeling of belonging to a group: you join something, you feel included, on the right side, you are part of something. This is what happens with football team fans too,” says Makkai. In the book he explores how a certain human instinct leads us to "put ourselves at the center of a disaster, not even to attract the spotlight, just because it seems authentic." And in that center, in that idyllic campus that she knows so well (her husband is a professor at one of them), Makkai confronts us with our most primary instincts, with our hypocrisies. But neither Kurt Cobain nor Radiohead plays anymore.