By Mercedes BermejoMADRID – "Commitment" to the moment and "the insight" with which one tells a story are the essence of literary journalism, according to Mexican writer Fabrizio Mejia Madrid, noting Spain's growing interest in a category long considered vital in the Americas.
Mejia Madrid, born in Mexico City in 1968, is in Spain to discuss "Dias Contados" (Counted Days, a collection of 13 stories covering the two decades from 1989 to 2009, which he describes as "literature under pressure. "
Javier Cercas with "Anatomia de un Instante" (Anatomy of a Moment in 2009 has contributed in a singular way "to the growth of the non-fiction narrative in Spain," Mejia Madrid said in an interview with Efe.
The current trial of Judge Baltasar Garzon by the Spanish Supreme Court for ordering wiretaps of conversations among jailed suspects, and the protests by Spain's "indignados," are examples of "fertile ground" for riveting stories, Mejia Madrid said.
The success of literary journalism in Spain has contributed to the fact that during 2011 several publishing houses brought out collections dedicated to leading exponents of that style, as in the case of Mejia Madrid's publisher Debate, which offered works by the American Gay Talese, Mexico's Alma Guillermoprieto and Wojciech Jagielski of Poland.
"Literary journalism arrived in the Americas with the conquistadors," said this assiduous contributor to newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic and to the magazines Proceso, Letras Libres and Gatopardo.
"The arrival of democracy in Spain and the freedom it brought meant the category was all but forgotten, while Latin America needed it to report what was happening on a continent oppressed by dictatorships," Mejia Madrid said.
The writer remains faithful to the tradition practiced by Latin American writers of alternating fiction with non-fiction – he even names himself a follower of Garcia Marquez in the world of "poetic journalism. "
In "Dias Contados," Mejia Madrid offers his particular vision of the world and invites readers to "revisit history" and reflect on the "fleeting present" that slipped by between 1989 and 2009, a time characterized by a dizzying rate of progress he calls "acceleration."
In a journey that takes the writer from France to Germany, from Cuba to Venezuela and for a stopover in his own country, Mejia Madrid offers the reader both the chance to witness an era and to verify accepted assertions about it, which without being "prophetic" he succeeds in doing very well.
"The next century will either be Islamic or it won't," says one of the people who appear in the story "La Vida como Espectro" (My Life as a Specter, published in 1989 and which now serves to remind readers how people saw the future then with examples of the predictions they were making.
The stories, told in the first person, begin when the author "sees a news program, gets in a taxi or takes an airplane" and continue when he arrives at the scene of the key incidents where "the pieces of the puzzle begin to come together" and the story plays out from there, Mejia Madrid said.
For the writer, who began practicing his trade early – he recalls that he wrote his first novel when he was 8, of which no copy survives, and at 15 began working for a Mexican newspaper – the acceleration of the current era means newspaper stories have no time or space for reflection.
"We don't fit in the pages of newspapers so we write books," the author of novels like "Viaje Alrededor de Mi Padre" (A Trip Around My Father in 2004, Hombre al Agua" (Man in the Water in 2004, "El Rencor" (The Grudge in 2006, "Tequila DF" in 2009, and "Disparos en la Oscuridad" (Shots in the Dark in 2011, said.
Mejia Madrid is currently working on what will be his first virtual work, "La Vida Digital" (Digital Life, a story about the Internet.
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