“Because of cell phones we read more dispersedly”

Until now – that is, until this year, until he published his detective novel The golden girl– Pablo Maurette (44 years old) was the author of books that referred to the human body or essays on the story. There they go: The forgotten sense – Essays on touch, Living flesh, Migration, Why we believe stories, How evidence is constructed in fiction and Illustrated Atlas of the human bodyo.

A student of Literature at the UBA and a literature teacher in the United States and Italy, during the pandemic he read all the police books he could. And while he discovered authors that he loved (Ruth Rendell, Eric Ambler, Leonardo Sciascia or Friedrich Dürrenmatt) and returned to others that he had loved in his childhood or adolescence (Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammeth), he began to write his policel: The golden girl (Anagrama) will be one of the best stories on the subject that you will read among the novelties of the genre.

“Reading detective novels made me want to read for pleasure, for entertainment, read just to have fun. Because working in academics one begins to read in a more utilitarian way, looking for specific things for articles, reading with a pencil in hand,” he tells this magazine from his home in La Florida, Miami, where he spends the first six months of the year. anus; the other six in Florence, Italy. All thanks to the fact that Florida State University – where he teaches classes – is based in that Italian city.

After so much police reading wrote a murder mystery story set in Buenos Aires at the end of the 90s, which at the same time were the last times that lived in Palermothe Buenos Aires neighborhood in which he grew up (he was born on June 14, 1979).

In the mid-2000s he went to England to do a Master’s degree, stayed two years and then left for a doctorate in the United States and he is still there.

He grew up reading the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He also with the Russians, like Dostoevsky (Isn’t Crime and Punishment a detective story?) and Gogol. He was also marked by Stevenson and Swift (Gulliver’s Travels). And Borges, and Cortázar: “The Italians die for them, especially for Borges. United States, Italy… All of Europe, I would tell you, is interested in Borges. Borges’ omnipresence is impressive, he is an author who enters everywhere.”

“The police genre is discredited, and yet it has some incredible authors. No one would say that Patricia Highsmith is not a great writer. The police are seen as a casual genre, junk literature that does not deal with serious issues, which for me is a mistake,” he defends now that he has rediscovered that world of the lowest passions.

Far from what is minimized by certain intellectuals, the police genre impressed him with its clear style: “One of the great virtues of the genre is that it must be clear, precise. The crime writer does not experiment with syntax. The mystery is in the plot. Its authors do not get bogged down with 15-word sentences, they get to the point: the best adjective, the best noun.”

Then: “It is a very interesting genre that allows us to think about one of the great problems of human beings, which is the problem of evil. The police generally revolves around a crime, a homicide, which is the crime par excellence, the worst thing a human being can do”, he reflects. She has always been interested in the topic of evil, she says. She asked herself so many things about it and yet until now she didn’t find an answer. “I guess there are no answers,” she resigns.

Now Maurette found the joy of writing detective stories. With his slow speech, short sentences and low volume of voice, he tries a smile at Viva when he says that he would like to return with another story about Silvia Rey, the protagonist prosecutor of The golden girl. Separated, Rey is fearless and thirsts for justice. She does not want to resign herself to the judiciary removing files from her in exchange for cases not being resolved. Middle-aged, Rey is separated, she lives alone in an apartment from which you can see the Chacarita cemetery and she has no shortage of lovers. But the man with whom he has the most relationship is his father, a widower and great companion.

Maurette shaped a great character. But the others, his boss Ana María and Sub-Inspector Osvaldo Carrucci, are not minors. But none like the young teenager whom he places at the formidable beginning of the story and describes as “tall and fat, with a stooped posture and soft features. He had sunken eyes and swollen cheeks, as if he were taking cortisone (…) The boy had long hair cut like a helmet, Prince Valiant style. Or Christopher Columbus.” Those first pages are the great gateway to the novel.

Maurette’s life takes place from time to time in Buenos Aires, where she returns to visit family. With each turn she finds it different. This last summer, when this year she came to present The golden girl and give interviews, it took him a while to get used to a city with “more misery in the streetswith more visible poverty.”

Some of this could be seen coming from the statistics that friends told him or he read in newspapers, “but it is one thing to have them tell you and another to see it with your own eyes.” When you talk to him about violence, he skips over the city of Rosario, a topic about which he is unaware beyond what they also tell him: “It never occurred to me to write about drug trafficking. It is a topic that I do not know and that varies depending on who tells me.”

But in whatever country it is, there is reading, reading and reading. Does not read in electronic format, unless it is something academic. Fiction, always on paper. Five, or maybe six books a month, he says, if free time allows. In parallel, academic reading.

Although he has the disadvantage of the cell phone: “Today we read in a more dispersed way. When we didn’t have cell phones you would sit and read and read. It’s harder to get away from the phone now; It must be left out of arm’s reach to read. Whether we read less or more, better or worse, I don’t know. I think it’s too early to say and I don’t know what reading is better or worse. But I do believe that the cognitive apparatus is changing: we do several things at the same time. I include myself. Sometimes when I want to concentrate, I have to leave the phone in another room. But still… ‘Ah, I had to send this email and if I don’t do it now I’m going to forget.’ “It’s something I deal with every day.”

He adds: “Those of my generation still we have the memory of a world without a smartphone. Sometimes I wonder if what’s happening to me with that is pure nostalgia. But there is no turning back: we will have to make more efforts to concentrate, to find moments that are not contaminated by the cell phone.”

However, he takes it calmly and highlights the positive side of the advancement of technology: “It is true that thanks to WhatsApp, for example, I can talk to my family in Buenos Aires whenever I want“It’s like they were right around my house.”

There is a detail in the current Maurette that stands out if one compares it with his previous photos on the web, when he was shown with a goatee. Now, with a side part, a serious look and a neat mustache, he resembles the generalized image of those police officers who, wrapped in an overcoat, were seen in series or in the movies or described in books. The only thing missing is the cigarette. During the interview, you will smile little, which feeds the seriousness bias. Who knows if, once we finish talking, and once again alone, he doesn’t sit down to write and give shape to the second story of Silvina Rey involved in another of those mysterious murders…