The pages of Tell are filled with a universe of history intertwined in the cosmos of the famous and fictional arch of Swiss independence, with the ambition of a sexagenarian filmmaker who reviews his life from his track or the young man he hires to write the fish in this endless puzzle. With the same aim, the Argentinean writer Martín Lombardo (Buenos Aires, 1978), psychologist and professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Bayonne (France), has created this tracklist of stories, vines and films, to take the reader on this journey through the human mind and the world before us.
Interview of Matías Crowder to the writer Martín Lombardo, author of Tell, in Diari de Girona
Does your career as a psychologist influence your novels?
It is difficult to know. I feel that the idea of exploring language. I grew up, above all in the case of this novel, with the idea that the stories that are explained, and those that are not, create our identities, which are always so transcribed.
Where do the stories that he explains in his literature come from?
In this novel, this idea is clear, from the question of how that fiction enters into reality. From here it starts: from a home that has the hypothesis that it descends from Archer Tell, without caring about it, which surely Tell followed a limit.
He seems to want to make himself at the top of his characters.
In the novel, the idea of looking for the traces of Tell and of the world of photos and films on the archer is linked to reality itself. In fact, the novel asks what can be brought to life in the cinema, to erase the difference between the objects and their representations.
Why is this desire of the characters of Tell to fence in the past the family ties?
Because in the family past there is something ominous, something sinister, if we take the moment in which the family becomes allied. The family ties, the stories, are still a fiction, a point of view, an obsession from which the universe is observed and life is understood, or a way of living.
Many stories, such as Tell’s, turn around a pommel. What would you say is the poma of you as a writer?
As a writer, the poma works as a design: the one that produces pleasure, enthusiasm, writing skills, even though it is not as high as it should be, always appears ahead. The poma also refers to that which is forbidden, and how it is written, a question also about the limits of literature; I believe that writing itself is a way to answer questions about the limits.
Why do you want to leave Argentina? It is not quiet, it is very nomadic.
I wanted to know why I wanted to live in other countries. And also, in a nutshell, although I am going to see time now, I am going to see why distance makes me understand better or see better the place of which one is. I could also say that I am going because I am part of a family of immigrants and also because I am going to the homeland of immigration.
Is this nomadism the culprit that they fear for their identity and memory?
The nomadism precedes it, it comes from my family, from far beyond my birth. I’m going to like it and I’m going to explode, but in other ways, I’m growing up. I’m also growing up that I see a literary tradition in the Rio de la Plata: identity, memory and, as I said before, the ways in which they sweep up the fiction and reality are part of a literature that I would like to share with you.
