The Colombian sculptor Feliza Bursztyn had an “explosive joy” that dazzled Gabriel García Márquez and the rest of her friends, but she ended up dead “due to sadness”, a mystery that the writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez now unravels in his new novel, ‘The Names of Feliza’, about which he spoke with EFE.
“My whole challenge was to try to get to know Feliza Bursztyn – a real character – as you know a fictional character, that is, completely, inside, what was happening in her head, in her emotions, in what, For lack of a better word, we call it the soul,” explains Vásquez (Bogotá, 1973) in an interview in Madrid, the city where he will soon live.
The novel has as its germ a column that the Colombian Nobel Prize winner in Literature wrote a few days after Bursztyn’s sudden and unexpected collapse in a meeting with his partners and other friends, and which included a phrase that Vásquez had been obsessed with for 27 years. : “The Colombian sculptor Feliza Bursztyn, exiled in France, died of sadness at 10:15 on January 8 in a restaurant in Paris.”
Vásquez transfers the intrigue to the reader through the construction of a novel that from its beginning tells of the death of the artist. “I wanted the reader to know it from the first page and yet be interested in knowing how it happened”; that is, what he himself discovered in the historical, political and personal research he undertook to understand it.
In the work she describes a woman “who was always trying to live on her own terms” and “tremendously free, and that always comes with risks and there is always a price to pay.”
The “constant misunderstandings” with the spelling of the surname Bursztyn, misspelled even on his tombstone, or Felicia’s decision to change her name to Feliza during adolescence, serve as a metaphor to explain “a person with a very unstable place in his own life, in Colombian society, and in the art world.”
“I was discovering that the diagnosis – of sadness – does not belong to the moment of his death, it is an accumulation of events throughout his life, a constant confrontation against small or large tragedies: the estrangement of his daughters, the death of his mother. people he loved the most, the attacks of a conservative and reactionary system in art, life, society,” describes the author.
Obstacles that undermined the joy of this “stubbornly Colombian” woman, who searched all her life for a physical space in which to settle, from which in the end she is also expelled when she is kicked out of the country after a dramatic and absurd arrest. EFE
