Abel Fernández Larrea
by Sampsonia Way / September 4, 2013 / No comments
Fiction writer, editor, translator, essayist, musician and university professor.
He has published the fiction book Absolut Röntgen (Caja China, 2009). His novel 1991 remains unpublished, although it was awarded the Frónesis (2012) Creative Writing Grant from the Hermanos Saíz Association, Cuba. In 2012 he won the Matanzas City Foundation Award for his short-story volume Berlineses.
His stories and essays have appeared in Cuban literary magazines including Matanzas, El Cuentero, La Letra del Escriba, El Caimán Barbudo and Voces.
He works as editor for the University of Havana’s publishing house. He resides in Havana, Cuba.
Abel has a lot to do with Cain, in the good sense of a lifelong desire to explore areas ignored both by human feelings and reason. To do this, he seeks to banish any local color from his sceneries and language, in a displacement that ultimately imitates the most common literary translation. With such a style of maximum visibility, History starts to be revealed as the most trivial Horror.
Interview by Justo Planas
“I do not identify so much with my generation, or at least with that generation to which you refer, the more contemporary. We have different perspectives and preferences, I could say that even different systems of ideas. I have read my contemporaries, but obliquely, overlooking. I do not think that they have left their mark on me, nor that I dialogue with them too much. I am not, of course, free from some influences or even common substrates…”
“I think the new Cuban generations mostly have a strong deficit of references. There are many symbols, images, topics that they cannot understand, simply because they lack the corresponding references, they do not know the story behind those issues and sometimes they do not even know about their existence.”
“Right now it happens in Cuba just what happens globally too: there’s too much information and little judgment to choose.” READ MORE
