Uprooting and unstable identities are the basis of the novel Laser City

The uprooting and unstable characters, whose lives face crossroads and walk on a kind of tightrope, interest the Colombian writer Mariantuá Correa, who in her most recent novel, Laser City, addresses the life of a woman with little to lose and a victim of subtle manipulation that puts her on the verge of disappearing.

In interview with The Day Regarding the text edited by Almadía and presented a few days ago in Mexico City, the narrator commented that its protagonist She had to be a woman without a family and with a canonical moral and ethical past of the grandmothers, which she cannot apply to her life in the capital because it works with other rules..

Correa (Barranquilla, 1992) added that As a person from an island, in this particular case, but also a person from the province, when she travels to the capital, Soledad realizes that her life cannot be easily transferred. The capital ends up being very rough. I never say that it is Bogotá, but it is; It could have been Mexico City or Buenos Aires.

He related that several times it has happened to him to be in two places: I’m from the coast, and I had to go live in the capital very soon. I studied two degrees, law and literature; She was the literati for lawyers and the lawyer for the literati. This interested me a lot in the novel..

The author said that social classes are a stable element in her text: the boarding house where perhaps marginalized people live where the protagonist comes to live and the contrast of what she experiences in aesthetics, with her very rich clients, concerned with existential problems more associated with appearance, personal image, and she, while she thinks What are you going to eat tomorrow or how to get out of that precarious situation?.

In contrast, Correa continued, the body that seems stable in the Ciudad Láser establishment He undergoes aesthetic treatments and is changing all the time; The intention also with the videos they record is that the body, which is a totality, appears mutilated in some way..

The characters Raúl and Soledad try to make a leap between social classes; “They weren’t planning on becoming rich, but at least the first one would like to not have worries or have to work so much. Trying to make that jump, disappearance occurs.

Raúl is the purest manipulation. Similar to Shakespeare’s characters who whisper in the ear, for example, Iago or Lady Macbeth, who dose the information and end up convincing people of macabre things, as with Soledad (who therefore videotapes naked women). He, very intelligently, starts an erotic couples game between them, and a topic that also interests me a lot comes up: codependency in couple relationships.

She gives in to avoid abandonment, and This is what happens in codependent relationships, which ends up losing identity. In some ways it is a metaphor. My character really disappears, but so does his identity, for having given up so much..

The novelist said that the seed of her story is the moment she had laser hair removal: “it seemed terrifying to me to have to undress in front of an unknown woman and have my eyes covered. I felt doubly naked, exposed, vulnerable and, at the same time, that a woman is playing with your body in a very delicate act of applying creams, which could sometimes be related to a sexual or erotic game. That’s where the idea was born that something more results from the erotic sensation.

“The body is receiving the same caresses that it can have in a sexual and emotional relationship; So, it does lend itself to that confusion of the protagonist, of ‘I like it and I don’t like it; it makes me uncomfortable’; That is, that issue of pleasure and pain that is very much in aesthetic procedures.”

Mariantuá Correa maintained that she was interested in “the third-person narrator seeming like a black hole. Somehow he swallows the things he is drawing. Sometimes he zooms in on Soledad and sometimes on Raúl, like a camera, because I couldn’t allow a narrator to make many moral and ethical reflections on what was happening, because both disappearances, web recordings and manipulation between the lovers These are things that are better left alone.

I wanted a much more action-oriented narrative, and that the way to really get to know the character was through his actions and silences. Silence is a mark, for me, of codependency, of giving in and going with the flow of the other. The detective was in charge of putting the pieces together and showing the reader what Soledad is like. It was more enigmatic to me that they were blurred characters and that she was always missing a piece.