Patricio Pron Opens His Pandora's Box with a Novel You Don't Expect
There are writers who give you the feeling they are telling you something true about themselves, even when they write fiction. Patricio Pron is one of those writers. His novels have that rare quality of seeming personally costly — as if each book required something of him that cannot be entirely recovered.
His new novel, described this week in El Cultural as 'unpredictable' and capable of revealing 'personal vulnerability' through fiction, confirms what his readers knew: that Pron does not know — or does not want — to do things the easy way. He is a writer who refuses to repeat himself, who seems genuinely interested in the discomfort of not knowing where a novel is going until he has written it.
That is rare. Most established writers eventually find a method that works and repeat it with variations. Pron, at least in this new work, seems more interested in opening himself — in making fiction a place where vulnerability has room — than in confirming what his readers already expect.
Lispector said writing was dangerous. That if it wasn't, it wasn't worth doing. Pron seems to have taken that seriously.
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