Chilean author Alberto Fuguet is presenting his new novel Ushuaia (un destino melodramático) at the Lima International Book Fair, a 344-page work published by Tusquets that grew from a real disappearance case that has stayed with him for more than two decades.
In November 2005, Fuguet's neighborhood in Chile filled with missing-person posters. He was working on a screenplay for a film he would never finish, also called "Lost," and the coincidence unsettled him. The posters carried the large eyes and long hair of Santiago "Chago" Errázuriz, an 18-year-old private-school student who had been studying communications. The press seized on the story quickly.
A few days later, on a Sunday afternoon, Fuguet crossed paths with the group putting up the posters. One of them recognized him: it was Santiago's brother, who asked for Fuguet's phone number, intending to pass it along once Santiago was found, perhaps for a coffee or a film project. Fuguet agreed. But Santiago was found dead near the Mapocho River, kilometers from home. The brother later called to hand over a hard drive containing the texts the young man had posted to the internet.
Fuguet described Errázuriz as not the best writer of his generation but as someone who felt a genuine need to express himself. Reading that material, he said, he knew a novel would eventually grow from it.
Ushuaia works like a palimpsest, layering multiple texts: the narrator's voice; short stories written by Bruno, the protagonist, within a competitive literary workshop; poems Bruno posts to a blog that attracts no comments; and interviews conducted by a journalist investigating the young writer's disappearance, including off-the-record exchanges. Fuguet said his idea was that the reader would play detective alongside the narrative. He described the novel as an existential thriller without a conventional detective, and pointed to his earlier novel Tinta roja, well known in Peru, as his first foray into crime fiction.
The literary workshop at the center of the plot draws from Fuguet's own experience as both a participant and a university teacher. He said the workshops of his youth bore no resemblance to what exists today. He compared them to boxing rings and blood sports, intensely competitive environments where fellow participants were rivals to be beaten. Today's workshops, he argued, have become places where members prioritize feeling welcomed and comfortable, and where students no longer dare criticize each other's work openly.
On his relationships with peers from that era, Fuguet said the experience was the closest thing to having been in a guerrilla. He acknowledged there are things that cannot be forgotten, and suggested that in his view he came out ahead, pointing to continued interest in his work and the antagonism it still provokes as evidence.
He was frank about literary prizes. To win awards, he said, you have to know how to write for the Academy, and it depends entirely on who the judges are. He compared the dynamic to winning an Oscar, where there is a tendency to reward stories with polished prose, tidy emotional resolutions, and uplifting endings. He is certain that Julio Cortázar would not win prizes today. Festivals tend to overlook writers like his protagonist Bruno, he said; to succeed in that world, you need orderly prose and closed-off ideas. He argued that for decades the literary world has rewarded storytelling craft at the expense of aesthetic risk, and that ideology is now rewarded more than aesthetics.
The novel enacts this tension directly. It opens with a story that Bruno writes specifically to succeed in the workshop, a piece that wins a prize but does not reflect his actual voice. Fuguet described writing that story as an exercise in removing the elements that define his own style, and noted with dry irony that if the entire novel were written in that register, he would be invited to the most prominent literary festivals in Latin America.
Fuguet presents Ushuaia today at 4 p.m. in the José María Arguedas auditorium at the Lima Book Fair, joined by local writers J.J. Maldonado and Andrea Ortiz de Zevallos. At 6 p.m. he takes part in a panel titled "Writers Without a Tribe: New Maps of Latin American Fiction" in the same venue, alongside writer Dany Salvatierra.
