Alberto Fuguet
Alberto Felipe Fuguet de Goyeneche (Santiago, March 7, 1963) is a Chilean journalist, writer and filmmaker.
Biography
Her family left for the United States shortly after she was born. Fuguet lived in Los Angeles (California) until he was 11 years old. He arrived in 1975 in a Chile besieged by the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. The break that this meant —because he didn't even speak Spanish— forced him to turn to the world of books as a way of learning his new language and joining a social nucleus radically different from the one he knew. In several interviews he has commented that the first book he read in Spanish was Papelucho, by Marcela Paz, which would later be a tangential but important influence for the construction of the protagonist of his first novel.
After studying sociology for a year, he graduated in journalism at the University of Chile. Columnist, music and film critic, novelist and screenwriter, Fuguet has influenced many contemporary writers thanks to his opposition to Latin American magical realism and his commitment to a more real and urban literature. Latin America, for him, is not about "talking toucans and flying grannies" (caricatured image that foreigners have about the literature of the southern cone of the continent), but of a stronger reality that he has tried to capture in his texts.
Proof of this is the collection of short stories by various authors McOndo, which he edited himself and which gave rise to the literary group of the same name. This, in addition to his constant references to North American pop culture (film, rock and television), have led his detractors to call him "foreignerizing", which has not diminished his influence.. His nimble prose, full of references, has been created thanks to his keen observation of urban speech, as well as his command of English as the language he spoke during his childhood.
His first book of short stories, Sobredosis (1990) was a complete success in his native country, but his consecration came with his novel Bad vibes, which deals with a A young man from Santiago and his experiences under a Chile dominated by the military dictatorship. This was followed by Red Ink and Please Rewind, a surprising novel due to its structure and characters. All of his characters belong to the metropolitan world of Santiago. In 2003 he released his semi-autobiographical book The movies of my life , in which a seismologist analyzes his life through the films that have marked him. The graphic novel Road Story, based on a Shorts story and illustrated by Gonzalo Martínez, was published by Alfaguara in 2007 and is perhaps the first Chilean graphic novel issued by a major publishing house. Since the early 1990s, it has stood out as the spearhead of the so-called New Chilean Narrative.
In 1999, Fuguet was chosen by Time magazine and CNN as one of the 50 Latin American leaders of the new millennium.
His novel Red ink was made into a film in 2000 by the Peruvian Francisco Lombardi. One of the writer's dreams was always to direct his own film, which he achieved in 2005, with It's Leased (he had already written the original script for Two Brothers , directed by Martín Rodríguez). The film, with Luciano Cruz-Coke and Francisca Lewin in the leading roles, tells the story of a young semi-adult who faces the conflicts of leaving his parental home in middle age, his first profound decisions and the occasional disappointment. It was part of a wave of new Chilean cinema that included Alicia Scherson's Play, Matías Bize's En la cama and Pablo Larraín's Fuga. The soundtrack of Se arrienda was composed by Andrés Valdivia and Cristián Heyne.
In 2011 he won the award for best national feature film at the Valdivia International Film Festival with Música campesina. Commenting on his success, he stated: "I never wanted to be a writer, I always wanted to be a filmmaker. And I think I've done it now."
In an interview given in November of the same year, Fuguet had announced that his fourth feature film would be called Sudor, that it would be shot in Iquitos and that its co-writer and protagonist would be Pablo Cerda. it came to fruition, but in 2016 Fuguet published a novel with that title.
Fuguet had thought of writing a sequel to Bad vibes, the first part of which was to be delivered in mid-2011 in accordance with the conditions of the Literary Creation Scholarship from the Book Council that he had won for these purposes, but he finally renounced the new novel, which even already had a title: Matías Vicuña, like the character in the work that made him famous. He thus explains his decision to abandon the project: & # 34; I can't see myself writing or finishing that novel. Matías Vicuña has already changed his voice. I was interested in talking about today and I don't feel that the character could talk about today". Before Fuguet had thought of taking the novel to the movies, and even managed to shoot an episode.
He has been in charge of the Diploma in Contemporary Audiovisual Culture at the Alberto Hurtado University, aimed at screenwriters and people who work in cinema.
Fuguet declared in mid-2011 that he believed that social networks were a new type of drug and he assured that he did not have accounts on Facebook or Twitter, because he feared that they would not let him create. In November of the same year, he ended his blog Autistic Notes.
After an intermission of five years, Fuguet returned to the novel in 2015, with Nonfiction, a work in which he explores the homosexual world. He himself has said that he considers himself "a gay guy who writes."The book marked his change of publisher, from Alfaguara to Random House. On this circumstance, he commented: & # 34; I thought the Random House Literature catalog was incredible. An honor to be there. It seemed attractive to me to change labels with two new novels. In any case, it's just a stamp. It's not a change of house". Both publishers belong to the Penguin Random House Group.
Work
Novels
- 1991: Bad wave (in 2011 a commemorative edition was published without substantial changes, but, in the words of Fuguet, “remastered”)
- 1994: Please rewind
- 1996: Red ink
- 2003: The movies of my life
- 2009: Missing (an investigation)
- 2010: Airports
- 2015: No fiction
- 2016: Sudor
Graphic Novels
- 2007: Road (in collaboration with Gonzalo Martínez)
Stories
- 1990: Overdose
- 2004: Shortcuts
- 2006: Aptitude test
- 2014: Together and alone
- 2018: Counts gathered (recollecting stories from Overdose and Shortcuts plus seven unpublished)
Chronicles, essays, biographies and non-fiction
- 2000: Part one
- 2000: Two Brothers: behind the route in a place of the night
- 2007: Autistic notes
- 2012: Cinépata (a log)
- 2013: Transits: a literary cartography
- 2014: Everything's not enough. The short, intense and overexposed life of Gustavo Escanlar
- 2017: VHS (Memories)
- 2020: Wastes of the end of the world
Editing
- 1993: Counts with Walkman (coedited in collaboration with Sergio Gómez)
- 1996: McOndo (coedited in collaboration with Sergio Gómez)
- 2000: Spanish speaking: Latin voices in USA (coedited in collaboration with Edmundo Paz Soldán)
- 2008: My body is a cell (an autobiography) - from Andrés Caicedo.
Filmography
Screenwriter
- 10.71997
- My grandfather my nana and I sitcom (TVN 1998)
- Two brothers: In a place of the night2000
- Red ink, 2000, based on her homonymous novel, was directed by Peruvian Francisco J. Lombardi with Giovanna Pollarolo Giglio
- Killer ants2004
- Upstairs, 2005, cowritten script with Francisco Ortega
- Lost, cowritten script with René Martín (without producing)
- Velódromo, 2010, co-written with René Martin
- Crazy: Looking for Rusty James, 2013
- Peasant music, 2011
- Winter, 2015
- Monkeytail, 2018
Producer
- Two brothers: In a place of the night, associated producer, 2000
- Killer ants2004
- Upstairs2005
- Malta with egg2007
- Winter, coproductor, 2015
Address
- 10.7, assistant director, 1997, short film
- Killer ants, 2005, short at 16mm B/N, 20 minutes duration
- Upstairs, 2005, feature film
- Find, 2005, video clip of the soundtrack song Upstairs
- Youth schemes, 2006, video clip of the album song of the same name Javiera Mena
- Machines, 2007, video clip of album song Great Santiago of Telediario Donoso
- Lost2008 canceled, in the process of becoming a graphic novel
- 2 hours, 2008, short 25 minutes, color
- Velódromo, 2010, 111 mins approx. color
- Peasant music, 2011
- Crazy: Looking for Rusty James, 2013
- Winter, 291 minutes; 2015
- Monkeytail, 2018
Awards and scholarships
- 1991: Santiago Municipal Literature Award in the category "Count" Overdose
- 2010: Guggenheim Fellowship in the "Fiction" category
- 2010: Award for Journalism of Excellence in the “Interview” category The 100 of Hinzpeter
- 2011: "Best Largometraje Naciona"l at the Valdivia International Film Festival Peasant music
- 2011: Moviecity Award at Valdivia International Film Festival by Peasant music