Tamara Silva Bernaschina: literary guide to the mysterious Uruguayan rural landscape

“Everything is over or dead, and when we return, all that's left is to rebuild and search for traces of things that were,” writes Tamara Silva Bernaschina in the story “No Camping, No Boarding,” a prime example of her style. Boasting, the unsettling, an ominous reverberation, and a certain distillation of melancholy coexist in a single sentence. She is Uruguayan , originally from Minas, the capital of the department of Lavallejas, a city located in the south of the country where around 39,000 people live. However, she told Viva —from Barcelona, ​​where she is presenting Larvas , her latest collection of short stories published by Páginas de espuma —that her territory is in the countryside. In the rural, the outskirts. Animals, bugs, lice, and small fantastical irruptions populate these eight stories, which are full of tenderness but also brutality.

Her first book, Natural Disasters (2023), won two Bartolomé Hidalgo Awards (Fiction and Newcomer). She also won the National Literature Award in the First Work category. A year later, she published her first novel, Season of Whales , which received an honorable mention in the Juan Carlos Onetti literary competition. Perhaps for this reason, and because she was in the 2000 category, many began calling her "the young promise of Uruguayan literature."

A category which, she reveals, bothers her a bit: “I don't really understand when something stops being a promise. A promise is like a future. Something that hasn't yet been realized. I always wonder what would happen if there were someone else in my place, if I weren't 24, if I weren't a woman.”

In this talk, she analyzes certain themes of her latest collection of short stories , which, she reveals, expanded her readership and included her in a catalog that honors her: "It's being read in territories it hadn't reached before, like Spain and Latin America beyond Uruguay and Argentina. That's what excites me most about all this. Also, being part of such a wonderful catalog makes me proud."

–You studied Literature and a degree in Copyediting. What did this help you with your writing?

I've been writing since long before attending a workshop, and obviously before I even entered university. It's true that college, and especially my training in literature, gave me a literary perspective not only on Latin America but also on the world, and tools to read in different ways I didn't have before. It's true that the expansion of my reading horizon had a direct impact on my writing. All the authors I discovered through college, who I wouldn't have found so easily on my own, are incredible discoveries. I took many literary workshops. One I always mention, because it was key to the launch of Natural Disasters , was Horacio Cavallo's. While the book took its own process and I wrote some texts outside of it, that's where the impulse to publish came from.

–You won several awards. What did they mean to you?

–It was incredible. The book's life extended in bookstores and especially in the press for months. The interviews, the reviews, the invitations to participate in panels at the Book Fair, even international fairs—Buenos Aires, Guadalajara. There's something fantastic about that, and that's when the awards contribute to making people more familiar with the book. Then there's a monetary dimension to a prize that has money and that's really useful. Also something more intimate, a sort of... I don't know. That was my first book, it was my first book. Being given these awards meant almost like a legitimization, although that word is kind of strange, and using it in this context is also because awards are a strange world.

–How did the stories in Larvas come about?

“It's a book of short stories that I thought about from the beginning. I did something I hadn't done with the previous one—where I had a lot of texts, I selected them, and the book took shape.” The idea was there beforehand, already knowing that it would be published in Páginas de espuma, but I didn't have a very clear direction yet. But there was something about the tone, about elements I wanted to include in those stories. When Juan Casamayor contacted me because he really liked Natural Disasters , I didn't yet have a project for a book of short stories. When I had it, I shared it with him. But there's something about the writing process for Larvas that is very different from the previous books. It's due to a notion of a reader who was no longer just a Uruguayan and possibly Argentine reader but from Latin America and Spain, and also something much more focused in terms of the process. Thinking about a book of short stories from scratch, seeing what they have in common, what I want to tell, where it's going. It was very interesting.” Above all, the pace of writing this book, which involved several months of very intense work, writing one story after another with a very interesting sense of poetic overlap.

–Your book opens with a quote from the Argentine musician Dillom. The story takes place in Iruya, an Argentine town in the province of Jujuy. What is your relationship with Argentine culture?

–A lot of the literature I read and love is Argentine. I think the literary tradition, especially from the Río de la Plata region, is very influential and dynamic. Authors like Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and Samanta Schweblin. There's something incredible there that I really enjoy. There's Dillom, music, cinema, and Lucrecia Martel, who seems like a beacon to me in many ways. Argentine culture is very present in me.

–In several articles, you're described as a "promising young artist." You were born in 2000. Does this label bother you or make you uncomfortable?

–There's something about it that I find funny. I don't understand another part, and when it's used in a certain way, it also makes me a little uncomfortable. There's something about this promise thing that's been around since Natural Disasters , my third book. There's something about those two words together that makes me a little uneasy. Although I understand what they refer to and where they're generally going.

–This follows from the previous question: youth appears as a force in the stories in Larvas. Do you see it that way? Does this inspire you to imagine stories?

–There's something about children's and young people's voices that, for me, is full of power and possibility. It's a moment to shift focus, to see how the world looks, how something we already know and that bores us looks from a child's perspective. What game does it play? What change in form can that thing being observed take? I really like that, and also how, on a linguistic level, thinking about how a child would speak also seems incredibly rich to me, how the magic comes into play in a much more organic way. Then, thinking about adolescence, it's like a state of total deformity, in a good way. That interests me, that transition, that passage.

–There's also a kind of open door toward the fantastic, almost like magical realism at times. Do you notice that?

–It was another thing that existed before the texts existed. There were images, things I knew didn't belong to a mimetic representation of reality, and I was interested in seeing them as irruptions of the fantastic, even if they were very small or seemingly symbolic. I have a hard time thinking in the realm of the symbolic.

–I think everything that happens in a fictional text happens. Unless you're reading something very allegorical. For example, in writing, when I depict a mare coming back from the dead, I'm talking about a mare coming back from the dead. I was interested in playing with that.

–There's also an exploration of territories beyond the urban—rural, mountainous, near the river. Where does this come from?

–The territories beyond the urban realm are my territory. What they say, and it's true (if you open up to people, there are landscapes), would be the Uruguayan countryside. I was born in Minas Gerais, a city in the interior of the country, but I lived in a neighborhood on the outskirts. Then I moved to the countryside and lived there until I moved to Montevideo to study. There's something of that territory deeply embedded within me; it's part of who I am, how I move, what I think and feel. These are the territories of my literature in the three books I've written.

–Another topic that emerges is sexuality and the feminine universe, especially through exploration, curiosity, and unprejudiced self-discovery. How does this affect you?

–I think what lies behind all these stories and all these themes is desire. The search for desire and, above all, following it. That was one of the directions of the book, that it had to do with the body and, above all, with that something that beats and moves forward. That challenges me as a person. When a story is crossed by desire, good things happen.

Larvae , by Tamara Silva Bernaschina (Foam Pages).