The writer Hernán Rivera Letelier (Talca, 1950) published this year the book From the diary of life that I never wrote (2024, Alfaguara), dedicated to his childhood.
The story addresses his life as the fourth child of an evangelical family in the Algorta camp (Antofagasta), with a father who was a saltpeter worker and a mother who died tragically from the bite of a corner spider.
The imaginary games appear in the driest desert in the world, the legends that formed it, the first loves and dazzles, the arduous work being just a child, the ways of life in the mining camps, among other memories that are woven with an unavoidable tenderness and sense of humor.
–In this new installment, he tells us about his childhood in the Algorta nitrate mine and part of his stay in Antofagasta, more or less until he was 11 years old. Will his adolescence, youth and more come next?
–That was my elf’s advice when he told me to write a life journal about my childhood. When I replied that it would be difficult at my age, he told me not to be stupid, that I would have plenty of time. ‘So much so that you could even write the trilogy: childhood – youth – old age.’ I thought: as long as the “Carediablo” doesn’t appear and erase my slate. The “Caredevil” was a primary school teacher who always erased our blackboard before finishing copying. Here the blackboard is the memory and the teacher is Alzheimer’s.
–The theme of the Great North, the desert and the saltpeter mines is present in all his work. Will you continue to revisit this world?
–I never know what I am going to write until it comes out of my epigastrium. If I get to write the second and third parts, of course the pampas will be present, since I lived there until I was 45 years old.
–What would you advise young people who today live a reality similar to yours in their childhood and adolescence, who have talent, but with limited resources, to approach the world of books, art, literature?
–Writing is the cheapest of the arts. You only need paper and pencil. If they want to write and have talent, that is enough and more than enough. Since you have to read a lot, there are the libraries. We are talking about young people with limited resources. There is also internet in libraries. You have to become a hungry reader. In the pampas when I was just starting to write my poems, sometimes I spent my bread money to buy the magazine. Paulasince I had discovered that it had a page dedicated to poetry.
–Which living writer do you admire the most and which of those who have already left?
–I still admire the writers of the sixties and seventies. For the same reason I hardly read new writers anymore. I’m reading and rereading especially those from the Boom. I say that nothing has yet been written of as high quality as those geniuses did.
–What future do you see for literature with the potential of artificial intelligence (AI)? Do you think there will ever be AI writers competing with humans?
–When they invent an AI with intuition, with imagination, with memory and with experience – the four elements with which I write, the four tools with which I work – then we talk about competition.
–What would you like your epitaph to be and where would you like to “rest in peace”, in a saltpeter mine?
–I have already said it a couple of times: I had my epitaph written years ago, it says: “Here rests HRL – he died before his work.” I agree with that.