Pagan Patagonia

The jagged-edged photograph appeared among the rusty tools in the shed. The once black and white of the image had given way to a very wet sepia colour, with faces from another time showing through. The tall, bony man with intensely light eyes, hooked nose and a cigarette smoked between his lips is my uncle Davor Mantic. The people around him are the peonada, that is, stallholders and sheepherders with firm arms and sun-tanned faces. Almost all of them come from the island of Chiloé.
The freckled boy wearing a woollen waistcoat with a deer on his chest and wearing that pilot’s cap, smiling without opening his lips, is me. I must be about nine years old.

These stories inhabit urban Patagonia, the post-modern cities built in the bend of the founding myth where characters as distorted as they are unusual coexist: men who want to be beavers, a computer expert physician, a Bon Jovi double, sailors who navigate the sea of delirium, and even the figure of Marshal Josip Broz Tito waving the flag of the red star of Yugoslavia in the most southerly city in the world.
The settings and atmospheres take on particular prominence: abandoned villages, petrol stations, lighthouses, geographies where the dream of reason goes astray, a kick-boxing academy and, in particular, the city of Punta Arenas as the epicentre where immoderation underlies. Ships also appear in these tales, which with their keels like swords cut through the Antarctic ice, joining the arteries of the earth to make eloquent the failure of all human endeavour to bend the epic of the cold.

Key points

• An inordinate and desperate narration, in the purest style of Pablo de Rokha’s poetry.
• These are stories that describe the atmospheres of the ends of the earth outside the centralist and arbitrary perspective of the metropolis.

Óscar Barrientos

2018 – Pablo Neruda Foundation Prize for Poetic Trajectory
2015 – Ibero-American Julio Cortázar Prize, La Habana, Cuba
2014 – National Prize of Narrative and Chronicle Francisco Coloane
1997, 2013 – Municipal Prize of Valdivia Fernando Santiván
2001 – Literary Creation Grant from the Book and Reading Fund.
1988 – María Cristina Ursic Prize for Poetry