The novels of Spanish writers who reach American libraries and have some repercussion are a rarity, usually reserved for authors with a long and successful travel behind their backs.
It is not the case of Virginia Feito.
This thirty-long maid between Madrid, Paris and New York has achieved praised reviews and sold the rights for a film adaptation with her first novel, Mrs. March, which these days publishes Lumen in our country.
“I am overwhelmed before everything that has happened, I did not expect it at all.
I fantasized with it from a child, I have often accepted an Oscar in my bathroom, but have a reception as well in a market as competitive as that of literature in English, with the quality and amount of books out there, ha
It’s been a whole rise, “explains the author’s own with the agile verb and the intact spontaneity of who is still living in a cloud.
Who is Mrs. March of the title?
There is the core of the matter: neither she knows itself.
She was on the outside she looks like a respectable lady of High Society New Yorkan married with a Bestsellers writer;
She inside her resembles a bomb about to burst full of neurosis, fears, envy and instincts of the most perverse.
What launched the gears of this as fun as an anguished psychological thriller was an image: “A woman with fur coat walk down the street, with a ugly bow and one of those bags with the very short handle, of which you have
I carry on the wrist as if you were an idiot.
From there I began to take threads and then, watching the hours, when Meryl Streep goes to florist and the saleswoman tells her ‘her friend from her has written a book.
Are you the one who has inspired the character? ‘I said:’ It’s already, that’s what is going to happen to this woman, and it’s going to be horrible. ‘
As soon as I gave way to Mrs. March, I wanted to destroy her ».
The description of Johanna, the character created by her husband who seems to be inspired by her, can not be cruel: “Not smart enough to be bad, not enough enough to disguise his numerous physical defects, but deliciously abhorrent of hundreds of
Disgusting ways ».
And what beats behind this confusion between reality and fiction, between sanity and paranoia, is an acute and something twisted reflection on the construction of a personality.
“I am fascinated by the concept of identity, how we created it, why each one is so different, why I obsess myself with one thing and you with another who has nothing to do, what has led us to be like we are …
And I wanted to explore all that. ”
Feito Deconstruct the superficial and frivolous world of a woman who has endowed “of all the qualities that I hate, including some that I have.
I have not given any element to redeem it or justify it.
She wanted to create an envious woman, a bad mother, selfish, capricious … The truth is that I do not endure her, “he says between laughter.
The attraction of unpleasant characters, as the Succession series demonstrates, is undervalued.
The descent to the infernos of Mrs. March also responds to the inclination of her author for the sinister and macabre elements, something that is meridyly clear when she talks about her literary tastes: “If there is no abuse, incest or murder, I do not read it
».
In the reviews published in the novel, comparisons are abounded with Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith, but are the elongated shadows of Hitchcock and Polanski that loom themselves on the character on each page, from winks to the wardrobe (those Green Mint Green Gloves
, like those who collided Kim Novak in vertigo) until the spiral of madness in which it is difficult to know what is real and what is part of the mental abyss to which the protagonist appears.
“I was watching compulsive things that could inspire me for the book and Polanski fell all the filmography, especially repulsion.
I also influenced black swan.
In fact I was afraid to have plagued Aronofsky, because there is all that world of mirrors, doubles, schizophrenia.
I like to describe pretty things and contrapose them to the most horrible. ”
Perhaps that contrast is what has fallen in love with the book to Elisabeth Moss, the actress of the tale of the maid, who bought the rights of Mrs. before even the book was published.
“There is a part of me that still does not believe it.
As in Hollywood the actors are always ruling out projects by calendar conflicts, I am asking it to fall, but it does not seem the case.
I have not yet asked me to start with the script, but I do have the support of a producer like Blumhouse.
I have been given a lot of protagonism, and that did not expect it, especially someone like Elisabeth Moss, who has committed to the project from the first minute incredibly. ”
It is not for less: Mrs. March (and the author of her) have come to stay.
