The Paradox of Unrestrained Power by Ezra E. Fitz

At the Feria Internacional del Libro in New York City this week, Colombian writer Felipe Restrepo Pombo will participate in two panels, one on the importance of investigative journalism and the other on the narrative richness of Latin American literature. In advance of the Feria, I talked with Felipe about how his background in journalism informs his fiction and the influences behind his 2021 novel Ceremonia (Ceremony), which explores how the overwhelming emptiness of privilege can be all but impossible to escape.

Ezra E. Fitz (EEF): Latin American literature is full of novels about the lower economic strata—The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela, Barren Lives by Graciliano Ramos, maybe even El Tungsteno by Cesar Vallejo, just to name a few—but others depict Latin American elites. The Buendías in One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example, are an aristocratic, landowning family. In your novel Ceremonia, the Ibarra clan amasses an immense fortune through coal mining. What made you want to write an upper-class Latin American family saga?

Felipe Restrepo Pombo (FRP): You’re right to point to that phenomenon . . . I would add Our Lady of the Assassins by Fernando Vallejo as another brilliant example of a novel of the lower classes. For decades, Latin American literature has focused—and rightly so—on the underprivileged, and this has produced some great works. The elites, on the other hand, have not been depicted as thoroughly. This, however, was not my primary intent. When I started writing this, my second novel, I wanted to focus mainly on the characters. I wanted to write a family saga, a polyphonic novel in which the views of several family members from different generations come together. There’s a long tradition of this in fiction, and many authors have done it brilliantly before me. The great Greek epics and tragedies are, essentially, family dramas. The same is true of the best European literature, both classical and modern, and of some of my favorite US writers like Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote. And, of course, there are the epic family sagas of Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, and Mario Vargas Llosa. In recent years, I’ve been impressed by two family-based novels with a very original take on the genre: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani. These two particular approaches helped me find the path I pursued to construct the Ibarra family.

So what I wanted to do, then, was return to the tradition I described, but with a more contemporary structure. The family is an attractive topic for anyone, writer or reader, because there are no perfect families: they all have secrets and problems, reticence and sadness. Families are nothing if not conflicts . . . but they also have their great joys. A person’s life is largely marked by their family, and in that sense, I think it’s always exciting to see that experience portrayed in a novel.

EEF: What research was required in order to write this novel so convincingly? How did you create these dynamic characters and the intricate society in which they live? I remember going to college with people with last names like Forbes, Firestone, Icahn . . . did you meet with or interview anyone who lived an Ibarra-type life?

FRP: For me, writing is the ability to sharpen your eyesight. I can’t write anything—fiction or nonfiction—without first spending a lot of time contemplating, researching, and trying to understand. It’s what the Argentine writer Martín Caparrós calls “the conscious and voluntary need to try to apprehend what’s around.” I’m very meticulous when it comes to this exercise: I believe the success of a story lies in its ability to decipher the details. I’ve been lucky enough to live, as you have, among some families similar to the one I’ve described. I don’t think it’s a virtue; rather, I’ve simply had the privilege of observing a social system that many people don’t have access to, precisely because to be elite is to be exclusive. As I built up my characters, I decided to place them in the world of the wealthy—to make them a family with enormous resources. I thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who so impeccably observed the upper classes. I feel that, in general, people fantasize about the wealthy, but often enough, these are misperceptions. Millionaires are often trapped in a series of performances, theatrics, and ceremonies . . . hence the title of the novel.

EEF: It would be easy to cast a critical or cynical eye on the patriarch, Arturo Ibarra, and his children and grandchildren because of their privileges and excesses, but you stay true to your journalistic roots, making no judgments, critiques, or criticisms, only observations. Tell me, how does your work as a journalist influence your novels? What freedoms or limitations do you encounter when moving between fiction and nonfiction?

FRP: When I started laying out the novel’s structure—something I spent quite a lot of time doing—I had to find the common points that could exist across the different generations, and, obviously, I had to create a point of origin. That’s why I thought of the patriarch, of the landowner who built his fortune by exploiting the less favored classes. A very Latin American case, since in all of our countries there have been these vast family estates, these powerful figures who become multimillionaires basically by enslaving other people. But I was also interested in talking about the sense of machismo in our societies because I feel these families were cast from the image of the strongman who owned everything and who was surrounded by women who were only there to serve or escort him. I also wanted to use that patriarchal figure to talk about the relationship between economic and political power, especially when it comes to paramilitarism. It’s always struck me how many rich people in our countries end up hiring their own private armies: a very Colombian phenomenon. The patriarch’s ultimate fate in the novel underscores the paradox of unrestrained power that ends in madness.

That being said, as you note, I’m not interested in making a moral ruling about him or any of the other characters. I don’t believe in the author as a kind of judge: rather, he should try to understand the reasons that have made the characters what they are. That’s something I’ve learned from my years of experience in narrative journalism that is also perfectly applicable to fiction.

EEF: One of the themes of the novel is that, no matter how affluent one may be, they are still subject to suffering and strife. It’s almost as if, once the castle walls have been built high enough, the royals spend the rest of their lives trying to free themselves from that prison. I was particularly struck by the character Patricio and his efforts to understand himself as someone who’s not just another Ibarra. Could you tell us more about how some of these characters came to be?

FRP: I think all the main characters in the novel have a conflict with their identity, especially when it comes to their sexuality. Patricio, one of the patriarch’s grandsons, is constantly battling with his desires and with what his family expects him to be. He, like so many other people (though perhaps fewer now than in previous times), has to hide his orientation for fear of what his family or acquaintances might say. This is an essential dramatic point, because sexuality is a fundamental part of the life of every human being, and feeling forced to hide it, to be ashamed of it, carries enormous consequences. In a certain way, the patriarch himself also twists his ambitions, his delusions of power, into sexual behavior. What I’m interested in is talking about those fears, those prisons. And in the case of Patricio, which is perhaps the most obvious, I wanted to give him the option of escaping, of being himself. I poured a lot of myself into that character, a lot of the effort I had to put in to accept who I am. I think this kind of behavior is readily apparent among the Latin American elite: you have a role to play, and if you don’t play it, you’re summarily excluded and rejected.

So, yes, the theme of suffering and strife runs through the novel, but also the theme of freedom. The possibility of finding it, of being liberated, of accepting our identity.

EEF: One of the most fascinating parts of the novel involves cults that are able to seduce even the most powerful members of society. Why are cults so particular to upper-class elites? Or is it that elite members of society tend to gravitate toward these kinds of cults?

FRP: So, Daniela is one of Ceremonia’s main characters. The paradox of having everything yet still not knowing what she wants is at the heart of her being. To create her dramatic arc, I did some investigative journalism into these cults, and I was fortunate enough to interview several women who were involved in these sorts of organizations. Many of them belonged to prominent families, and they ended up joining these groups to fill a void, to fulfill an innate need to be a part of something. Many of them had gone to college in the United States and had careers, but nevertheless found themselves apathetic, disinterested, trapped in an environment that didn’t stimulate them. Cults are designed to attract these kinds of people. They ask for money in exchange for the privilege of belonging. Some of the people I interviewed were members of the infamous NXIVM organization, and I asked them if they were aware that they were joining a cult. They said they were, but they felt like it was more of a group, like a social club. The stories they told were absolutely unbelievable . . . it’s hard to understand how someone could get so deeply involved with organizations that sell them the idea that they’ll help them find happiness.

EEF: Finally, Ceremonia reads in certain ways like the TV series Succession—or, rather, Succession could easily have taken place in Bogotá or Mexico City or elsewhere in Latin America. In fact, you don’t specify in which country Ceremonia is set. Is that a way of showing that economic disparities exist all across the globe? And, on a larger scale, what does this say about the need for English-speaking readers to have access to literature in translation from around the world?

FRP: Oddly enough, when I was working my way through the final draft of Ceremonia, Succession premiered on HBO. It immediately became one of my favorite shows, and I tried to create a dialogue between the series and my own work. Of course, they are two very different things, but some readers have told me that my novel could be a kind of Latin American Succession . . . oh, man, I wish! I decided not to situate this novel in a specific country because I was trying to make it as universal a story as possible. I wanted to write a book that deals with the chasm that exists in our societies and that separates those who have so much from those who have so little. This happens all over the world, of course, but Latin America is notorious for it. I think it’s essential that these types of stories be translated into English so they might reach readers in the United States, allowing them to see the complexities of their own neighborhood.

Felipe Restrepo Pombo is a Colombian journalist, editor, and author. In 2017 he was included in the Bogotá39 list of the best Latin American writers under forty, organized by the Hay Festival every decade. He started his career as a journalist at the news magazine Cambio, under the direction of Gabriel García Márquez. He is the author of the novel The Art of Vanishing; two collections of journalistic profiles; and a biography of the painter Francis Bacon. His work has been published in several countries and translated into English, French, and German. In 2013 he was a guest editor for the prestigious Paris Match magazine and he has been the magazine’s correspondent ever since. He is the editor behind the books The Sorrows of Mexico and Crónica: The Best Narrative Journalism in Latin America. He was the Latin American editor of Esquire, the cultural editor at the news weekly Semana, the director of Arcadia, and a columnist at El País. He teaches narrative journalism at several universities throughout the continent and he is currently the editor-in-chief of the acclaimed Gatopardo magazine in Mexico City.