Failure, hunger and reality

Editor’s Note:

It is early November 2014, and a figure dressed in black, with a thick mustache, is wandering the streets of Oaxaca City, observing everything. This is Martín Caparrós, a professor at the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for New Ibero-American Journalism (FNPI), who is there to lead a workshop for eight young reporters. There, almost by chance, Herson Barona, a young Mexican writer, meets him and interviews him. We bring this conversation to light not only for its journalistic value, but for the echoes, similarities, and obsessions that resonate throughout it, and which bring to mind the keynote address Caparrós delivered at the Central American Journalism Forum in El Salvador a few days ago.

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The idea of failure is very present in several of your books. It is a recurring theme in your work, but perhaps that has to do with the fact that it is a recurring theme in humanity. I think that *El hambre* attempts to highlight our failure as a civilization.

It is not I who turns to failure; it is the forces that dominate us. I would love never to resort to that idea, but—in a case like that of *El hambre*—when you start to look more closely at how the lives of so many millions of people unfold, what remains is a very strong sense of failure. There are too many lives that are so far from what one would want them to be that one cannot help but think we have failed. And badly. And that we are often engaged in an even more serious failure, which consists of not even thinking that we can try to change that. But also addressing it, writing about it, and naming it is a way of learning to move forward “in spite of,” which is the meaning of the Beckett quote I use as the book’s epigraph: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

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