Asesino, bróker y psicópata (American Psycho) - LNT

En los años 90, la crudeza de la descripción de los asesinatos en la novela American Psycho desprestigió a su autor, Bret Easton Ellis. 30 años después American Psycho sigue siendo un referente en las historias de terror.

Episode Transcript

(00:25):
Ja la acha beats him in themiddle of the sentence in full face,
Lui, his fast- paced bladeslashes his bonga de dies making him silence
the faith. The conversation takes placenaturally, without an authentic structure, without

(00:47):
concrete themes, without internal logic orfeelings, just words just like those of
a film that would have been incorrectlytransged hello. I am for taiman I
say holding his hand and looking atmy reflection in the mirror hanging from the
wall with a smile of satisfaction.Blood starts running slowly on both sides of

(01:07):
his mouth and when I pull outthe axe, I' m about to
take care of Owen. Of that, Syria and Christi and kiss Sabrina.
While I keep eating her mouth,I hold on to a simple and sad
one. Right, no one's out. No one redeems himself.
However, I' m innocent.Ma is evil something you one. That

(01:29):
' s something you do or askgood night. It is one of the
most controversial and shocking books that havebeen published in many years. American Saiko

(01:49):
de Brett stonel disappeared in the UnitedStates two weeks ago. Passages like these
have caused great indignation. There arethose who have asked that the book be
banned, as well as if theauthor had wondered how many times I can
spread around the world before Mom andDad gets angry. Right, and Mom
and Dad are pissed off. Thebook is a heaviest vision of life in

(02:13):
New York in the eighties seen throughthe eyes of the serial killer. Patrick
Baintman, a yupian in predilection fortorture and murder. It' s a
failed book. The characters are flatand simply serve as vehicles for Ellis Bson
' s negative obsessions. I thinkthe book sucks. Ellis' real crime

(02:34):
is not to degrade women, peopleor animals on the street, but to
degrade imagination. Then that' swhat I don' t forgive you.
It will be forgotten without a traceor without interest, without argument. There

(02:58):
' s nothing in this book.Lots of implausible details about luxury clothing,
food products or beauty products. Ifthis book were not the most repulsive book
of the year, it would certainlybe the most ridiculous and, as expected,
it goes nowhere. The characters arenon- existent and therefore do not
evolve. Nothing explains Batman' smadness. There is no intrigue in any

(03:23):
judicial investigation. It is a deepboredom for everyone, except for its author.
Obviously, if I read the bookagain and would have the same opinion,
I' d rather hang myself thanread it to Mirial Cheko again,

(03:51):
he' ll chase me to thegrave. None of my novels will ever
reach that notoriety is quite funny andI don' t recognize being here talking
about Patrick Baitland. Thirty years afterthe release of the book. I recently
thought I was done with him.I thought I was done with Patrick Einman.

(04:12):
In December of nineteen hundred and eighty- nine, when I finished the
book, I was convinced that myexperimental novel would not exceed the five thousand
sold copies and be able to moveon and never talk about it again.
It had never occurred to me thatpeople were good or that a man was
able to change, or that theworld could be a better place if one

(04:34):
were pleased with a feeling, alook or a gesture, or if one
received love or affection from another person. Nothing was affirmative. The term generosity
of spirit did not apply to anything. It was a topic, It was
kind of a bad joke, surface, surface, surface was the only thing

(04:57):
I found a meaning in this civilizationand one such and as I saw it
colossal and dentted when I was achild in the seventies, I was very
interested in horror movies These films werea reflection of the secret world in which

(05:25):
I lived. Then it was aperfectly normal looking world and in a normal
upper middle- class family, butbeneath the surface, under that perfect family
varnish, a completely different story washidden, made of thousands of hidden things

(05:45):
among my parents. There was alot of tension, my father' s
alcoholism, and then the fact thatI was different homosexual. And those horror

(06:08):
movies reflected all that, they werethe expression of the horror that arises in
the very heart of that normality thatwe strive to live. There was never
a plot in those movies. Thingshappen without you really knowing why, why
the little regan of the exorcist ispossessed because the shark begins to attack.

(06:32):
There was never an explanation. Itjust happened oh appens of all those rules,
all those customs that had to beadjusted. They were just mere appearances,
a comedy. When I watched thosemovies, I felt stronger. I

(06:56):
felt that I was maturing when Icould see her without fear, without panic,
without running away from the cinema,I felt that I was becoming an
adult voice. My macabre joy,gives way to bitterness and weep for me.
I just want them to want meto curse the world and everything they

(07:17):
' ve taught me. The principles, the differences, the choices, the
morals, the commitments, the knowledge, the unity, the prayer, all
that is reduced to adapt or die. Brett was special, ut went to

(07:40):
class in a suit. He wasfar ahead of us in his writing,
in his thinking, polemics. TheVers didn' t scare him and he
saw things big as in the movieswe always listened to what had happened to
Brett the day before, not knowingif it was true or not. He

(08:05):
constantly made up stories about each other. He was never evil, but he
was strange. Maybe that was hisway of manipulating people a little, or
he just had fun doing it.One day, writer Joe McGinnis, one

(08:26):
of Bnnington' s teachers, foundthe text Bret had written for his entrance
exam. He was very impressed andgave it to his Agenget to read.
When I read it his ability toobserve nor a very personal style immediately jumped
into view Stle. A year laterI started working as an editor at Simonon

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Schuster. One day a manuscript arrivedat my table. It was a novel
and became less than zero. Itwas an autobiographical novel about the youth of
the Angels and in that novel itshowed a talent that could not be ignored.
I put the reactions on our editorialcommittee were disparate. One of the

(09:18):
bosses at the time said a phraseI have not forgotten. If we'
re going to publish a novel aboutcocaine zombies, I guess this is the
one we should choose. Come on. I knew Brett in nine hundred and
eighty- four. Your editor hadpassed me the less than zero manuscript.

(09:43):
A few weeks before FWIS. Ihad just read a few pages, that
' s all. At first Ithought I was just trying to provoke by
Shuack and then I met Brett.We went for a few drinks and had
a great night. We connected Thenthe next day I got the manuscript from

(10:07):
minus zero and read it and Iwas really impressed prust I understood that I
was someone who had thought a lotabout fiction conception to write a novel as
exceptional as less than zero. Atthat age. This only happens once per
generation, maybe every two or eventhree generations. Brett' s maturity was

(10:31):
surprising. He was a very earlyauthor, endowed with a great capacity for
observation. After reading his book,I knew Brett was going through the same
thing he had lived and I wasbeginning to be famous. Oh, well,

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the press talked about me every day, because the journalists and fans were
chasing me Brianson and I thought hewas going to go through the same thing
and maybe I could help him.And indeed, that was what happened I
moved to New York, as Ihad always wanted to do already, in

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nineteen hundred and eighty- seven,New York was in full transformation. Whole
neighborhoods were in the process of gentrification. Others were still ruinous. And that
was the New York that I adored, the one that had brought me in
so many movies that I had seenin the 1970s at thuts That was where
I wanted to live, as inthe Budiyann Woon movies. All his films

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had influenced me a lot. Iremember feeling transported when I saw Manhattan.
That was the movie that made mewant to live in New York. Cha
chapter one and you still adored NewYork City and idolized it in an exaggerated
way. He didn' t writebetter He idealized her in an exaggerated way.

(12:28):
It was a very exciting time forwriters like us, in the seventies
and then, in the early eighties, literature was not really important to the
dominant culture. Very few writers werefamiliar with popular culture. Rock, television
and film were the main pop scorscultural media and then, in the mid

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- eighties, a group of writerssuddenly appeared that, as some journalists said,
made literature sexy again. We hadthe impression that we were at the
center of culture and that center wasin New York at a truly exciting time.

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There was also all that music.It was really exciting. Everything was
possible with the most beautiful women themost fascinating conversations and, of course,
the best drugs and we enjoyed tothe fullest of our fame air fortion Probably

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some novels never saw the light.That' s why he doesn' t
give Kameson. The novelty had becomea value in itself. The younger the
author was, the more glamorous andmore he was talked about in the tabloid
press, which was an advantage andfrom that point of view, Bretty Jay

(14:07):
was up to that image. Theywere all party day. The press of
the show didn' t miss asingle detail to be. Frankly, publishers
loved that because they could announce thatthey had signed with the most popular authors
of the moment. Suddenly, Brettfound himself with a lot of money regularly

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inviting about twenty people to the bestrestaurants and organizing crazy parties at Christmas,
for example. You never knew whoyou were going to meet, but all
the stars of the time were thereand he entertained all those pretty people with
waiters disguised as angels that kind ofdelusional anu happened weird things. People used

(15:01):
to confuse Brett and me like wewere in a Brettston Ellis novel where no
one remembers anyone' s name.People were coming to thank me for those
Christmas parties, but it wasn't me who organized them. It was
always Brett. I never wrote toAmerican Saico at a time when I had

(15:28):
already become a kind of literary celebrityand right away. I realized that that
celebrity wasn' t really me,that person the newspapers were talking about,
it wasn' t me, itwasn' t the real Bretin, it
was what people, critics, journalistsimagined of me. And that ended up

(15:54):
freaking out. I told myself Iwas dead. The real bret had died
and it was that other brief whowas going to take his place, chake
over, and that' s whathappened. I became the bad boy of
American literature, especially after American Chicho, but also with less than zero and

(16:17):
with the laws of attraction, thebad boy drug, Dagton and list who
doesn' t care about youth,clubs, all that, sex, drugs,
etcetera. And little by little,all that ended up feeding my book.

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It' s four o' clockin the afternoon. I' m
back from Central Park, where nearthe children' s zoo near the place
where I murdered little Maccathree. Ifeed the dogs walking through pieces of Ursula
' s brain. When I godown Fifth Avenue, everyone seems sad.
The air is full of rot.The bodies lie in the cold pavement lined

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up for miles. Some move,most are inert. History is beginning to
sink and only a few individuals seemvaguely aware that things are going wrong.
I realize that the silhouette of theskyscrapers has changed and I look up,
admiring the immense Trump Tower, shiningproudly under the last rays of the afternoon

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sun. We have employed five zeroconstruction workers and the building will create in
brios. Thousands of people spend millionsof dollars in New York. Many of
those very rich people have chosen theCrump tower. It' s a crucial
step for middle New York and Iadd there' s nothing wrong with being

(17:53):
rich. When I moved to NewYork, I knew I was going to
write American Sayho and that no newnovel would talk about Wall Street, that
world. Just get there. Istarted dating guys from Wall Street. My
friends had older brothers working there.They were twenty- five, thirty years

(18:15):
old and made a lot of money. I wanted to know how that worked,
how they could earn so much theirmother owed. In the 1980s,
the years of rigan or gold Streetbecame the real lung of capitalism. Twenty
- four hours a day, sevendays a week, every certain time someone

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releases the animal energy of this countryand then only God knows what can happen.
That happened in the eighties with theglorification of the bankers, the Brockers,
Wall Street and the money circulating inthe art We used to say it
wasn' t enough to win.It is necessary that others always lose more,
more and more and more and moreand more and culture had been profoundly

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transformed, It had become much morematerialistic. It was a culture of consumption
and, as such, it wascelebrated. I didn' t know much
about wall Strel, about a broque' s work was, but the book
started to change when I realized thatno one wanted to tell me in detail.

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After all, it was mostly theirleague style that interested them and I
understand. For a 20- year- old or a woman, that'
s important. Year, the appearance, the way you behave, the way
you express the money you earn,who has the bride, the prettiest,

(20:00):
the best suit, the most classycar, the largest apartment. It was
a world that represented very well theyupi culture of the time at some point
and then, through dating those people, I saw how my book began to
change. I hadn' t startedout as a pretty classic novel about a

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young man from Wall Streets, whosevalues were gradually corrupting. There was the
bride, there was a lot ofdrugs, ar brods and then, in
the end, he decided to leaveall that a little as clay, at
least zero and they are in thelaws of attraction. The idea was to

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make a kind of trilogy about theyouth of the eighties. That was my
project at first and then, onenight, when I was having dinner with
those guys again, everything changed.I couldn' t explain why, but
in the middle of dinner I sawit clearly. Patrick Batman, I'

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d be a serial killer. OrI was going to imagine he was a
serial killer. It was very strange. Everything was very confusing and suddenly I

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saw it clearly. I can't tell where that new orientation came from.
Something in my subconscious made me establishthat connection. I think there are

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reasons both for the hope and forthe optimism of getting rid of the Old
book to leave room for the newone and then I began to imagine a
voice. While I was writing it, I had no face, no idea,
I didn' t even wander,but I had that voice. A

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bum I blinded one spring, he' s sitting across his legs on a
disgusting blanket near the corner, fifty- five o' clock. She'
s got such a broken nose thatI can' t imagine how you can
breathe with her. I take outmy wallet and pretend I' m gonna
leave a dollar in his empty canof coffee, but then I think why
bother. Anyway, no one looksand the beggar won' t keep the

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dollar again. What probably happened toBret Tiston Ellis in this book is that
he found a novel voice that isvery original and that makes it a success
for me. It is a voicethat you really don' t find in
any of those other books, andthat voice allowed it to express something that

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is deeply rooted in us, whichis what I would call ecopathy. The
opposite of empathy is the absolute inabilityto feel what the other feels. But
this lack of empathy is deeply rootedin us, because although under the protection
of the super self of society,we try to put ourselves in the place
of the other, fundamentally not so. There is something very deep in that

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violent image that returns us from ourselves. I had nothing to do with Patrick
Baynman. He and I have nothing. Maybe on the literary plane. We

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both share a certain dissatisfaction, butI am not a novelescomnt character Patrick Daintman
was a character I had thought aboutfor years. I had projects for him.
I wanted to explore some things withthem was by far more interesting than
my little problems of famous depression thatcrawled through New York in the late 1980s,

(24:14):
although we did share some things.The rejection of the world in which
we live, of its values,which we hate, this world in which
we feel trapped because there is noescape and the only hope we have left
is not to go crazy. Theeye hangs from the basin in front of
his cheek, but he keeps blinkingI hold him over his head. With

(24:38):
one hand I throw it back andwith the thumb and the forefinger I hold
it. The other eye keeps itopen and puts the tip of the knife
into the basin, first breaking theprotective membrane, so that the basin is
filled with blood. Then I makean incision in the eye and when he
starts screaming, I cut his nosein half and the blood comes out of

(25:02):
the bubbles, mono bread Bockers.When I read the book, I thought
shit' s gonna mess up.I must admit that I was a little
bit, a little shocked by theviolence of American Saicho and I was not
the only one. Brett himself wasthere. He waited until the last moment

(25:23):
to write those violent passages. I' d already written everything else. I
remember trying to talk to him forseveral days without success. However, at
that time we were constantly talking untilfinally his agent, who was also mine,

(25:44):
explained to me that he was veryscared and depressed today because he had
been writing all those scenes. Ihad written them in just two weeks,
so I went to get him homeand dragged him to a restaurant to get
him out of all that. Theprestigious publisher Simon al Suster planned to publish

(26:21):
American Saiko this January. The officialreason Simon' s resignation from the Suster
was a matter of good taste.However, forty- eight hours later,
Random House bought the rights wrights.I remember presenting the book at a marketing

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meeting in the presence of sales andadvertising managers or in are going. I
had sent them some excerpts and theywere all horrified. I didn' t
want there to be any misunderstanding andperhaps I made the mistake of thinking that

(27:03):
they would read it with the necessarydistance to understand what I had understood.
Keep Yes, it was a horriblebook, but it was also fun,
but it was a satire that invitedthe reader to read it with complicity ling
the riars El, as there wasa huge controversy. A lot of people

(27:27):
were mad at Brett. They saidhe was misogynistic, that he hated gin
women even received death threats. Itwas very serious dis when excerpts from American
Saico appeared in two magazines the scandalexploded me. Very few people had read

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the book, very few had readthe evidence from the end to the end,
but that was enough. The extractswere enough to ignite the bomb fuse
that was going to explode with theprotests of feminist associations, insults, death
threats, etcetera. It has beena long time since we saw such a

(28:21):
thing It was horrified by the descriptionsof violence contained in the book. On
the other hand, as a full- time feminist working for women' s
empowerment and rights, I was veryfrightened by Ausburg Fin because I think it
sends a very dangerous message to readers. I remember an article by Norman Mailer

(28:48):
at Vanity Fer. Mailer recognized Brett' s great ambition with this book,
but he also said that such violencewas not justified and that article was one
of the most positive. In general, they were all very hostile. Black

(29:10):
Oh, my editors all over theworld abandoned me all, including America.
Or the only one who didn't was my editor in the UK.
Of my other twenty- six editorsleft me lying down. Ay Anders,
I understood that the book could impact, even though art personally did not shock

(29:30):
me. It' s not myway of looking at things. Art has
nothing to do with morality. It' s ironic that you obviously just look
at the surface of my pieces.Or if that is to protest against operences
or against the combination of violence andsex that is in the book, without

(29:55):
finding, without finding in that theslightest meaning m and that is its decision.
I guess, they' re freeto do it, but for me
the meaning is there implicitly. Iwas tired and I didn' t know

(30:15):
what to say anymore. The controversywas very violent and the reactions deeply hostile.
Wow, what could I say anything. It was useless. They hadn
' t understood the book. Theysaw what they wanted to see, what

(30:36):
the New York Times wanted to see, and the truth gave me the same
for the risk of looking old-fashioned. I think there' s a
moral behind the writing act. Otherwise, it' s a waste of time.
It is not about teaching, preaching, or taking care of such or
such behavior, but at the centerof the writing act there must be the

(31:00):
need to change the world, tomake a better place for evil. I
don' t consider myself a model. I admit that I like to disturb,
I like to explore territories that otherwriters ignore, because that I like
is simply not something that impose forsvansof It is not easy to explain why

(31:26):
you wrote this or that book.You just write them because you want to
change the world. How you dothat as a writer i we can certainly
change some people' s view ofthe world. Maybe they' ll be
inspired and that' s already alot, you know, but writing a
novel is a very personal act,it' s a very intimate thing.

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It has nothing to do with others, with your audience, with your readers.
You' re working on something that' s inside you that' s
often painful and something you want toget rid of. I don' t

(32:21):
remember who said what writer said thatthe worst thing that could happen to you
was being stuck in the nightmare ofanother Yukushma or Kelkndul. Well, I
think that' s a bit ofa feeling if not bad. I don
' t remember you feeling when youdived into that book or spancos. It
' s not my nightmares, it' s his nightmares, and he imposes

(32:45):
them on me in a way.True, at the same time you want
to get away from him because it' s painful and at the same time
you' re secretly attracted to him. Oh, and that' s the
strength of this book. Criture existsto face horror. It' s not
just that I can do it,it' s that I must do it.

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If the writers don' t tellus about the horror of the world
and the horror within us, whowill. O This book is a bomb
thrown in the middle of an opulentsociety. Through Patrick Batman' s character.

(33:30):
Horrors are uttered and inflicted on othersocial groups that clearly do not belong
to the ruling class. Without adoubt, it is the vision of the
rich white man over the rest ofthe world. The fact that I teach
literature has probably protected me a littlebit. That has allowed me to read
the book at a certain distance ina way a little different from that of

(33:53):
other readers. I was not particularlyimpressed and neither did I feel or snor
of the personally, neither as awoman nor as a person of color reso
even more like an exercise of provocation. The desire to go as far as
possible. He knew how to usehis character very effectively to denounce the absence

(34:16):
of values that reign under the civilizedappearance of our society. If you think
your skin is dry, scaly,which makes your face seem opaque and aged.
Use a whitening lotion that, eliminatingdead skin, leaves you with a
shiny epidermis. If you know it' s our Pacman phone, you open

(34:38):
it, you put it in yourear and you talk. I serve the
grapefruit juice in a glass of Sandramiwine, next to the Panasonic toaster and
the Saltan coffee maker is the sterlingsilver cremine coffee maker. I' m
wearing an Alan Fluser suit today.It' s a' 80s suit.

(34:59):
The new version has widened the shoulders, enlarged the chest and girded the back.
The soft flaps are about 12 centimeterswide with the tips ending near the
hats. The idea of having anarrator, the self of the book that
spends time, scanning everything that surroundshim, listing the marks of all the

(35:20):
clothes, which he sees of allthe objects, from the candle on the
table to the fork, to thehandkerchief that protrudes from a pocket. That
' s all totally absurd. AthPoile is an attempt on his part to
denounce this hyper- consumerism, hyper- materialism, the rampant narcissism of our
society. Iron is a leading threadpresent throughout the book is not a stylistic

(35:44):
clumsiness. I imagine his editors forcedhim to purge him, to shorten him.
That had to be an endless battle. Pinfal Holloway, obviously Saic American
had been reviewed earlier by an editor, but not by me, not by

(36:04):
new I knew Brett was going througha difficult time. He had already gone
through that phase of editing before,although I do not know what suggestions had
been made to him. Jaser hadalready gone through all those stages of editing,
through all that well- established procedureuntil the choice of paper. I

(36:27):
had already been through all that andnow we had to start over and I
never published a book that had beenreviewed by another. I just hand over
definitive manuscripts. I' m notasking anyone for help. I' m
just handing over final versions. Ialways have. That' s how I
get to know Gelly. I can' t imagine your reaction after the first

(36:50):
reading. I' m sure hethought about what we' re going to
do with this and he went intohis head to check it out to turn
it into a novel for the public. But that wasn' t going to
happen in any way. When Iread your comments on the first twenty-
five or thirty pages, I thoughtabout what we' re going to do.

(37:17):
The idea was to publish it assoon as possible so that people could
read the book. So I tooka plane to speed things up a little
bit. NT Frinderman, a friendof mine got me a good deal at
the hotel to read so we coulddrive each other crazy without wasting too much

(37:40):
time. Gimme in Nstbox. Ialways work identifying the best parts and things
that can probably be improved. Bythe way. I always work that way,
box line. He was making hiscorrections and then I was checking them

(38:02):
out and undoing everything. He wasvery angry. We' re still like
this to the airport. Two weekslater he wrote me a letter telling me
in ten years you will feel ashamedof this book. I did my best
to help you. It' smy job. I think we could have
improved it for many to be theone who was right. They were the

(38:23):
same people who didn' t likethe book and those who still don'
t like it. They would certainlyhave preferred it if Gerriy had the last
word. But then it wouldn't have been my book. I'
m sorry, guys. That's not what I want to do.
This is what I want to doto me Tona was alins. The book

(38:52):
continued to sell well for a decade. Then the film came out and gave
him a second life. Or Christianbayle makes a memorable performance and the film
and he put a face on thecharacter. When I read the book,

(39:16):
I became furious, but still Icontinued, not out of obligation, but
because I could not believe what Iwas reading. When I went in half,
I thought it must necessarily have somemeaning. It has something that captivates
you very much to your regret andif you reach the end and tell yourself,
that it is unclean and completely emptyof meaning, then it is that

(39:38):
you too are that you have readit to the end. Director Mary Harron
told me that she had been proposedto lead an adaptation of the novel.
She warned me. I know you' re gonna hate him, but trust
me. I think we can turnit into a feminist satire, and I

(40:00):
realized I was right. With examinationI thought of my years at the university,
those groups of boys, those sororitywhere you only saw arrogance, all
those kids who only thought of money, convinced that they were the masters of
the world before can and surround allthose things that define what we call male

(40:21):
toxicity. I knew almost nothing aboutthe world described in the novel, however,
as a macho asshole. Of thatyes, 100% the summarizing liked
the film yes, I wrote thecriticism to guide, without I think it
has clarified the purpose of the book. He has made it clear that it

(40:44):
is a criticism of male behavior orsomething that many people had overlooked, especially
those who had not read the book. And it has also highlighted its humorous
side to many who were frightened bythe novel had not realized that it will
be numente. It' s acomedy. I think the initial misreading of
the book came from people who thoughthe was just talking about violence. But

(41:07):
the violence scenes in the book onlyoccupy four pages. The remaining three hundred
and ninety- six are ready andsocial satire. Patrick Pitman' s elucebrations
to me was never a book aboutviolence. The smell of blood floods my

(41:32):
dreams that are for the most partfrightening. A burning transatlantic, volcanic eruptions
in Hawaii, the violent death ofSolomon' s Brockers, James Robinson assaults
me. I' m back atschool. Then at Harvard, the dead
get up and walk among the living. My dreams are an endless succession of

(41:54):
car accidents and disaster scenes, ofelectric chairs and horrific suicides, of mutilated
syringes and pinnaps, of flying saucersand pretis. Tonelis is the great writer
of hallucinations, both of drug hallucinationsamong his characters, who are always between
two states, as well as hallucinationsin the perception of the world. The

(42:19):
moment you introduce the hallucination. Inthe book you introduce a constant device of
doubt that if someone sees the realitytransformed, what is its credibility. And
Baitman clearly suffers from hallucinations. Thereal summary of the book is not what
we often read the story of aBrocker who works at the Stock Exchange during

(42:40):
the day and who commits murders atnight. This is a book about someone
who is sick, who imagines thathe has committed murders, who may have
committed them. But really the soulof the book is the unspeakable thing happened.
This didn' t happen. Wecan read the book that way or
n i n or otherwise. Thatis precisely the object of literature. The

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unspeakable. I' ve never readanything like that before. It was the
first time in my life that Ihad found a book that, but that
I got rid of that seemed todo everything in its power for me to
surrender and as a reader, Iwas captivated by that inusuaiter experience among all

(43:30):
those endless lists that, from aliterary point of view, are perfectly consistent
with the meticulous descriptions of the mostbrutal scenes of torture and murder. You
could see what the author intended.That said, I never liked the book.
I never enjoyed it with him andI' m curious to know who

(43:53):
might like a novel. So,I wonder what pleasure you can feel reading
that book. A After discarding thefirst version, I wondered how I could
express, from a literary point ofview, the idea of insanity without having
to write with Patrick Batman. He' s going crazy, how to express

(44:14):
madness through style. I was veryinterested in that. It became an obsession
through repetition, hallucination, confusion amongthe characters, the fact that they could
not hear well what is said now, how to put all that on paper.

(44:37):
As a writer, I can reflectthe personality and sensitivity of a madman
and all that with the character's voice. And that was an exciting
exercise. And also how to makeboredom interesting. This is desirable. He

(44:57):
had to challenge the reader by offeringhim four endless graphs, describing the clothes.
The reader will read them or skipthose paragraphs. I was also interested
in that, but perhaps the passagewould have to be boring to the point
of forcing the reader to skip it. There are many things that interested me
in the writing of American Sychole.I was only twenty- five or twenty

(45:22):
- six years old and these arethings that would not interest me at all
today. But, well, shewas young and needed to take more risks.
I had all the attributes of ahuman being, the flesh, the
blood, the skin, the hair, but my depersonalization was so profound.

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I had come so far that theusual capacity to feel compassion had been annihilated,
erased, slowly and consciously, Iwas just an imitation, the gross
forgery of a human being. Who' s Patrick Batman. Evidently, as

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the title indicates, he must beplaced in the character of the psychopath.
In the nineteen- seventies we beganto identify a type of personality, not
a mental illness, but a typeof personality that met certain specific criteria.
The absence of emotion, the tendencyto impulsiveness, completely unbridled narcissism, the
inability to maintain sincere and honest socialrelations. It' s a very negative

(46:30):
portrait of a very disturbing character.One of the interesting effects of American Saiko
' s success is that he puton the map this relationship between the normal
world and the psychopath, which hasnot been stopped by justice, which evolves

(46:50):
freely in its surroundings, that is, in finance, in enterprise in general,
and also in politics. Fair enough. Psychopaths among the population are relatively
scarce we find between three and fivepercent in the business environment, they seem
to rise to ten and fifteen percentand increase as you climb the ladder of

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the hierarchy of arrival, suggesting thatwe live in a world and I believe
that is also one of the messagesof american Saico that is made in such
a way that favors and rewards somepsychopathic traits. Well, we' re

(47:40):
all a little complicit, because inreality, a psychopath can' t do
the damage he does if his environmentdoesn' t help him a little,
which helps if, otherwise, hecan' t easily integrate, easily go
unnoticed, easily hide his tracks andbasically enjoy a certain complicity, because people

(48:00):
don' t look the other wayor follow the game because it suits him
American Saicho is visionary in many ways. RuMP squite Trump occupies a special place
in the novel Representation. I thinkit represents the corruption and absurdity of the

(48:25):
American business world. Ston Maire Trump, Patrick Dayman seems to admire Trump a
lot, and that' s good. He says a lot about Donald Trump,
his biggest fan. He' sa serious killer. It' s
beg SPA. The money is good, Guay, the power of the white

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elite is good, but the minoritiesin which poor people are included, that
' s not so good. Wedon' t want it and the fractures
are much worse today than they werein American Chords times. A Brettis ton

(49:20):
Ellis has managed to capture phenomena thathave proven to be endemic in American society.
The excesses of capitalism, the relationsbetween men and women, between rich
and poor, between black and white, are the problems we face today.
In two thousand twenty- one theyhad their origin in the seeds that were
already germinating. In a thousand ninehundred and ninety- one and that Brettis

(49:47):
Tonelly knew how to see Amr apsychopathic America. The title is commercial,
of course, but denounces the problem. Our society is sick. It takes

(50:09):
the public many years to really understandits meaning. It became a cult novel
by its violent and bloody side,and even though readers were wrong, at
least that allowed the book to stayalive over time. People understood that it

(50:29):
was not a book about violence,although it contained violent scenes. It was
a book that described a rush thatwas rotting inside. Judith Martin, also
known as Miss Modales, welcome toour schedule when I' m working on

(50:55):
a book collects Dating and there wasone I loved that I was either sure
to use. She was a bitstrange about Miss Modales, a protocol expert,
and for some reason, the furtherthe book went, the more it
seemed to me that the quote madesense. He fit perfectly into the novel.

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Let us make the mistake of thinkingthat good manners only express happy ideas,
but with them many behaviors can beexpressed. That is the purpose of
civilization. Restrictions are necessary. Ifwe followed our impulses, we' d
kill each other. And it's true he' s right. I
don' t think she talks literallyabout murder, but about things like censorship

(51:38):
or media lynching. American Seico seemsto take place in an era of absolute
freedom compared to where we are now. I think if I wrote a novel
today, it would be much morecritical of society than American Cychrong v.

(52:00):
Such someone said that America in Saikoyhas become a respectable book. I guess
I meant that if you' restill here after thirty years, you become
a little respectable like an old prostitutewho, by virtue of being part of
the landscape and with age, endsup becoming respectable. But I don'
t care much about that. Tobe frank. I don' t pretend

(52:22):
to be respectable or look for mybooks to be considered respectable, but it
' s true that the novel takesa long time. Here we' ll
see how long it will last.Yes s