Ignacio Solares

Who is Ignacio Solares?

Ignacio Solares is a prominent Mexican novelist, editor and playwright, whose novel La invasion was a bestseller in Mexico and Spain. Until 2005 he served as the Coordinator of Cultural Activities for Literature and Arts at the National Autonomous University of Mexico; he is once again a faculty member there and directs the cultural magazine Revista de la Universidad de México. He formerly served as director of the Department of Theater and Dance and the Division of Literature at UNAM. He also edits the cultural supplement to the weekly magazine Siempre.

Solares is known for mystical occurrences and “dislocations of reality” in his fiction. In Anonimo, a work that has been compared to Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” for its protagonist’s metamorphosis into another person, we see Solares’ rejection of much organized religion, but his simultaneous search for the transcendent and religious on the borders of human experience. He has written, “I believe in every possible manifestation of spiritual strangeness. I believe in all possible escapes. The only thing I cannot endure is reality, whatever it may be. I believe that the writer is defined by the constant necessity of creating a world, to depart from this world. Literature is more concerned with misery than with happiness. Writing is directly related to frustration. It is a reflection of personal desperation. The writer is profoundly disgusted with his reality.”