Does not reach the 30. You live in a pisazo next to the National Audience, in Madrid. It doesn’t work. You do not have money problems. Read Rimbaud and Baudelaire. And stroll. Walking around the city, mainly at night. Stroll along the calle Genova, paseo de Recoletos, for Malasaña, calle Ponzano, in the neighborhood of Chueca. Stroll through the center, the periphery is not interested. Wander because it has nothing to do, because you don’t know what else to do with his life, and because while walking think about a old love that, of course, lives in Paris. Obviously, the author is not Robert Walser’s not talk about his work The Ridethat great metaphor of the ride as the life, as “something indispensable to maintain the contact with the living world”, as explained by the own Walser. Because in Good night (Circle of Chalk), the first novel of Santiago Islandthe protagonist walking through the city but look at everything from the pride, distance, and indifference. No wonder, there is no discovery. The protagonist of the Island has no name, is a dilettante who sees himself as one of those flâneur (walkers) French of the NINETEENTH century, and cultivated the image of a writer cursed and “existentialist prêt-à-porter” while trying to write a novel.
Santiago Island has 25 years, is a musician, has a band called Chelsea Boots, working in a telecommunications company and is son of Pablo Isla, president of Inditex. Good night it is his first novel. He explains, “the character has some things in common with me, there’s no doubt, but there are many others in which we have nothing to do; in fact, it is a caricature that could be done myself. I’m not a writer, damn, work, I do not sleep on the laurels, and I don’t recess as much nor in my stories or in my own fascination”.
Island opens the novel with a quote from Pedro Salinas, that identifies it as one of the major reference that has taken the time to write this story, and says that his interest in literature is earlier than the music, “I’ve always read a lot and I’ve always liked to write.” Your character says, in one of his walks, that writing is a profession punk, that’s why only write to the gentleman or the crazy. The author is placed on the first side, “crazy I don’t have much,” and considers that “living from the literature it is almost impossible, I think that it is more difficult to make a living from music and that’s why the character makes that reflection, because only you can allow people who are very pirada, or who has no need to make a living from it”.
The pijerío is a little traditional and own that it is in Spain, those that maintain the customs that have died in the other houses: the hunting, the bulls, the requested handsays the protagonist of Good Night. Island portrays the pijerío madrid, to “the that in Hello! call the puppies of the jet”, -“a holder quite nauseous,” says the author – and speaking of influencers as Mary Pombo or describes one such set of long that only celebrates “the creampie” social in a castle in the sierra of Madrid, in which he slept Franco. “In my personal life I haven’t been to anything that kind of existence and I move a lot for these circles, but I know and the character, which has an existence quite outside of all, too deep in itself, when it wanders through this little world, knows who belongs to him in some way and, on the other hand, gives you rage and laziness,” explains Island.
On the absence of tenderness in the gaze of the protagonist, who observes the world from the trial permanent and the indifference, the author agrees that his character “is a person who is very obsessive, cynical and very self-centered and everything that is not part of your fantasies will seem minor and irrelevant and I wanted to move that way of understanding things and the world, to be clear the distance between their fantasies and the real people, what you see as something minor.” Your protagonist is not pringa, not dirty, living in the estrangement and the distance continued, as if paseara only to see himself walk: “it Is in his watchtower, but he also feels miserable, it is a portrait of a type of people who do not mix, that you feel bad about yourself and looking the other over his shoulder.”
All the women I know to little, I seem to be light, perhaps a little silly, perhaps a little dry, perhaps too eager to please or be fascinated… he says his character that go a misanthrope, borders on misogyny: “All people give the same, except for one woman who he adores and idolizes, and who was in love with, and all the others who do not belong to that fantasy that has been mounted in its head, will seem negligible. And it is true that in his relationship with women looks over shoulder, looks on from above, and has such a vision that, put into perspective, it is not very nice.”
Island also “shoots” against the poets of bar in one of his portraits of the nocturnal wildlife of the city: “they are on the limit always of the beauty and the shame of others, the character gets into a bar and sees that people declaiming his poems and gives you shame others; he messes with the poets of the fly, that type of poets very babosos, who tend to be men, give you rabies and you’re not interested in anything.”
What rage, dreaming of a writer cursed and have been for manners of after work snacksthe character says of Good Night. “I will keep on writing, yes,” says Santiago Island.
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