I asked the director of APRIL, Álex Sàlmon, to give me the proper names of the authors that I have interviewed recently in the youngest of the Spanish literary supplements. He gave me the list, and finally added, generously and between interjections: “Good list!!!”. I felt, therefore, inclined to recover names, titles, references of each of them, which are here, underlined with the bold letters required by this commemorative occasion.
Sergio Ramírez entered the uncertainty of exile, and APRIL He sent me to interview him. One of his great stories is titled Don’t leave me alone. The occasion required a gloss on that verse of Cesar Vallejo which is now a lump in the throat of whoever reads it. Then APRIL He sent me to Álvaro Pombo’s motley house in Madrid. The man from Santander who lived in London, at the beginning of his journey through poetry which was followed by narrative, had published Santander (Anagrama), as if summarizing with melancholy and pain the war in his homeland, and he told me: “In Instead of an Our Father I have written a novel.”
Manuel Longares attended me at the old Café Gijón when he had published his strangest and most corrosive book, Scale social(Gutenberg Galaxy), which boils in the hands of reading. The author of Romance me said: “My silence is a rest.” I went to Barcelona in search of the peace of Valentí Puig, who had given us House divided (Destino), a diary that combines melancholy and anger because his country bears those dark fruits. He told me: “The ghosts of the 1930s returned to Catalonia.” By zoom I traveled to Brussels and from there Ángel Viñas, the historian of pain from Spain, told me that he had just published Oro, guerraydiplomacy (Criticism): “The right-wing parties are heirs of Francoism.”
Soledad Puértolas received me in her house with beautiful wall clocks and countless books, to talk about Quartet (Anagrama), his book of stories, a delicacy that made him say: “In life I perceive an immense void.” Antonio Soler had published The alligator’s dream(Galaxia Gutenberg) and gave me a headline that would later be something that many who know the current history of politics say: “It is a huge burden not to accept the Transition as good.”
Dario Villanueva, academic, contributor to this supplement, published in the same publishing house Powers of the word, one of the great books of the time, and it gave me this headline: “Since the Franco regime had a repressive police, now we have cancellation.” Julio Llamazares published Firefly (Alfaguara), in which sentiment and journalism go hand in hand. His way of seeing literature (now) has this reproach: “Literature has been trivialized: it seems that commercial success determines literary quality.”
APRIL I didn’t have to know that Cristina Fernández Cubas, who gave us her interview at the Majestic in Barcelona, was going to be awarded the National Literature Award. Huge joy. She told me, when she was not yet awarded: “When I write I am like in a state of introspection, of pause in life.” Marcos Giralt Torrente spoke to me, above all, about his son and the book that attracts him to this world, Some day I will be a memory (Anagram), and he left me this inscription: “Literature is born from conflict.”
Juan Gabriel Vásquez published last summer The translation of the world (Alfaguara). He will be Nobel, perhaps, an outlier. He told me regarding that excursion through the best foreign literature: “It is a cry of retrospective joy.” Salmon offered me the privilege of interviewing Idoia Moll, for the thirty years of her publishing house Alba de ella. She told me: “Thirty years of happiness… It is important to find balance.” [editorial] between the commercial and the literary.
Sergio del Molino (The violet hourAlfaguara, about the pain over the death of her son and the ten years that have passed) and Pilar Quintana (for The doga masterpiece, it seems to me, like Sergio’s, which also came out in the same publishing house) were the last commissions that the director of APRIL. I am very happy to have fulfilled.
2023-12-14 05:59:59
#books #Juan #Cruz
