In May 1995, Sopa de Cabra offered three acoustic concerts in the La Planeta hall in Girona in collaboration with a young Cuban poet, Antoine López León, a fleeting appearance in the Girona cultural world who was much talked about for a few months , as he also participated in poetry recitals and prepared a theatrical monologue. “He was brilliant, dynamic and powerful, he dazzled everyone and we were like the curtains of his performances”, explains Gerard Quintana (Girona, 1964) to show the fascination that the character aroused, which abruptly disappeared when it was learned that the texts that he recited were not his and he had inflated his resume to leave the island. “He left the shoes I had given him at my door and nothing more was heard of him”, he continues, to add that the poet and theater director Antonio Sariego, one of those affected and who fulfilled some of the commitments acquired by López , “it was disappointing”.
The story stuck with Quintana so much that he needed to tell it, but he had to write it up to three times to get to the novel La puresa de l’engany (Columna), which goes far beyond the anecdote “It was a fraudulent relationship and no one wants to be cheated, and even though we assumed we collaborated, I’m proud of it, he was my hero, it seems like a legitimate lie to get out of prison of the island where he was”. He had been to Cuba a few years earlier, in 1992, and “what had seemed like a feat” then “was paradise turned into a prison” because, in the words of its protagonist, Claudi Careta, “every revolution is the seed of the next tyranny”.
In the novel, Careta is a second-rate film director who arrives with a girl on the Caribbean island and meets a series of characters, including a certain Antoine, also fascinating, who also does concerts with the He eats and he is also an impostor who leaves his shoes at the door, but “I only keep his name and little else”, says the author. The plot becomes much more complicated and delves into the personalities of the characters and especially into the darkness of Careta, “without judging him”.
He does this by pulling several threads, one of which is sexuality – “Claudi is a voyeur and she is an exhibitionist”, he says -, very important in the book and which the writer and musician also uses to denounce a failed sexual education: “Many men of my generation discovered sex by hooking up with their father, and in some places it is still like that and contributes to the objectification of women”, a fact that “is changing in form but is not resolved, anymore that many children now have porn as an initiation”. According to Quintana, “we still learn sex and love separately, it’s a big problem. The day we get them to move forward together, the world will be better.”
In any case, the author insists that he wanted to avoid the “exemplary novel, because there are already many of them”, and he tried to “model someone who is not me, to put myself inside this character who ‘cheat to get ahead, and do it without judgement’, alluding to the current cancellation culture.
For him, literature must also serve to question the world, one of the reasons why it deals with “the crisis of the family, which today is in doubt. I’m attracted to dynamiting this social nucleus”, among others by bringing up incest, a theme that has come out in his previous novels, as it also came out in Girona and the nineties. “I think it will be the last book with these references, the next one may be science fiction”, he concludes. At the moment, he feels “uninhibited and liberated, more comfortable and daring”, once he has “given up on satisfying everyone, and if they throw tomatoes at me, I’ll eat them”.
