He would have been about 13 years old when he imagined the world of Odum. At the time it was just a dream, but from that germ, matured over the next two decades, E l mundo secreto de Árbal, published by Código Rojo, was born. Elena Furiase (Madrid, 1988) has just published her first novel and the day she sat down to sign at the Madrid Book Fair reveals that she was on the verge of hysteria. Actress, daughter of Lolita and Guillermo Furiase, she was raised in an environment of freedom and creativity. So, one day he decided that the time had come to dare: “I always had rum-rum in my head, because I had been writing things for a long time. I think I decided it one day when I was thinking about the comings and goings of our profession. I thought why not post, why feel shame.” When they are older, Noah and Nala, the children she has with Gonzalo, will be her biggest fans.
The protagonist of this immersion in a fantastic world is Sara, a young girl of the same age as Elena was when she created her in her mind. In this story we will see very diverse characters, chosen expressly: “I tried to do a bit of social inclusion. Now that we are celebrating Pride, I will explain to you that one of the characters could be said to belong to the LGTBI group, and if it is inferred but not said in an open way, it is precisely because it is not necessary. It is about naturalizing what is natural. There’s also a warrior, a voluptuous woman, fat and strong, very, very beautiful: I want kids to see beauty in not-so-normative bodies. And the warriors are racialized”. The book is illustrated by Celia Gómez, a schoolmate and whom life wanted to bring back together, and her mother-in-law was the first person to read the draft: “She is a well-read woman, I trust a lot of her, of her judgment, and even though fantasy is not her favorite genre, she stuck to it, and that gave me a lot of strength to continue.”
We can see the actress every afternoon in the series Mía es la venganza, in which she plays a blind physiotherapist. As in his book, this fiction puts on the table current issues and with a background message: “We try to say and do things – within the limits of our characters – that somehow influence people’s lives and we send a positive message when we talk about the body itself, about blindness, about immigration”.
With this sensitivity, it is logical that the clouds of social regression that threaten on the horizon the rights of those who these days celebrate the most vindictive Pride in recent years: “I just hope that everything we have achieved is not in vain Bye now. I’ve always been brought up to understand all kinds of ways to love each other: no one is a rare beast and you don’t have to say that ‘I have a gay friend’. I have a friend, that’s it. Loving each other is a human right and if things are done with love, nothing can go wrong.”
