Dolores Redondo, the acclaimed author of the Baztán Trilogy, does not hesitate for a moment. Pequeño teatro, the novel with which Ana María Matute won the third edition of the Planeta prize, is her bedside book. And for different reasons.
“This novel marked me for its hardness, because I was not afraid to talk about the dirty things in life, about the sordid parts and how sometimes we are attracted to that part,” he explains in the podcast Los libros secretos. “It has those elements for which they told me that the Baztán Trilogy was not going to work: a small town, a very traditional life, words in Basque…”, he adds.
The writer, who has just published Waiting for the Flood, also explains how this work by Matute helped her to make peace with the place where she was born, Pasajes, a town on the coast of Guipúzcoa, located a few kilometers from San Sebastián.
“I hated it because it was linked to the effort, it was ugly, polluted, it smelled bad, it was full of rude and crude people who worked very hard,” he confesses. And he continues recounting: “With Pequeño teatro I understood that a great novel could be written in a place that at some point I had hated and came to love, as has happened to me over time, and that it had not been a misfortune to have been born there”.
Another aspect that unites her with Ana María Matute’s debut feature is the initial rejection that the novel aroused in publishers, a situation that she experienced so many times. “At different times in my life, when I was rejected, I identified with this story. Publishers told me it wasn’t going to work, and I thought they hadn’t read Little Theatre.”
The referent of the Spanish black novel also tells in the podcast how she got to know Matute in person, a woman who “left her mark” and who had to “fight a battle against the terrible label of women’s or feminine literature, when she was capable of writing very hard things typical of someone with a heart hardened in a thousand battles”.
Redondo, who explains that she has ruled out different proposals to be an opinion-maker, reveals that her latest book “is the tip of the iceberg of a project that includes more than one novel.”
The cultural podcast Los libros secretas can also be listened to and followed on audio platforms such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts, among others.
