And this year, the Planeta award has fallen to… Louisiana! There, in what is now the southeastern United States, when the Mississippi was Spanish, Far from Louisiana is set, the historical novel –traversed by a strong love story– with which the Aragonese Luz Gabás (Monzón, 1968) has won today, at a gala held at the MNAC, the million euros with which this award is endowed. The finalist was the Catalan Cristina Campos (Barcelona, ??1975), with the contemporary Historias de mujeres casadas.
The action of Far from Louisiana is set at the end of the 18th century, when this French colony passed into Spanish hands. Variegated mixture of races, languages ??and cultures, with three armies disputing it (those of the two countries mentioned and the English, sporadically supported by one or another tribe) coexistence there was difficult, despite which a love story blossoms between a Indian – son of a tribal chief – and a French subject. “The action transits between the Enlightenment and romanticism -Gabas detailed-, it has the part of logic but it also anticipates the next century, the XIX”.
Gabás is –as is the case with all the winners of this award in recent years– an author of notable commercial success. She graduated in English Philology, she was mayor of Benasque (of the PP but with the support of the PSOE) between 2011 and 2015, when she resigned her act as councilor after losing the elections. But she is, above all, known as a novelist, since the success of her first work, Palmeras en la nieve (2012), also a story set in an exotic Spanish colony, in this case the island of Fernando Poo (now Bioko), in Equatorial Guinea, in the mid-20th century, and which is inspired by the experience that Gabás’ father had working on the Sampaka cocoa farm. In fact, the author wrote it with the intention of transmitting her family memory to her children and it became an unexpected bestseller. A movie was made from the novel in 2015 starring Mario Casas and Adriana Ugarte.
Gabás, who lives in a town in the Huesca Pyrenees, set his second work, Back to Your Skin (2014), in that area, which focuses on the repression against witches in the 16th century, with brutal executions committed in this case by the inhabitants of the area, not by the Inquisition. Later, he traveled to the Carlist wars in Like fire in the ice (2017), another Pyrenean and love story located on both sides of the Pyrenees, with the description of the ‘thermal tourism’ that the European aristocracy carried out in some of those populations. With this work, starring the young Attua, she ended what she called “an emotional trilogy” that included “the exploration of my origins.” “I think that the landscape is very important – she explained – because it conditions your way of being. To the harshness of the land, the harshness of its people, accustomed to cold, to wolf nights. Mountain people do not speak, but they have feelings that are hidden and that fight to come out. Here it is rightly said that ‘don’t ask the mountain man, don’t give him’”. For Gabás, “the rural world generates insecurity, anguish and fear, as happens in cities, and life can be just as attractive in one place as in another.”
El latido de la tierra (2019) has another record, more of a noir novel, with crimes to solve, and is set in rural Spain in the 60s, 70s and 80s, when large areas of Aragon and Castile – the current Spain empty – suffered severe expropriations. “An empty town is a truncated story,” writes the author, whose protagonist, Alira, is torn between fidelity to tradition or new customs. “We look too much at the city –explained the author– but there are still people who feel the pulse of the countryside, Alira is one of them and she would like to keep alive the fire of a land that refuses to die”. This is a work with a generational soundtrack, since each chapter is accompanied by a musical proposal, with special attention to heavy metal, which Gabás herself is fond of, and songs by the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Los Suaves, Janis Joplin, David Bowie, Guns’n’Roses, Tears for Fears or even Lady Gaga.
For its part, the finalist work, by Cristina Campos, Stories of married women, has been awarded 200,000 euros and recounts the love and heartbreak troubles of three co-workers in the current era, especially that of the protagonist, Gabriela, a journalist who after twenty years of marriage finds herself in the unexpected situation of having a lover, which turns her life upside down. “She talks about the subtle world of female infidelity,” says the winner. The action takes place between Barcelona, ??Boston and Formentera. In the words of the jury, it is “a sociological treatise on sentimental relationships in this changing society.” Campos, with a degree in Humanities, works as a casting director and is married to the film director Jaume Balagueró. She made her debut in literature seven years ago, with lemon bread with poppy seeds, a play about two sisters separated in their youth who meet again in a town in Mallorca after having inherited a mill and a bakery from a woman they don’t think they know. . Each chapter of the novel – which was adapted to the cinema last year by Benito Zambrano – begins with a pastry recipe.
