the friendship between a boy and a girl, he from the city and she from the village, in a retrofuturistic environment: many elements refer to the eighties, such as a mysterious epidemic, and others that are between the present and the future, such as the severe drought causing massive fires and the accelerated extinction of many species in a world that is ending. It is the starting point of Ofert a les mans, el paradís crema (Anagrama), the second novel by Pol Guasch (Tarragona, 1997), which arrives in bookstores on Wednesday, then two books of award-winning poems (Francesc Garriga awards and López-Picó), and the Anagrama award for the great success of Napalm al Chor, with a play included and a handful of translations.
What was the main challenge when writing? Did you feel pressure from the reception you’ve had so far?
No pressure, not at all, because I wrote it right after finishing Napalm…, before publishing it; I’m always writing even if it’s in thought. The main challenge was to fit the pieces and make the puzzle work, because it is a fragmentary novel, with very diverse points of view, like a patchwork of memories, from different characters and voices.
It uses very diverse forms, with time and spaces up and down…
When I start writing I never think that I will write something from beginning to end with a single point of view. It’s not that I feel like exploring, it’s that if it’s not playing I don’t understand the task of writing.
As in the work of Clarice Lispector, a writer she admires, the plot is not the most important thing…
When she was little, Lispector wrote stories that she sent to magazines to be published and they didn’t and she said it was because “I don’t write stories, I write sensations”. My goal is not to tell a story, it is to create a space, a world, an atmosphere, and convey a feeling. It is one of the few things I am clear about when I write.
In the new book there is a mysterious epidemic that only affects homosexuals, it is very reminiscent of AIDS, and portrays the present homophobia.
I really wanted to explore how the AIDS legacy of the 1980s was still beating today in a form of contemporary queer relationality. It wasn’t about proving the validity of homophobia, but asking about how a community lives through a memory of something that didn’t live but was very strong. It was one of the questions that led me to writing.
He does so by talking about the relationship between Líton and Rita.
I really wanted to ask myself about this other type of relationship about which we have very few references, a very poor imagination. We know what lovers do, what people who love each other do romantically, but what do friends do? In addition, friendship and illness are intertwined, it was seen in the eighties: when doctors, experts or scientists turned their backs on them, those who stood by many sick people were friends, like the lesbian friends who donating blood to boys with AIDS, which was, without romanticizing it, a reality of how friendship can save. Friendship saves in a context in which inhabiting the world is difficult. Having friends is often the solution to pain, or a way to ease it. Also, the boundaries between friendship and love are not at all obvious.
They are two completely different characters.
I really like writing characters who haven’t bought the story of what it means to live, who still have the possibility to understand and read the world in their own way. I have the feeling that every time I start to write I am rediscovering something of the world.
Here, of the world and of friendship.
Friendship or relationships, love, esteem, are not so much about what bond you and I have and what you and I are together, but about what we choose to look at the world together, what we choose to point to and towards where we look and where we go together.
They are very good friends but they also stop seeing each other for a few years…
They discover that friendship is not an unconditional bond. We have always thought of friendship in paradoxically very romantic terms, as if it were not also a negotiation between two people who need something from each other, but it is also based on necessity, selfishness, salvation, and many times friendship is a disguise to forget that we are alone.
Rita wonders if anyone will remember them.
Writing can try to capture all the intangible worlds that remain in relationships, that remain in things and that we are not able to see, that we are not able to witness. I wanted to write a book about two people who love each other, who are able, with their relationship and their love, to build a whole world of which there is no sign or trace left, and I think that maybe this is the thing more beautiful to love, the ability to be able to generate something that only you and I will witness.
Art allows us to glimpse it.
Yes, and at the same time with an inevitable feeling of betrayal, of putting words to something that doesn’t have them and that maybe doesn’t need them, that works with other languages, and maybe for me one of the challenges of writing this novel was looking for the languages ??to trace the outline of this relationship without having to describe it. That is why there is so much talk about looks and memories. Because we can never talk about friendship and love in the abstract, we can only talk about the most concrete particularity. The challenge was how to trace its contours so that the reader could see the magic of this relationship, what it contained and why it was special. This is also why there is the party scene, in which everything is constructed outside of language, in a space, in a time, suspended, non-existent, and everything is constructed through looks… and this is also why the center of the novel.
The book includes a postcard that is described in an entire chapter.
I am a deeply forgetful person, and when I think about my life I never think about facts, I always think about sensations and abstract memories, what I have felt and what made me feel things. A whole life is narrated through the Líton objects, and I did it precisely because I had the feeling that there were many moments of abstraction in the novel, and thinking about what will be left of us I also wanted to focus on how, through a few objects, you can narrate a person’s life.
The whole novel in one picture.
Yes, but maybe the question he was asking me was about how we leave traces in the things we do and in the things we live, that behind everything in the world there is a story. But the almost mythical characters of the old women tell Rita that behind every stone, behind everything, there is a life.
The old women are among the three weavers of the thread of life and the three witches of Macbeth.
Yes exact. To me, they have the function of the Greek chorus, which is out of time. And they are the voice of a whole past that no longer exists, the encounter between the present of these characters, Líton and Rita, and their desires for the future, but at the same time, all the weight of the past that they no longer have have met And for me, bringing these two worlds together was a very powerful encounter. What happens when you put together this world that also has a special way of pointing to things and the world with another world that points to the world in a different way? What happens when these two worlds meet?
Right from the start we know that Líton is dead. Is death less and less taboo?
The theme of death that came up a lot in Napalm…, and in my novels I don’t bring up death as a theme, it just comes up. He doesn’t respect me. Maybe because of how I’ve lived it in my life, maybe because of how I’ve thought about it, beyond writing, but I live it as something very natural, very obvious. Maybe it’s something that has always been very present in my biography, and therefore I treat it the same as other things. It would be very strange for me to write a novel in which one of the things that constantly crosses our day to day does not appear, it is obvious.
But it’s taboo.
Yes, but when I start writing I don’t ask myself which topics are taboo to discuss, maybe I do it from the unconsciousness that involves writing for myself sometimes, right? It is as obvious and as clear as it is obvious to me that in a book that talks about life, death must be present, and not from a dramatic place, not from an ending place, but from a place where many things can be said, from where an entire life can be reviewed.
Let’s hope that the current drought is not as extreme as in the book, with the fire that destroys everything…
On the one hand there is the fear of the end, obviously, of the end of a world, not of the world, because I think that one thing we see in this novel is that the end of the world, as we we imagine, it will not be as we have been led to believe. And the endings do not have to do with definitive endings, but with much slower losses, they are assumed little by little. I really wanted to write about what happens when the world we imagined, the one I lived in as a child, disappears. Will we wish the same, will we dance, will we go out partying? I don’t know if I would talk about eco-anxiety, but I do think of a pain that has to do with what happens when the world you’ve known disappears, or the world you promised yourself is no longer there. These characters are deeply melancholic because they have within them the inheritance or a story or narratives about a world that they no longer live in, about a world that they no longer have. And I think the end of the world will be much more sad and melancholic than chaotic and tragic. I have this feeling.
But there is always a mythical past to which we can never return.
But it also raises the end of a landscape, in the case of this novel, it is also a symbol or allegory or parallel to what you are commenting on now, precisely. And I think it’s something that’s going through me a lot right now, and it’s the end of a stage.
“That life was serious”, says Gil de Biedma.
For me the book functions as the end of a landscape, a world, a life, but it is also about the moment when one comes face to face with the breach of the promise made to him . I mean, in the end, the book is the failure of a promise or the realization that the promise you had received will not be fulfilled. And therefore, the world ends here too. And the world does not end like with an explosion or like Black Mirror, nor a nuclear bomb nor the third world war. The world is ending because you have built your entire future based on a promise that was made to you, that you believed in and that you fought for. And I think that something happens to the characters in this novel that happens to me too and I think it happens to a lot of people around me, that you need to become aware that the promise you had received, the ideal about the which you had built your future, does not exist. And this should not be interpreted as a generational issue. It’s a process of becoming aware of the loss, the naive, the disappointment… I don’t want to be hopeless, because I’m an optimistic person who has a lot of hope, every day of life is a wonderful day, but it’s also a day of becoming aware that everything that could be has not been. And for me the novel wanted to capture that, which maybe it’s not because you haven’t done enough, maybe all that hasn’t been because there’s a whole series of things that haven’t worked.
