“Committing suicide can take a lifetime,” the narrator of the novel by Eider Rodríguez, who is also called Eider, and presumably Rodríguez, points out to herself. In Construction Material (Random House / Periscopi), the author (Errenteria, 1977) puts on forensic gloves and analyzes her relationship with her father, who died of complications derived from his long alcoholism shortly before start writing this book.
The storyteller, who dazzled with her collection of stories A Heart Too Big (Random House, 2019) goes to the long format with a book that, she insists, is a novel and not autofiction or testimony. He has followed his usual procedure: writing in Basque – he defends broken Basque, a dirty and contaminated literary language – and later translating into Spanish with his partner, the writer Lander Garro (Pau Joan Hernàndez translates into Catalan), although this time the process It has been much harder for him, because giving them back their original language meant turning those two characters, the alcoholic father, the mother who takes an inventory of drunkenness, into people again.
The book will not have been easy to write. At what point was it imposed on you?
I finished writing a story and I was going to start with another one that I had thought of and could not. I didn’t have the energy or emotion I needed. That which leads me to write, the hunch, the impulse, I was going to write about my father. One day, talking to my editor, I told her and she told me to keep going. Like when you go to the doctor, they tell you what you have and you are cured. That’s when I realized that he already had many things written. I always record things in notebooks and I had already noted a lot about this. The next day I made a map on a cork and there I already saw that it was not going to be a short story. I got excited and thought about all the things I wanted to tell and hadn’t told. I was also aware of echoes in my stories.
Things that he had not even told his closest friends, as the narrator says at one point in the book.
Even my partner told me reading the book, or my sister. In fact, these are things that I did not know. I had tiptoed through those things, anecdotes, feelings, and the writing process materialized them.
In the book, the sister is “protected” by disappearing from the book, but the mother is not. The mother is there and her role is very important.
This book has several layers and one of them is the most novel. There I was very clear that I was going to use characters, and that is why it is a novel. And it is not a testimony, nor an autobiography. From the moment I decide that I feel comfortable with the theme of the novel, I decide who I turn into characters and who I don’t. The decision not to include my sister is a form of protection and care, but it also has a reason for literary content. I didn’t want a character out there hanging around. It is a drastic decision. And the same with the character of the mother, the mother had to be there having that dialogue with her father. In addition, it helps me to give a counterpoint of caustic humor.
The relationship between the father and the mother is one of codependency.
Totally.
And she does the counting, she is like a notary of her husband’s alcoholism.
We always talk about gaslighting when we talk about couples, but gaslighting also happens here. The girl also works as a notary: the father is drunk, he has fallen, he does not speak. She is one of the father’s legal guardians.
Alcohol literature has been romanticized: the serum of truth, the poet’s ink.
I hate all that. I loved the book Another Shitty Night in This Fucking Town (Anagram) by Nick Flynn. On the other hand, I didn’t like Sarah Hepola’s [Lagoons, Pumpkin Seeds]. The final part seemed horrifying to me, when she converts to Christianity. Alcohol cannot lead you to create something good. I am a great admirer of Marguerite Duras and her best book is The Lover and if that book could come to fruition it is because she wrote it when she stopped seeing, when she was in her seventies. It is the book that shines the most and in which all her potential is found.
In his book he cannot be less romantic. The drunk man falls, he pisses himself.
I believe neither in the alcoholic genius nor in the clairvoyant drunkard. I do believe that through alcohol you can get to situations that you wouldn’t otherwise. It can be interesting, like the other drugs, but you have no control. And alcohol is not a magician that takes you to a special place. Besides, the figure of the suffering writer is something I hate too. Those of us who write do so because we have a pain inside, but I don’t think we have to feed that pain.
What has been your own relationship with alcohol?
A quite natural relationship. I like to drink and get drunk and have a good time. I do not practice it so much. I did have a time in my thirties when alcohol made me feel terrible and it may have to do with heredity, not so much genetics as psychological. He didn’t take it well. I started writing and taking notes about it and it got better. On a daily basis I don’t drink but I have a correct relationship.
He does a brilliant portrait of the middle class and what it means. No two ways of being middle class are the same.
This has not been a reflective book at all, contrary to my stories, for which I make plans, rundowns, this one barely had prior reflection. So I didn’t set out to talk about the class, which is a topic that interests me a lot, but it came up. It often happens to me that when I hear about the class, I don’t know what is being talked about. I was interested in the part in which the daughter tries to declassify herself through literature, not because she doesn’t want to belong to that working-class environment, but because she finds that it is the only way to romanticize and to be able to talk about the subject of decadence. . She is a girl that she does not know how to do except read. She is envious of people who dance, who paint, who create things, who can be poor, dirty or crazy, but in an assimilated way. She aspires to it. She begins to write and believes that she is going to move away through literature. She starts reading dirty dramas, and she sees how that pain becomes more social, a more collectivized pain. And she realizes where she comes from, she becomes aware of her own class and the whys of her own class by reading There are so many ways to be middle class!
This family, which runs a building materials store, has many opinions regarding houses, for example. Jacuzzi bad, tiled good. It is their way of judging how others live.
This is how the middle class is built, based on those trifles that differentiate you and that make you feel good. We are that absurd.
The question of language is closely related. In some way, the Basque language is a class signifier in the eighties in Errenteria. Those parents who have lost their language and who do not understand their daughters or their own parents are striking.
Yes, there is a class issue. My grandparents speak Basque, my father doesn’t speak Basque, my maternal grandparents are from Burgos so they didn’t experience that break, but in my father’s case they did. I speak Basque with my paternal grandparents, but my father lost it. My sister and I were given names in Basque aspirationally, because they wanted their daughters to speak the language, they enrolled us in an ikastola. For my mother, her way of being from Errenteria, even though she was born there, happened because her daughters spoke Basque. The handicap of the ikastola is that when her daughters speak Basque, they do not understand them. They have always promoted readings, theater. They think they like Benito Lertxundi because they have to like him, a guy who sings in a transcendental way. They know what they have to like.
In the end, for a generation it was a way to differentiate and declassify oneself, but the opposite happens to me. When I become aware of why my parents do not speak Basque, I also become aware of class, where we come from, why my parents have lost their Basque…one of my personal struggles is broken Basque, I love that Basque is spoken dirty. I don’t have a gift for the language, I don’t speak a clean and pure Basque. My tongue is not bright and I like that. It is my literary language and when I started writing I was looking for an elevated Basque and I am looking for it less and less, I am looking for an earthy and uncomplexed, contaminated language.
You always write in Basque and co-translate into Spanish. Other authors who have done the same, like Katixa Agirre, say they don’t have a good time with the translation…
Until now I had boasted that it was joyful for me to translate, that I did it almost simultaneously. But translating this book has been hell. Also because of the content, because I break the distance imposed by the Basque language to talk about people turned into characters with dialogues that would not have existed as is in real life. Male writers, above all, say these things, that “I haven’t slept for seven years.” I hate that. If you’ve been doing that, it’s because someone has made your food and bought it for you, but it really has been horrible. Search for the words that those people would have said and the artifice vanishes.
In recent months, several books that problematize the family have coincided, all by writers who share generational coordinates. Those of Sara Mesa, Aixa de la Cruz, Lara Moreno…
I don’t think it’s a coincidence and I love the books you mention. I really liked the one in Sara Mesa and the one in Aixa de la Cruz. Feminism has given us collective permission to talk about issues that were considered minor, residual, peripheral. Now we are sparking those themes that were already in masculine literature but were not conceptualized that way because they reflect power relations, class relations. For me the family works like a state, that’s why there is a Constitution in my book. It allows you to talk about a world. I don’t think it’s a coincidence and it has been feminism that has promoted it and that is why it is no coincidence that we are the authors who are doing it. Then Philip Roth writes a family saga and no one says he’s talking about family, they tell you he’s talking about New Jersey or whatever. We also talk about the things that Roth talks about. It is also important to dersomantize the family, because there is a tendency to romanticize it. You go from romanticizing family or motherhood to doing almost the opposite and that doesn’t interest me either.
If the family is a state, it is an undemocratic one.
Totally tyrannical. With their customs, dances and their own language, the familiar lexicon that Natalia Ginzburg speaks of. I am interested in seeing with which flag each family goes out into the world.
In the book the theme of violence in the Basque country is present in the background. And the violence appears almost as eroticizing, which is something Eva Illouz talks about in the Israeli context. How those contexts generate a part of erotic discharge.
I was interested in talking about something intimate but with a social context. When I read Annie Ernaux I love it, but what interests me the most is where her stories take place, where she comes from. I wanted this to happen where it actually happened. All this part of the violence has an eroticization. I have tried to tell that in a natural way, without judgments, without deciding whether or not it goes with my ideology. Violence was part of the landscape, of the adventure. Why are we going to watch TV, if all these things are happening looking through the window, if the PSOE headquarters have been set on fire again, how is it told in the book.
There is a certain pride in an ETA cousin that the family fails to catch.
There is another cousin in jail, they always talked about him. It was part of the landscape. Errenteria has been a very hostile place to live, due to the issue of heroin, a lot of consumption and many junkies on the street, and due to the issue of the Basque conflict. Five days before I was born, the national police killed five protesters in Errenteria. We live it. You went to a bar to a concert and you heard: “Today there is a demonstration, we better go elsewhere.”
What was your political socialization?
I come from reading the books of the Circle of readers, because my mother was a subscriber. Then I became a subscriber to the Txalaparta publishing house. There I read about the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships…they published Indonesian literature, the tetralogy of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, things that today would be published by a super gourmet publishing house. Or Mia Couto, a lot of African and Latin American literature. My political socialization is done like this. I understand that I live in a world in conflict and that the country in which I live is also in conflict and I position myself on the left. I was shaped by these readings. He saw the Basque people as a people with the right of self-determination. This editorial has an encyclopedia on the Civil War and I place the conflict in that continuum, of winners and losers.