He sits on the couch in his spacious uptown apartment. Serves two coffees. Liven up yours with a little whiskey. Enrique Vila-Matas knows that the confession will be difficult.
Why did you start inventing interviews?
Because of fear. Or if you prefer, out of necessity. I was afraid they would fire me. It’s a fear I’ve had all my life.
When did you publish your first attempted interview?
He was 20 years old. She had gotten a position at Fotogramas and they asked me to translate from English an interview with Marlon Brando that the magazine had bought. I didn’t know English. So I made it up. It turned out pretty good.
Did you ever publish the real interview?
About 12 years later, I wanted to publish the real interview in Zine magazine. But I invented it again. In fact, I decided to write a fake interview with Brando every ten years. But I couldn’t achieve that goal.
You learned English, why did you continue inventing interviews with other personalities?
For necessity. He had arranged to meet Rudolf Nureyev one morning to interview him. The night before I went out for drinks and, somehow, I got involved in a fight and got my face smashed. I couldn’t appear before the dancer with that appearance, so I tried the interview.
Did no one notice that you were a fraud as an interviewer?
I came out quite successfully, although I realized that I had gone too far the day I heard Terenci Moix say to Jaime Gil de Biedma: “Have you seen what nonsense Nuréyev says in this interview?”
Are you aware that when this confession is published there will be a big stir?
I think you are late. The thing about my invented interviews is an open secret that, now, has become a book, Eight Invented Interviews (H
This made-up interview may contain a lot of reality. The same thing happens to the literature of Ignacio Orovio, which lives between memory and fiction. The La Vanguardia journalist has just published Los inculpados (La Esfera de los Libros). On March 11, 2004, Orovio received a call from his partner Dagoberto Escorcia at 7:45 in the morning: “Something big has happened in Atocha.”
“As I lived in Lavapiés, very close to the station, I went there and managed to reach the damaged trains. I still see recurring images from that morning like that of a man who was having a heart massage. I walked away for a moment because another colleague, Francesc Peirón, called me, and when I came back, the body was covered with a blanket, it really shocked me.” , the journalist and writer said on Wednesday at the Fnac de L’Illa where he presented Los inculpados in a talk with his friend Llofre Llombart.
Those recurring memories, the subsequent investigation, the 11-M trial, which Orovio covered for La Vanguardia, and a good dose of imagination have resulted, 20 years later, in this book that is as entertaining as it is unclassifiable. The Accused is a crime novel, it is a history novel, it is a journalistic chronicle and it is the memories of how the author lived those days at work. “I don’t know which shelf the bookstores are going to put it on, maybe they have to invent a new section,” Orovio joked.
And the work takes place through the realm of fiction through a character – who “is a mix of three or four real people that I met” –, a Moroccan who suspects that his friend and roommate may be one of the perpetrators of the attacks. And in parallel, he advances along the path of reality through the day-to-day work of a newspaper that has to tell one of the most shocking news of recent years.
Truth and fiction were also the sources of the work of Teresa Pàmies (1919-2012), who “mixed genres and invented from the foundations of extreme experiences she had gone through,” as explained by Montserrat Bacardí on Monday at the Finestres bookstore. accompanied by Sergi Pàmies, son of the author.
Bacardí has ??published La veritat literària de Teresa Pàmies (Eumo), a biography of the writer who lived in exile in France, was imprisoned during the Nazi occupation, continued her exodus through Santo Domingo, Cuba, Mexico, Serbia and Czechoslovakia and, while caring for of his children, he also wrote. She published her first book at the age of 51, already in the 70s back in Barcelona.
And meanwhile, where was her husband, Gregorio López Raimundo? “My father was making the revolution, he spent time in Spain and then returned to France where he was also clandestine. At home we joked about Dad’s revolution, because what we saw was that Santiago Carrillo came to visit and the two of them locked themselves in a room to smoke,” explained Sergi Pàmies.
