At the age of eighty, John Irving assures that he does not have much left to write and is convinced that The Last Telesilla (Tusquets, Edicions 62 in Catalan) will be his last long novel, since it is around a thousand pages – 1056 in the Spanish edition. , 960 in Catalan. “It is not a farewell at all, I have 14 chapters of a novel and I work every day all day, I hope to publish two or three more,” says the author by videoconference. “It’s the last of the long ones, but I have no intention of stopping,” he insists.
His new book traces a fresco through the American 20th century based on the life of Adam Brewster, who narrates it in the first person. Her mother, a skier who did not become a professional competitor but was a ski instructor in Alpen, where he was conceived when she was 18 years old. Adam, now in his eighties, moves into the same Jerome hotel, where he encounters ghosts he does not expect. “Ghosts are the furthest I can go in the so-called spiritual world. I am not religious or a believer, but ghosts have credibility. Rational people, who I don’t think are capable of seeing them, have had experiences related to them, and I am very disappointed not to have had any, and I have been going to the Jerome Hotel for years, but I have never seen the ghosts that others see. I tried, but they didn’t appear,” Irving confesses, and remembers that there have already been ghosts in his other novels.
For Irving, in fact, “that’s what The Last Chairlift is about, it’s written from the perspective of someone who will be rewarded with seeing his mother and her husband as ghosts, because he misses them when they are no longer there.”
The novel also pays homage to some of his favorite writers, especially Herman Melville – Adam’s grandmother read the entire Moby Dick in his childhood, and he often returns to the book – and Charles Dickens. “They are the influences that I had at the age of 15 or 17, when I first imagined myself as a writer, a novelist who created a certain type of narrative driven by the characters and the action towards an end, which came to me directly from Melville. These old-fashioned models were in my head when I was still a teenager, they were the writers I wanted to imitate, not contemporaries, and my literary tastes have not changed. Irving goes further and assures that “I would never have imagined that this would make me famous, and if I had chosen other models like Hemingway, Faulkner or Fitzgerald, perhaps I wouldn’t even be a writer.” “Success for me was like a luxury, because my expectation was that it would be totally ignored,” he notes.
Like his narrator, Irving defines himself as a mediocre skier – although he and his family have often practiced this sport and two of his grandchildren are even part of the American acrobatic skiing team – he has studied at the same university under the wrestling program and being cis heterosexual is an ally of the LGTBI community. That is also why the book is a denunciation: “If women’s rights are treated as if they were a minority, how will LGTBI people be treated? That has always mattered to me,” explains the writer, with two homosexual brothers and a trans daughter. “Fascism is back, but the problem is not just Trump, because the people who support him have always been there and now they have a spokesperson,” he says. “The US is more divided and polarized than during the Vietnam War.”
