Juan Villoro is a prolific writer. He has published dozens of works that cover all literary and journalistic genres except poetry. His pen is so fertile that since 2020 he has released one title per year.
Villoro is a writer-thinker because he achieves a good balance between narrative action and the ideas that settle it and make it grow. He is also a writer curious about the world around him. Everything interests him. There is no event that is not relevant to you, that does not imply a contribution of knowledge and wisdom.
During all these years of his literary and journalistic career, Juan’s father, Luis Villoro, exerted a great intellectual influence on him. He was a renowned philosopher, the first to pay academic attention to deep Mexico and the indigenous people who inhabit it, people mistreated by history and who continue to be marginalized in a country that proudly claims its pre-Hispanic past.
This is a contradiction, perhaps the deepest, of contemporary Mexico.
Luis Villoro passed away in 2014 and Juan tries to fix his memory and wisdom in The Figure of the World, his latest book. Writing about the father is not easy, especially when life has left wounds that, deep down, are also misunderstandings.
“With parents we can have many additions and many subtractions”, admits Juan son and narrator.
If the writer knows himself through writing, in this case, he has also known himself better through his protagonist, a reserved father, with many ideas, but few personal details.
“We build the parents”, acknowledges Juan Villoro after having rebuilt his own.
“The most important act of love we can do for a person is to understand them,” he adds at the bar at Il Giardinetto, a place he has frequented since he began visiting Barcelona in the 1970s.
To love his father even more, Juan Villoro has interviewed people from his daily environment for five years. He started shortly after his death and did not start writing until the pandemic. With them he has learned what he did not know because “death leaves many things open”.
The result is an autofiction and a biography, a novel that, how could it be otherwise, also reviews the crucial role that Luis Villoro had in the Zapatista movement. At the age of 75, when many intellectuals have lost the stimulus for new adventures, Luis Villoro went to Chiapas, to the jungle, to listen to and guide a social movement for the dignity of the Mexican indigenous people. He was involved there until his death at the age of 91.
Juan Villoro remembers how he visited Barcelona with his father at the end of the sixties and how later he, who lived in Paris, went to the presentation of one of his first novels.
Then, in the mid-seventies, Juan Villoro lived in Barcelona, ​​a city that was “like a very beautiful woman who doesn’t know she is.”
He liked the character of the neighborhoods, the shops and modest restaurants. He feels nostalgic for that more humane and less international city, the capital of a Catalonia that was the gateway from Spain to Latin America and which, in his opinion, “has a wonderful opportunity” to be so again. For this, however, his ruling class needs to understand that Spanish is much bigger than Spain itself.
