the friendship between a boy and a girl, he from the city and she from the town, in a retro-futuristic environment: many elements refer to the eighties, like a mysterious epidemic, and others that are between current and future, like the serious drought that causes large 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 hits bookstores on Wednesday, after two award-winning books of poems (Francesc Garriga and López awards -Picó), and the Anagrama award for his great success of Napalm al cor, with a play included and a handful of translations.
What was the main challenge when writing? Did you feel pressure due to the reception you have had so far?
Pressure, none, because I wrote it just after finishing Napalm…, before even publishing it; I am always writing, even if it is within my thoughts. The main challenge was to fit the pieces together and make the puzzle work, because it is a fragmentary novel, with very diverse points of view, like a lace of memories, from different characters and voices.
It uses very diverse forms, with changes in time and space.
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 he admires, the plot is not what is important…
When she was little, Lispector wrote stories that she sent to magazines to publish 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 sensation. It is one of the few things that I am clear about when I write.
In his new book there is a mysterious epidemic that only affects homosexuals, is very reminiscent of AIDS, and portrays the present homophobia.
I really wanted to explore how the AIDS legacy of the 1980s still pulsates today in a form of contemporary queer relationality. It was not about demonstrating the validity of homophobia, but rather asking myself about how a community lives through a memory of something that it did not experience but that was very strong. It was one of the questions that led me to writing.
He does this by talking about the relationship between Liton and Rita.
I really wanted to ask myself about this other type of relationship about which we have very few references, a very poor imaginary. We know what lovers do, what people who love each other romantically do, however what do friends do? Furthermore, friendship and illness are intertwined, as was seen in the eighties: when doctors, experts or scientists turned their backs on them, those who were by the side of many patients were their friends, like the lesbian friends who gave blood to children sick 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 appease it. Furthermore, the boundaries between friendship and love are not at all obvious.
They are very different characters.
I really like writing characters who have not bought the story of what it means to live, who still have the possibility of understanding and reading the world in their own way. I have the feeling that every time I start writing I am rediscovering something about the world.
Of the world and friendship, here.
Friendship or relationships, love, esteem, are not so much about what bond you and I have and what we are together, but about what we decide to look at about the world together, what we decide to point out and what we look at and where we are going.
They are very 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 need, 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 capable, with their relationship and their love, of building an entire world of which there is no testimony or trace left, and I think that this is perhaps the most beautiful thing about loving, the ability to generate something that only you and I will witness.
Art allows us to glimpse it.
Yes, but with an inevitable feeling of betrayal, of putting words to something that does not have them and that perhaps does not need them, that works with other languages, and perhaps for me one of the challenges of writing this novel was to search What are the languages ??to trace the contour of this relationship without having to describe. That’s why we talk so much about looks and memories. Because we can never talk about friendship and love in the abstract, we can only talk in the most concrete particularity. The challenge was how to draw the outlines so that the reader could see the magic of this relationship, what it contained and why it was special. That is also why there is the party scene, in which everything is built outside of language, in a space, in a time, suspended, non-existent, and everything is built through looks… and that is also why it is 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, about what I have felt and what it has made me feel. Through Liton’s objects an entire life is narrated, and I did it precisely because I had the feeling that in the novel there were many moments of abstraction, and thinking about what will remain of us I also wanted to focus on how, through a few objects, you can narrate the life of a person.
The entire novel in one image.
Yes, but perhaps the question I was asking myself was about how we leave traces in the things we do and the things we live; behind every thing in the world there is a story. But the almost mythical characters of the old women tell Rita that behind every stone, behind every thing, there is a life.
The old women are between the three weavers of the thread of life and the three witches of Macbeth.
Yes, exactly. For me, they have the function of the Greek chorus, which is outside of time. And they are the voice of an entire past that no longer exists, and for me it is 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 They have known. 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 designating things and the world with another world that indicates the world in a different way? What happens when these two worlds meet?
From the beginning we know that Liton is dead. Is there less and less taboo with death?
The theme of death that appeared a lot in Napalm…, and in my novels I do not present death as a theme, it simply appears. I’m not in a hurry. Maybe because of how I have lived it in my life, maybe because of how I have thought about it, beyond writing, but I experience it as something very natural, very obvious. Perhaps it is 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 where one of the things that constantly goes through our daily lives does not appear, it is obvious.
But it’s taboo.
Yes, but when I start writing I don’t ask myself what topics are taboo to discuss. Maybe I do it from the unconsciousness that writing implies for me sometimes, right? It is so obvious and clear to me that in a book that talks about life, death has to be present, and not from a dramatic place, not from a place of ending, but from a place where many things can be said. things, from where you can review an entire life.
Hopefully 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 something we see in this novel is the end of the world, just as we imagine it. 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 have imagined, the one I lived in as a child, disappears. Will we still wish, will we dance, will we party? I don’t know if I would talk about eco-anxiety, but I would talk about a pain that has to do with what happens when the world you have known disappears, or the world you had 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 proposes an end to a landscape, in the case of this novel, it is also a symbol or allegory or parallelism of 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, of a world, of a life, but it is also about the moment when one comes face to face with the failure to fulfill the promise that was made. I mean, in the end, the book is the failure of a promise or the awareness that the promise that was made to you 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, or a nuclear bomb or a third world war. The world is ending because you have built your entire future based on a promise that has been made to you, that you have believed in and in which you have acted. And I believe that something happens to the characters in this novel that also happens to me and I believe that it happens to many people around me, that we must become aware that the promise that you had received, the ideal on which you had built your future, does not exist. And it should not be interpreted as a generational issue. It is a process of becoming aware of loss, of naivety, of disappointment… I do not want to be hopeless, because I am an optimistic person who has a lot of hope, every day of life is a wonderful day, but it is also a to become aware that everything that could be has not been. And for me the novel wanted to capture that, that maybe it’s not because you haven’t done enough, maybe it’s because there are a series of things that haven’t worked.
Catalan version, here
