I wouldn’t change it. But if the illustrator Sandra Uve had to choose another life, she would be an explorer or a scientist. As a child, she loved the zoology, geography and natural books that she had in the school library, in a humble neighborhood of l’Hospitalet. Huge and with green lamps on the tables, it was accessed through a tiny door next to the stairs that led to the patio. It was her salvation. There she discovered that each book took her to a different world, and she became an imaginary friend of Jules Verne. She found fabulous connections in maps, she fantasized about traveling. At six years old, she committed her greatest crime: not returning a book. It was from Enid Blyton, someone from Santa Clara. She is adventurous and restless, she should have liked The Five better. But she was fascinated by those girls, why were they happy in a boarding school?
He would have been around twelve when he devoured Poe and Lovecraft. She is passionate about fantastic and horror literature. And that she is super scared: she says that she has been to the Sitges Festival fifteen hundred times, but she would never stay alone in an old house. She rents an apartment in Ocata, where she arrived twelve years ago with David – when it was cheaper than Barcelona. In the dining room overlooking the sea, there are two rows of good wood Expedits that are no longer made. In front are the graphic novels and art and biology books that she consults for her work, fanzines that she made, and three editions of Super Inventing Superwomen –one in Korean–, where she recovered that history of the world that we have not been told, and of which He has done exhibitions. Behind her, comics from the seventies and eighties, and some books that she prefers to keep away from her ten-year-old daughter Valentina, with whom she shares other readings.
On a small cardboard shelf, in the hall, they put the earrings to return to the libraries, of which he declares himself a megafan. Every week they visit Teià and Masnou by car, at least, with a very old shopping cart. “They are an absolutely wonderful team, we have the best libraries in Europe,” he says. He has given workshops in almost all of them. Thank you for the interlibrary loan service. And it has a temple: Arkham Comics, on Xuclà street. He read Byron and Baudelaire at the age of thirteen or fourteen, and soon after Dostoyevsky. Before, I had discovered the comic at the hands of Purita Campos, author of Gina or Esther and her world. He keeps an illustration of his dedicated, from a time they signed together: “For my friend and colleague by profession.” Grouped in science fiction are Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury. Further, Jane Bowles, Boris Vian, the poetry anthology Buffalo Bill is dead, from E.E. cummings. And All Families Are Psychotic, by Douglas Coupland. It is the third time they buy it. He lent the previous ones and they never returned, something he can’t stand. He has come to make a list of the books that have not been returned to him.
He hates being late, and the only reason he could be late is because there was a book and vinyl stand on the subway; she can’t help but stop. When passing in front of a bookstore, she does not look at the window because she would take everything. He wants to read as long as his eyes and head allow him to. Especially in bed (probably due to a cervical issue), but also on the sofa and on the terrace, among medicinal and aromatic plants. Almost never ebooks. Lately he has been attracted to Spanish crime novels written by women, Alaitz Leceaga, Susana Martín Gijón, Eva García Sáenz de Urturi; he loved Aquitaine and The Black Book of Hours. She says that the wave of demands for women’s rights since 2015 is very important, “and I am in it, not only because of the work I dedicate to it, but because, with this type of novel, I feel that there is a kind of invisible sorority : I know you share this, I’m reading you, I hear your voice.
If I were a millionaire, I would travel, maybe I would get my degree and buy books. She wouldn’t know which ones to take with her to a deserted island (or to friend Verne’s Mysterious Island), but there are two that have changed her life: The Old Mermaid, by José Luis Sampedro, marked a before and after for her as a woman and as a mother . And Kitchen, by Banana Yosimoto, made him understand life and death in another way.
