A real estate agent cleaning a countertop before a potential buyer arrives and kicking out a child who has snuck into one of the rooms. This is an image that anyone who closes their eyes can catch a glimpse of. But now imagine that same scene repeated on a loop. This is how El último día de la vida anterior (Anagrama) begins, the new book by Andrés Barba (Madrid, 1975), the author who seems to have a gift for making something different out of everyday life.
This is his first ghost novel although, by the way, “none appear throughout the 140 pages. Not at least as we know them ”, advances the winner of the 2017 Herralde de Novela prize to La Vanguardia. Although this concept can generate strangeness at first, “it is something that the reader quickly gets into the rag, due to the mere fact that we are increasingly used to living in a ghostly world because of the Internet.”
And it is that, as the Madrid author points out, “social networks promote spectral projections, because in them we do not show ourselves, but the ghost that we have created. Semi-false images that embellish our own being. A creature that takes over our life to the point that we no longer know exactly who we are or the neighbor. Instagram is the closest thing to putting a glass between us and reality.
Although this is a short story, he assures that “it is one of the most complicated things I have written in all the years that I have been in my career. It is a plot that I had choked and encapsulated in my brain for a long time. More than once I tried to write it but I couldn’t. And when I finally did, it was liberating.”
Curiously, he managed to bring his characters to life at a time of crisis, with the pandemic and confinement as a backdrop. “It was not my best moment but maybe that was the reason why the feather flowed by itself. And it is that… What are crises if not a narcissistic loop from which it is difficult to get out?” asks the writer, who plays in his book at constantly blurring the real from the unreal. Something that, he assures, “I have learned from Bradbury, Shirley Jackson or Mariana Enríquez herself, among others.”
Although if an author has been of great influence for Barba, it has been none other than Henry James, “and not because he has translated it a lot, but because he has taught me that all good ghost writers are actually realistic writers.”
Delving into a genre that he hadn’t touched until then has been “a most stimulating experience. Especially because we see that more and more writers are once again trusting fiction and that we believe that there is a hyper-satisfaction with the self-fiction testimonial novel and the literature of the self. For this reason, creating a collective truth that only concerns the readers of the book and having the freedom to invent these characters has turned out to be an encouraging exercise”, concludes the author from Madrid.
