Narrator and playwright, Javier Tomeo (Fortnight, Huesca, 1932-Barcelona 2013) has been one of the most entertaining, surprising and imaginative writers in Spanish narrative. He wrote popular literature (western and horror novels) under a pseudonym for Editorial Bruguera. The Anagrama publishing house, coinciding with the tenth anniversary of his death, has brought together five of his most emblematic novels in one volume: The Castle of the Encrypted Letter) and The Song of the Turtles (2000). In the prologue, from 1999, the incisive Jorge Herralde allows himself some slip-ups. About Paco Camino, the creator of Siglo 20, tells us that he is “a curious character from Barcelona”, but he does not mention that he was the brother of the filmmaker Jaime Camino. He mentions “the systematic and enthusiastic support of Joan de Sagarra in his chronicles in El País”, ignoring the decisive support of Juan Ramón Masoliver.
Fernando Valls, in his blog La nave de los locos, from November 2010, stated of Masoliver that “perhaps his latest literary discovery was Javier Tomeo”. And Tomeo himself, when Julio Manegat asks him which teachers he learned from, affirms that “Juan Ramón Masoliver became almost a member of my family.” Herralde rightly affirms that “what interested Tomeo was literature and women, not necessarily in this order”, although he should clarify that it was rather his failure with them.
Today’s readers cannot assess what his freedom as a creator meant at a time when the compromised novel defended by the shady Jean-Paul Sartre was prevailing. Jorge Guillén, one of the indisputable poets of the generation of ’27, fell into disgrace because in his poem Beato sillon, he wrote that “the world is well done”.
Given the publication of the unpublished book of stories Vampires and aliens, it is inevitable to wonder why these unpublished stories (we have been promised one by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and another by Gabriel García Márquez) were not published while their authors were alive. However, in the “Editor’s Note” Enric Cucurella states that “the manuscript was practically ready for publication (…) and it was clear that this was the author’s will”. In any case, the recovery of one of our most original and daring creators seems more than appropriate.
It has tried to identify it with surrealism. It must be said that Tomeo does not use the easy resource of dreams. In “La Contra” of La Vanguardia on November 1, 2012, he tells Núria Escur that monsters “are imaginative creatures, but they have not passed through the subconscious”; and instead he identifies with Kafka, who “writes what I would like to write.”
The fact that he writes while awake explains why these imaginary universes seem to emerge from the everyday and we accept what is strange about them. Here fed by the tradition of vampires, of Dracula, of Jack the Ripper’s London. In the different stories the traits of vampires are defined for us, we go up to sinister castles inhabited by counts, we attend in amazement to what Tomeo, always so close to us, narrates to us.
Javier Tomeo Recovery of five novels. Foreword by Jorge Herralde. anagram 438 pages 25.90 euros
Javier Tomeo. Vampires and aliens. Alpha Decay. 112 pages 17.50 euros
