He wanted to be a writer from the earliest childhood. But life and a teenage crush took him in other directions. Carlos Zanón enrolled in Journalism “after rejecting Philology, but then I signed up for Law because of a girl I liked, although it didn’t work out because I went in the afternoon and she in the morning.” The romance did not come to fruition, but Zanón became a lawyer and practiced for several years, although “writing was still on my mind.” He wrote and published music-themed poetry and novels until he opted for black and carved a niche for himself on the literary scene with titles like Don’t Call Home or I Was Johnny Thunders.
“And I was able to stop being a lawyer,” he recounted in an interview with La Vanguardia on his way through the Malaga Festival where he was part of the critics’ jury. Letters opened new doors for Zanón. The writer had already collaborated in the Avui newspaper as a literary critic, but his novels allowed La Vanguardia to discover him to develop a new vocation, that of a columnist.
That happened in 2016 and since then Zanón has published four collaborations a week: “They let me write a bit of everything. I have always been clear that I am not a journalist and that is why I try to make literary pieces that are entertaining and not necessarily current. I am inspired by cases that do not usually appear in the press, I look for the look, ”she explains.
Now, that look has become a book because Salamandra, Zanón’s new publishing house, has selected the best columns published by the writer in La Vanguardia and has turned them into a book, One Hundred Ways to Break a Glacier, which “is a thematic selection with ten blocks of ten columns each”. Zanón discarded his sports articles and also those related to politics, such as those related to the process, “which were very attached to the moment and could have aged poorly.”
“I chose the columns that I liked the most and the result is a book that can be read as a collection of poems, not necessarily followed,” adds the columnist whose look is shrewd and also somewhat nostalgic: “It is one of the notes I use, but not as if the past were a better place, but as a new place, because it is not true that any past time was better, nor should the past prevent us from looking to the future”.
Manuel Jabois maintains in the prologue to One Hundred Ways to Break a Glacier that the columnist’s life is not as simple as they paint it, because sometimes finding a subject to write about is a lifelessness and because the graceful assumptions that appear in his columns are not they always see that mention as a compliment.
But Zanón does not suffer as much as Jabois, perhaps because he is a much more disciplined guy. He always has “the radar on” and although he delivers the texts on Friday, “on Mondays I’m already thinking about what I can talk about, it’s a matter of going down to the street and paying attention.” And, if he can’t think of anything, he can always resort to imagination. For something he is a writer. In the column that gives the book its title, for example, Zanón recounted when a girlfriend left him during a trip to Greenland. “I’ve never been to Greenland,” he confesses now.
But, real or invented, their stories are liked by readers, “who see themselves represented.” “I notice a lot of affection and a good reception”, concludes Zanón, who does not want to say goodbye without thanking “Miquel Molina, Lola García and Joan Josep Pallàs, who cover me in La Vanguardia every week”.
