Aura Reyes has entered prison. She has left her daughters in the care of Mari Paz, a friend, former legionnaire. Aura suffers for the girls because she has a very powerful enemy, but she trusts that when she has served her sentence everything will be fixed. It hadn’t occurred to her that she would be held and taken to a secret prison where her life was in danger every second. Nor had it occurred to him that in a desperate escape he would add new members, equally powerful, to the list of enemies.
Reyes is the protagonist of Todo vuelve (Ediciones B), the latest novel by Juan Gómez-Jurado, a fast-paced thriller that can be read in one go without giving the reader any pause.
How do you manage to keep the reader intrigued for 600 pages?
I do not know. It’s a question I ask myself and I’m afraid to answer, because when I write I drink from an unknown well and sometimes I’m afraid it will dry up. What I try is to generate the same sensations that I had when I discovered the pleasure of reading.
How was this discovery?
I would go to bed and my parents would turn off the light. I would turn on a flashlight and read Salgari, Dumas or Twain and say to myself: “This is incredible, it’s wonderful, it’s the best thing that’s happened to me in my life.”
I have suffered for Aura, for her daughters and for her friends. They make the characters suffer a lot…
All happy families are alike, but unhappy families are each in their own way and this explains everything there is to know about suffering in literature.
Do their characters recover from blows like Don Quixote and Sancho or the Simpsons did, as in the episodic novels?
not at all What I do is the exact opposite, because what’s easy when the characters don’t work well is for the clouds and the letters over the sky and the Springfield statue to reappear. Instead, when my characters suffer, the scars stay. Aura, which was already released in Todo arde (Ediciones B), has changed a lot, as has his way of seeing the world.
In his novels there are some very rich characters who tend to be the bad guys. What is behind this?
People are more interesting when they have something to lose. Scarlet O’Hara loses the plantation and has to get her hands dirty. Princess Leia comes to her senses when she is kidnapped. And evil millionaires are more exciting than poor villains because they have more capacity to do evil. I never tried to make a social commentary.
It all comes back
I hadn’t thought of that. But I feel it and I think so. Because the book is half-written with the reader. Now we are lucky enough to be able to receive feedback from readers and that completes the writing circle.
Why are their protagonists usually very strong women?
A very angry reader once told me that he had put three women as the protagonists of a novel. That there were too many. In Todo vuelve we have five female protagonists and three female antagonists, so I’m looking forward to hearing that reader’s opinion on that.
Aura Reyes had already appeared in other novels. Are we facing a spin-off?
My novels are interconnected. Each one tells a story, but together they tell a different story. This had not happened before in the thriller. I have done something new that, as far as I know, no one has ever done before.
