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 science books that were in the school library, in a humble neighborhood of l’Hospitalet. Huge and with green lights above the tables, it was accessed through a tiny door next to the stairs leading to the courtyard. There she discovered that each book took her to a different world, she became an imaginary friend of Jules Verne. He found fabulous connections on maps and fantasized about traveling. At the age of six, he committed his greatest crime: not returning a book. It was Enid Blyton’s, one of Santa Clara’s. Adventurous and restless, she should have liked those of Los cinco more. But she was fascinated by those girls: why were they happy in a boarding school?
He is passionate about fantasy and horror literature. And she’s super old: she says she’s been to the Sitges Festival fifteen hundred times, but she’d never stay alone in an old house. He rents a flat in Ocata, where he arrived twelve years ago with David – when it was cheaper than Barcelona. In a dining room overlooking the sea, there are two rows of Expedit of good wood that are no longer manufactured. On the front, the graphic novels and books on art and biology that she consults for work, zines she made, and three editions of Supermujeres, superinventoras –one in Korean–, in which she recovers that history of the world that they have not explained to us; has made exhibitions. In the back, comics from the seventies and eighties, and some books that at the moment he prefers to keep away from his ten-year-old daughter Valentina, with whom he shares other readings.
On a small cardboard shelf, in the hall, they put the pending returns to the libraries, of which he declares himself a megafan. Every week they visit by car – at least – Teià and Masnou, 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 his temple is Arkham Comics, on Carrer Xuclà. I read Byron and Baudelaire when I was thirteen or fourteen, and immediately Dostoevsky. I had previously discovered the comic from Purita Campos, author of Gina or Esther and her world. She keeps an illustration dedicated to her, from when they signed books together, “for my friend and professional colleague”. Grouped in science fiction, there are Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury. Beyond, Jane Bowles, Boris Vian, the poetry anthology Buffalo Bill is dead, by E.E. Cummings. And All Families Are Psychotic, by Douglas Coupland. It’s the third time they buy it. Borrowed the previous ones and still waiting. He has even made a list of the books that are not returned to him, which he cannot stand.
He hates being late, and the only reason he could be late is because there was a book stall on the subway; then he can’t help but stop there. When he passes a bookshop, he doesn’t want to look at the window because he would take everything. He wants to read as long as his eyes and head allow him. Especially in bed (probably because of a cervical issue), but also on the sofa and on the terrace, among medicinal and aromatic plants. Almost never e-book. Lately he has been attracted to the Spanish black novel written by women, Alaitz Leceaga, Susanna Martín Gijón, Eva García Sáenz de Urturi; he loved Aquitania and El libro negro de las horas. He says that the wave of vindication of 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 these kinds of novels, I feel that there is a kind of 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 get the title, and buy books. She wouldn’t know which ones to take with her to a desert island (or to her friend Verne’s mysterious island), but there are two that have changed her life: La vieja sirena, by José Luis Sampedro, meant for her one before and one later as a wife and as a mother. I Kitchen, by Banana Yosimoto, made him understand life and death in a different way.
