Miqui Otero (Barcelona, ??1980) has always been associated with music. All you have to do is search for his name on Google and, sooner or later, an article will end up defining him as a music lover. It is difficult to remove this label when most of his novels are full of melodies, including the last one, Orquesta, which has music as one of the main narrators. “I don’t have any special idyll in it. I just like it”, confesses the author in a bar in the Eixample, where he often goes to disconnect. It is outside the home that he finds inspiration and where his instinct as a plot hunter is awakened. “Now I’m trying to find out what that little group back there is talking about.” He can’t hear the whispers from the next table, but that doesn’t worry him at all. Deep down, he knows that “it’s more fun to imagine”.
To write his latest book, he has let his wits fly over Barcelona and travel a little further, to Galicia, to a town that has many similarities with his parents’, Valadouro, on the Cantabrian coast of Lugo, but which “it’s actually a mixture of many”. There they celebrate a big summer revel where an orchestra plays all night and children, young and old dance to the same songs keeping different secrets.
“Mixing generations and their respective problems was something I was very interested in, and one of the places where I could make them match without causing strangeness was precisely at a village fair, since popular music allowed me to put them under the hood itself. Necessary if the music is the one who explains things, since it only narrates what it sees”.
Although no one will take Barcelona away from Otero – in fact, he says that “it is more than likely that my next novel will be set here again” -, it is good for him to “get some fresh air from time to time”: “When you stay in one place for a long time, you feel like going out and exploring other territories. I had some respect that they celebrated Rayos (2016) or Simón (2020) as the great novels of Barcelona. A label that leaves you speechless but which is so big that it can cover up other possible topics that are beating and are latent in the plot”.
Despite his efforts to move from time to time to other territories, he recognizes that “the return to the village is not always as bucolic as it seems” and that “it is the traps of nostalgia that lead us to this thought, based not in return for its own sake, but in the need for return. The places are not frozen waiting for us to come back. When you come back, they are performing another play. Therefore, it is not surprising that we feel out of place, although it is not always easy to accept it. We tend to idealize and, when we come into contact with reality, these places in our minds disappear.”
