A thimble. It is a very simple object and at the same time very fascinating. With him, somehow, began Carlos del Amor’s (Murcia, 1974) relationship with writing, his literary view of life as a whole. The one who tries to capture it every day in the television bits that fill the TVE newsletter of the beauty that surrounds us. He was twelve or thirteen, in a few minutes playing with his mother, and from that word, he was able to create a story with a thimble, a beginning and an end, and with such emotion. Fiction that stays with him forever is real.
“Deep down, what I’ve done throughout my career has been sticking to that high.” Tom Waits, Patti Smith or Nick Cave admit this when playing in the background in some kind of perfectly impromptu take – we met at the La Buena Vida bookstore in Madrid, very cinematographic, by Jesús Trueba – so any of the three music can appear in their report without being out of harmony .
First of all she couldn’t get grades to study Journalism so she started with Documentation. When he arrived in Madrid from his hometown of Murcia, Capote, Wolfe and company—he had no money to buy his books, so he took them out of the Pedro Salinas Library in Puerta de Toledo—“opened their eyes to a new path.” counting things”. And recounting what happened in a different way and on the small screen is what he’s been doing for twenty years.
The book seems to him a “sacred, cult object,” and he never imagined that someone had his name written on the cover. But he eventually became a writer. To do this, he encountered editor Belén Bermejo, who died in 2020 like a comet in his career. Journey through Japan. Jet lag or not, Del Amor dared to take this step, but he did so with the assurance that it would not be fatal. He chose the short narrative, a genre more suited to television language, and his daily task was closer to the task of ‘imagining the unlikely to happen’.
This first novel, La vida a veces (2013), named after a poem by Jaime Gil de Biedma, was followed by two novels: The Year Without a Summer (2015) and Confabulation (2017). In recent years, it has moved to the other side of non-fiction with titles like Emocionarte (Espasa 2020 award) and Retratarte, a newcomer to bookstores. Always asking who is inside a site before entering, he assures that “this is a guest, I’m not a writer”. The perspective that illuminates the hidden lives of objects and tells their stories in each shot contradicts it. He claims to be pessimistic by nature. But it’s realistic and it’s going well. “It’s true that being on TV opened a lot of doors for me,” he justifies himself. And although he did not say it himself, he closed the others. “I try to apply literature to reality. You can gain knowledge by trying to write well. I would rather be told that I am a poet than a notary public of reality.”