Ray Loriga: “It sucks to compete with your dad whether you win or lose”

“… hours wasted, neither time behind nor in front, the worst are those disgusting crosses with pegs.”

Conscious rhyme or chance?

It’s no coincidence that they came from the same mind. I started with that tone, that sentence, and it immediately felt like an echo of that. I am amused that being close to death or a novel about death begins with the fact that almost the worst thing that ever happened to me was to confuse me by imagining a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. I thought it was contradictory.

Is there a secret relationship between the two novels?

I’m not aware of it. And thirty years later, the same author. When writing for thirty years, there are always echoes of what you wrote before.

What kind of results has the removal of a brain tumor left for you?

Some are obvious. I have a vision problem. I don’t think I lost an eye completely, this place is a bit battered. The problem is that this eye sees twice and the other sees normally because it has a small macula on the cornea. Thus, they gather like three visions. I can’t manage without a patch because I’m seeing a triple. The only way to be functional is to use a patch. I completely lost one of my ears. It’s like you have two speakers and one of them cuts the wire. I have mild facial paralysis. These are the physical sequelae left behind. In order to be able to speak again, I had to go through speech therapy and another course of physiotherapy because I lost my balance.

And emotional sequelae?

I guess it’s a feeling of vulnerability. You feel physically insecure. I can go out to buy a newspaper, but I don’t walk the streets alone at night.

Why did you decide to tell it literally?

For various reasons. Because it was good material for creating fiction. The process I go through helps me jump where I want. For revenge: Since it has happened to me, I will take advantage of it for something. Third reason: Because we writers are a bit of hyenas, we also draw from the misfortunes of others and from our own misfortunes. We make something out of everything. And then I dream about it to take advantage of his time in the hospital. I thought I was already doing fieldwork there.

Purebred writer.

A journalist does something similar, right? Since I’m in the hospital, I’m going to research how things work here, what kind of strange friendships you have, how you relate to others… It seemed to me that with the writer next to me on the bed It was so lonely and at the same time amused me.

The narrator coolly describes what happened to you. did you live like this

I’m not Yorick, but I’ve lent him things. Yes, I’ve been indifferent enough in the sense that someone’s death is a random thing. A hospital is an ideal place to realize how small you are. Anyone who is not like you is worse. And there’s the “blank page” element: you don’t care if the person next to you is a baker, president, or NBA champion. There is real equality. The pain is the same, the pajamas are the same, the room is the same. You say, ‘Why will mine be special?’

It presents friendship as a construct that seeks its own satisfaction. Selfish view of friendship, isn’t it?

It is. Friendship is an idealization of the other. There is an emotional tyranny in all kinds of love and friendship.

On what friendship or friendships is ‘Every summer comes to an end’?

I won’t name names because I have a lot of friends and someone might think ‘why don’t I go out’ and that wouldn’t be nice. But Luiz’s character is a kind of Frankenstein monster of friends and family.

Do you have favorite friendships in fiction?

A lot. From the movie ‘Back to Brideshead’. In ‘The Great Gatsby’, there is an idealization of Jay Gatsby whose narrator we may never know for sure. “On the Road” with Kerouac and Neal Cassady. ‘Two men and one destiny’. The one with Corto Maltese and Rasputin, a murderous psychopath with a weird sense of humor, is very interesting.

Do you have a weakness for Portugalthe main setting of the novel?

My wife is half Portuguese, her mother was born in Lisbon and we’ve been to Portugal a lot. I felt liked. There are also times when I wrote this book at a time when I was starting to think and couldn’t move. First it was just a bed, then a bed and a sofa, and this pandemic stupidity came as I started walking. For a long time without being able to move. At the very least, I wanted my characters to be able to travel to places I’ve been. So I had movement, even if it was just mental.

Do you have anything against adapting literary texts for children and adolescents?

some amount. But he is not just against adaptations for children and adolescents. When I was little, almost every home had ‘Reader’s Digest’. They would take ‘Great Expectations’ and take whatever was leftover or what someone thought was left and give you some kind of summary. It always amused me to think about who decided that a lot in ‘War and Peace’ or ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. I decided it would be fun to give the hero of ‘Every summer is the end’ that sinister slicing job for commerce, not censorship.

The protagonist knows little and admires the illustration.

I didn’t have to do any research there. My father is an illustrator, already semi-retired due to his health and lack of what he called ‘hands’. But my life as a child was largely painting. For my father and his colleagues. He was always looking for a book at the German Bookstore in Madrid or waiting for an English book or children’s stories by a Czechoslovak cartoonist he had discovered. He could wait months for a book by Ronald Searle, Ralph Steadman or Saul Steinberg. These characters in my house were heroes, just like TV celebrities or football players in other houses. What I quoted in the book and more. Living in an enlightened world gave me a precious childhood. My father used to draw very well and if I said ‘Daddy, I want a tank’ he would draw for me and even cut it for me. Or Napoleonic soldiers. For me it was wonderful to have a father who could draw the world and see the drawn world before facing the real world.

you draw?

I draw a lot and my father, who knows this business, told me that I have a good hand. But I decided to become a writer because it’s not nice to compete with your father. It could be that you lose, which sucks, or you win, which is even bigger shit.

Aesthetically, does having to wear an eye patch bother you a lot or is it not that bad?

I won’t call it arrogant, but I’ve become a flirtatious and in the prosthetics you can wear, it seems to me that the patch is not elegant at all. I got used to it And since my face is crooked and I have facial paralysis, they will pay more attention to the patch than the patch. It doesn’t affect me much.

What happened to Ray Loriga also happened to the narrator. Does the idealized friend Luiz also have elements of Ray Loriga?

And soul. Alma is the cartoonist I never became, probably because I left that path. Obviously, all the Karamazov brothers are Dostoevsky. The real breath of all characters tends to be their own. Even when creating a monster.

Luiz considers suicide preemptively, almost out of boredom, to avoid bad things to come. can you share

Intellectually, I had this feeling. Then you have a mother, you have a father, you have children, there are things that bind you to an emotional-vital chain. But of course I felt the distress that inconsistency can create.

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