As soon as you enter this book, which has very few tricks and minuses, it gives the impression that nothing can be left behind, no matter how difficult and risky it is to read. Suddenly It is as if the reader is writing the book while reading it. ‘Strange’ by Guillermo Arriaga.
Such is the case with the reading breath: it accompanies you as if you wanted to write it yourself, and so on until the last breath, which is impressive. That last one, which I will not mention here, is one of the most important parts of the book; To skip pages to check it out would be to underestimate the immense value of the novel, a masterpiece of contemporary prose in Spanish.
Its author has already shown the unusual character of his fictions in the cinema (his scripts for the films “Amores perros”, “21 grams”).) and in the literature itself (“Save the fire”, Alfaguara award 2020, ‘Wild’). It is strange‘ (also Alphaguara) Coming from Mexico, where the author was born 65 years ago, to Spain, this book, in addition to everything said about its impact on the reader, a sum in favor of science and medicine, in the eighteenth century, at a time when anti-progressors saw the doctor as the domestic servant of those who denied science. But if we guess anything from the book, it’s because that’s the way the entries send it. To sum up this work is to do the laziness a favor and this ‘Strange’ can never be done in relation to this impressive literature.‘.
We interviewed him on his 65th birthday in Madrid, and he speaks in a low voice, stroking his mature beard and drooping hair as he does so, as if he were going to pick up a pen to highlight topics that will one day be different. novels. He’s not a talkative man, so listening to him talk is like continuing to read ‘Strangers’ after reading it., It is a book about the strangeness that covers the centuries when people were treated like animals, even worse, even today..
Q. Reading this book makes the reader feel like they are participating in the article..
r. The opposite happens to me: I feel like I’m writing as if I’m reading. I write as a reader because I don’t know where I’m going and I don’t know what I’m writing or what characters I’m going to encounter. But I love that you appreciate it. I hope more readers feel it. What I wanted was to try to reproduce the eighteenth century in order to find a different rhythm to contemporary literature. Note that I had to exaggerate the punctuation because when I discovered what the commas meant, I knew a different breath was needed.
Q. But you need a musical mind to catch that rhythm, right?
r. I’ve always been a rhythm freak. But in the novel, it is a breath that needs to be created rather than music. I’ve tried and followed with dot before, but in this novel I wanted the rhythm to be longer and longer. Now that they’ve made the audiobook, actor Javier Poza told me, “You don’t know what it’s like to read this without taking long breaks!” [risas]. The poor man is running out of air.
Q. But this also happens when swimming.
r. Yes, but what I want here is for the reader to be completely immersed in the story from the first two pages. Let him start swimming and suddenly feel like he’s crossing the English Channel.
What was the character of Q. William Burton? [el aspirante a médico que proviene de una familia de la alta nobleza irlandesa]?
r. I come from a world opposite to his. I come from the culture of effort, the lower middle class, it got better, but always with effort. For Burton, social class is a kind of prison because his aristocratic past always works against him.
“I think it is a very difficult corset for the aristocracy to wear. Because authority and lineage are very important there. Or so I think.”
S. Novel is about authority. Father and mother suppress Burton alike.
r. Yes, I thought about this recently after the Prince Harry book. [el hijo de la princesa Diana de Gales]Tired of the royal model and what is expected of him, he is a boy who explodes and stands out in front of it all. So I imagine the aristocracy is a very difficult corset to wear. Because authority and lineage predominate there. Or so I think.
Q. But at the social level, that happens too. Spaniards and Mexicans, for example, we come from maids..
r. I grew up in a very liberal family without the typical sense of authority. In that sense, I’m totally unaware of it, but I feel like it’s something I need to understand as a writer. Because yes, as you said many of them come or go in that context.
S. The aristocracy is still a part of this life.
r. This is difficult for me to understand. But it’s true: it continues. It’s a bit stale, but keep going. It’s like a monarchy here. How hard it is to understand why the monarchy continues here! I don’t understand. Maybe you, the Spaniard, can explain it to me. I don’t know what function such a thing has in today’s world.
Q. What this book claims is science..
r. Yes, what I wanted was to tell the story as best as I could. I’m not sophisticated enough to be a scientist, but I wanted to use science to better tell this story. I’ve had friends with disabilities, I’ve directed disability documentaries, I’ve encountered obstacles in rural areas where I went hunting, and I used those experiences to make this novel.
Q. How was this novel born?
r. From nothing. I was on the road and the idea came to me. I saw a video of real strangers and I think he fell unconscious and one day I was talking to my friend Sergio Avilés, who is also a novelist, and I said I was going to do something with him. I wanted to set the story in Mongolia in the year 900 to see what foreigners were like during the war. Then in Norway in 1400, then in England in 1781, and then in contemporary Mexico. That was the first plan. But then it was the English scene that fascinated me, and it was broadcast.
“Is a great scientist necessarily a rational being? Or is he adventurous and romantic? Without risk and adventure, there would be no progress.”
Q. How do you see the difficulties these people have had to contend with against the barbarism that has driven them out of society and even from life?
r. The eighteenth century is a century of adventures. It’s a very romantic century, isn’t it? Scientists were adventurous. His crazy ideas drove science forward. For example, one of the scientists appearing here inoculates himself with gonorrhea and syphilis to see what happens. Then he began to transplant teeth: he took them from corpses and put them on people. He finally gives his body to science and says: When I die, they autopsy and determine exactly what killed me. So: is a great scientist necessarily a rational being? Or an adventurous and romantic? Without risk and adventure, there would be no progress. For this reason, it is a fact that many atrocities have been committed.
Q. At one point in the novel, it is said that science is close to poetry.
r. Yes, the scientist of that time was, as I told you, romantic and adventurous. Great battles are won by poetic minds, right? Many victories were achieved by leaping not on logic, but on imagination, intuition. Einstein had a saying: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Yes, I agree. To reach knowledge, you must first use your imagination.
Q. Is this a historical novel?
r. No. It is a novel based on a historical period, but not a historical novel. Actually, I’m explaining at the beginning.
Q. How do you feel about people suffering in that century and the present century?
r. I believe that the function of the novel is to reflect essences. Even a history book will not reflect what really happened. A novel, less. But a novel can reflect the essence of what happened. Or so I think. What matters is legend rather than historical facts. And myth is a reworking of historical reality. That’s what the novel does: a reinterpretation of what happened. It is to collect the essence, to take the pulse of the person.
Q. Scenes in which people are treated like monsters are not unique to the 18th century.
r. That’s it. Unfortunately it. A colleague of mine went to shoot a documentary in the mountains of Oaxaca and found a boy with cerebral palsy tied up among goats. I saw those images and… I was very impressed. Recently, my aunt told me that a family in her town tied up a boy with cerebral palsy and locked him in a dark room and never let him out. What happens, happens. This is not true in all parts of Mexico or the world, but there are some situations.
Q. What surprised you more than anything mentioned here?
r. Abuse is humiliation of someone who is different. Denial of the other. But this happens even in birds. Suddenly their babies are born smaller or deformed and … the mother abandons them or kills them outright. It is as if the rejection of the different exists biologically. But human beings need to be able to empathize with them.
“Ever since I grew up in a godless home, I have tried to understand believers. But at some point even the most believer questions God”
Q. There is no God in this book, right?
r. Growing up in a non-religious household, I tried to understand believers. But at some point even the believer questions God, right? A believing father with a disabled son questions him. Or at least questions why God gave him a child with a disability.
Q. It’s also a drama that you tell with irony.
r. Yes, but something that happens unconsciously like that. I tell you again: my only interest is to tell the story as best I can. I think it’s all about the mood the person writes, the moment of life. While I was writing this novel, my mother died, and I guess some of that pain is here. It’s pain, but it’s also the cure for that pain. Among other things, one writes for self-improvement. Art sheds tears, it hurts, but it also gives a guide to healing a wound.
Q. Where are you in this novel?
r. In all characters. Dedicated to his children, risking everything without anyone hindering him, accepting his beloved as he is, devastated but happy. All the characters have something of me or something they gave me.
Q. Can a book change the way you become an author?
r. I do not think so. At least not in my case. Because writers create books at different stages of life. This is the book that went through my mind while writing it. Just like the others. Every book lives inside me as I write it, and then becomes the property of others, readers.
Q. How did you come out of that last part of the book, which was so dramatic?
r. I wrote that part with great emotional tension, it took my breath away. So the last 60 pages and… I hope they read like that.