Antonio Soler: “Not accepting the transition as good is a huge burden”

Its composition is images and facts, a painstaking literature, cut like a knife, with a book that came out years ago but was barely distributed. It is about the ‘Crocodile’s Dream’, where the deadly legacy of the Civil War losers from the duels of the war erupts like a pain.

We had this talk in Malaga, where he was born in 1956, and here he is exactly what he said, as in the books and in real life. antonio soler there is nothing left

At the end of this book there is a sentence that reads: “I write all the words a person can leave behind.” I think it’s not just the character, but the author as well..

Yes, it’s kind of a mix between the personal and the character. I was 49 years old when I wrote this novel, and I was imagining a man about 20 years older than me with things going pretty badly. Now that I’m approaching that age, I see that maybe I’m in a rushed mood, but back then I wanted his life to be some kind of wasteland. Although the book is not very comprehensive and the words are a wonderful flood, I wanted to balance a life in this way. In this sense, my style narrowed a bit, got rid of a lot of ostentation and tried to get more to the heart of the story.

Q. Does this have anything to do with the way you face your own life, Antonio?

A. Yes, because I have characters who share my own worldview. Definitely. Maybe this character we are talking about is not so much, but there are others. The child hero of ‘A Story of Violence’, who does not feel in harmony with what he sees and does not know what his role is in this game that is life, is my point of view. This puzzled look was the look I had as a kid. There is a character in later novels that has something to do with me. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the lead role. Inside SouthFor example, a middle school has a lot to do in my youth. He is a man who approaches writing not just as a way of life, but as something vital. Literature helped me to adapt to society, to the world. Therefore, it has become a vital element. This is the knowledge of myself and the knowledge of others.

Q. Writing has always been an extremely challenging element for you. Why do you write so deep?

A. This is a requirement. The main thing in literature is not what, but how. I always give an example: two people fall in love but their families clash and force them to separate. It could be a Venezuelan soap opera or ‘Romeo and Juliet’. The main thing is how to explain this and what will emerge about the human being there. I was born into a Republican family in Malaga, which suffered heavy reprisals at the end of 1956, my father was at war. That’s what my grandma told me when I was a kid, and I don’t know if that adds to the surrounding weirdness that surrounds me. In the 60s you had to accept the regime, I remember the referendum to support Franco, and a neighbor said to my father: but how are you going to vote no! I also remember my father stamping Franco’s stamp on the envelopes and punching him. Nobody said anything to me, but a priest would come to my house and ask why we didn’t go to church. My family was secular, and… all this was in keeping with the deep rooted desire to find out where the family came from. I guess my uprooting was double: natural as a child who doesn’t understand much about adults, and also social, because my family was somehow disconnected from those around us.

Q. All your books have to do with that time. To what extent is his autobiography?

R. It is true that after my initial hesitations to find my narrative space, I began to realize that I am the notary public of my family. The one that will record a series of people who have gone and done as I thought they deserved, leaving no word on what they did. They once told me: How well do you know the weak. And I replied: I am one of them.

They told me “how well do you know the weak”. i am one of them

Q. This can be verified in most of your books. Let’s say there is Spain, it is difficult. And you are the calm watching. What are the books that tell more faithfully what happened?

R. Perhaps ‘The name I call now’, with reference to the past or a world before me. Because this is set during the Civil War as my family and grandparents experienced it. There’s a lot of what my grandma told me. Dramatic episodes and adventures. Persecutions, executions… all that. and then there is South, so it has a character very close to me and the world I’m going through. Sometimes, when talking to bourgeois friends, I get the feeling that they have failed to meet. Because they are talking about another world that I know, like tourists or people who have watched documentaries but have no real knowledge.

Q. There is also aesthetic ambition in your books, I think ‘Apostles and assassins’. What did he dedicate himself to in that book?

R. It was an act of demand and discipline, and I basically forced myself not to invent anything. Of course, if you don’t invent anything, it looks like you’re writing a history book. Hence the difficulty of keeping a novelist’s pulse. So I used descriptions of characters and environments, metaphors… but without inventing. Or at least I think that’s what I’m trying to do.

Q. What implications do the essentials for writing have for you?

R. I always demand that I give my all, not to accept as good what seems perishable to me. I was a competitive athlete and I knew that whenever I went for a run, I couldn’t break the world record. But he ran as if he was going to break it. And this is the same attempt that prompted me to write. Always do my best and correct what I have done and do not accept something that is easily good, reconsider. An editor friend of mine told me that a girl who wanted to be an editor asked her about the job, and she told me there are different types of writers: those who can touch something from the text, and writers you can touch if you write. touch something, they all fall. And saying that, she told him about my books. Well… yes: that’s what I’m trying to do.

Q. There are also publishers who no longer show much interest in the book..

A. Yes, that’s true. There are cases when it is noticeable. The level of immediacy we live in has these things. Moreover, there seems to be a great upheaval on the literary scene.

Q. Anyway, the ‘crocodile’s dream’ is back. The tone of this novel exists in many of his books. Was it on purpose?

R. Before I start writing any novel, I think a lot about what would be the most appropriate structure to tell that story. With crocodile’s dream It seemed to me that the most questioning came from within the character, about the weariness of a country tired of not seeing the war as over. When I wrote this in 2005, this seemed to be a matter of elders who had already experienced the war or were very close children of the war. Interestingly, 17 years later, all this is very much alive due to the political use of such a historical event as the Civil War. I think there is a big political mistake here. Not thinking the conflicts are over is supported by sectors that are hoped to disappear soon, but for now… it doesn’t seem that way.

Q. What does this mean for this country today? That bad memory of winners and losers, good and bad.

R. It seems like a huge burden to me because it does us a lot of harm as a society not to accept the obviously imperfect but very beneficial Transition as good. Don’t cover a historical event like the Civil War either. Because not doing so means that we still hold France responsible for the Napoleonic invasion or Italy for the Roman invasion. There are many countries that use the Spanish Crossing as an example. Why can’t we realize this?

There is great confusion on the literary scene now.

Q. In this book, you also explore the bleak side of this country after the war. How was the novel born?

A. It was interesting because in 2004 I was invited to give a series of lectures at the University of Toronto, and one morning I went to a professor’s office and saw an envelope with the return address facing up on his desk. It was the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the international brigades. The teacher noticed that I was looking at the envelope and told me that there would be a moment of silence for the brigades. I asked when it was and he told me shortly after he got back to Spain, but if I wanted he would introduce me to a brigade member and I could meet him. I was talking to a former brigade member and that’s when I started thinking about the novel. That was the origin.

Talking about people like the S. Brigade member is one way of describing this country..

R. Yes, I think this is one of the functions of literature. Actually, I remember a reader asking me if a character was inspired by Jorge Semprún, but… I didn’t think of a specific first and last name when writing it.

Q. One of the characters in this book invokes a lantern to illuminate the darkness of what he is describing..

R. Yes, but it’s a pretty cynical position, because he also says that when they were in the field, they turned on the lantern at night and found sleeping birds and fired one shot to kill them. And that’s what was done to people back then, wasn’t it? Of course he says: I’m not shooting, I’m just turning on the flashlight. That’s why I say it’s a cynical position. It is a way of washing hands. But the one who lights the flashlight is as responsible as the shooter.

Q. Another says: “Everything was better before I was born.” That sounds like a sentence from Antonio Soler, doesn’t it?

A. Yes, hahaha. Yes, of course. This is part of my personal story. There’s one thing I’m thinking about: There was a certain decline in my family when I was born, or at least the idyllic world of my family broke a bit after I arrived.

Q. How many of you are in the books you write?

A. One hundred percent. Even the characters I disagree with have a look of my own. Of course, I strive for no judgment or punishment, I try to have a Cervantine compassion with everyone. In the end, you are writing about someone else but from your own subjectivity.

Q. There is a spring resurrection at the end of this book. Really?

R. Yes, I believe that with the end of the dark period of the dictatorship, the advent of democracy and then the disenchantment, and then the normalization of a democracy’s logical problems, there is room for some hope. Then we saw that there are extreme elements that deepen the conflict, but apart from this, we can be socially satisfied at a moderate level.