Sex and gentrification, friendship and job insecurity, the search for lost childhood, and the growing gap between the countryside and Spanish cities. Writer use Lahoz combines loose verse (Destiny), his seventh novel, universal themes and hot topics. With poetic prose brimming with magnetism, the Catalan author constructs a fast-paced plot filled with feminism, comradeship, injustice and disappointment. The sexual awakening of the main character Sandra, emancipation of women in recent years. The daughter of a wealthy family, Ximena is the embodiment of classicism. An intellectually ambitious Xavi turns opportunism into a recipe for success. As in her previous novels, the characters in this novel too. loose verse groping they stumble, they make mistakes, they fail until they find a certain balance of surrender. “I love characters who try life and then regret it,” the author admits.
If Use Lahoz’s previous novels were recreated in the past, loose verse ends in the present day by describing A Barcelona plagued by real estate speculation and job insecurity. With loose verseThe author, who won the Primavera Novel Award in 2013, has established himself as one of the important writers of Spanish literature.
Q. Most of the important people loose verse They’re women, Sandra, Ximena, Isa… except Xavi. What challenges did it pose to you in these very feminist times to describe it in a feminine way and to get on the skin of a lesbian woman with such an active sex life??
r. Fiction allows us to approach universal themes such as abandonment, love, money, death, exile, and desire. It was a pleasure to put myself in the shoes of a liberated woman. Sandra is a reflection of the women’s liberating movement. She would not have lived like this had she, like her mother, been born in Valdecádiar in the forties. She was born in Barcelona, the cradle of the lgtbi+ movements of the seventies in Spain. The desire and need for pleasure is a fundamental theme. The pursuit of pleasure changes over time. The games that give us pleasure in childhood are not the same as in adolescence or maturity. There is a taste in friendship, a taste of the soul, and a taste in knowledge and writing. I love characters who try life and then regret taking the desire this far.
Q. There is social inequality in his work. However, in loose verse It depicts the insecurity of college-educated youth like Sandra...
r. There are some recurring themes in my work: forgiveness, class struggle, the passage of time, the exile of childhood, the difficulty of sustaining feelings such as love or friendship. I’m sorry that Sandra didn’t and couldn’t liberate herself financially. There is job insecurity and inflation… The only thing that prevents Sandra from fully liberating herself is her economic dependence on her mother, which stems from social inequalities and job insecurity. I trust fiction as a reflection of the reality of a time and age. I’d rather read a novel than a history book, I’m more interested in emotion than overdocumentation.
Q. Gentrification and real estate speculation are also strongly featured in the novel. Sandra has to move to the suburbs of Barcelona…
r. It is one of the themes of the novel. The devouring presence of vulture funds and vulnerability are decisive factors in Sandra’s family. This society has a soft spot for winners, the poor foreigner who has crossed the Mediterranean is not as welcome as the moneyed Swiss. It seems as if those who fail are doomed to die. If you lose and you don’t have money, you’re useless to me, the system whispers to Sandra, inviting her to leave headquarters. The problem of gentrification is very serious. A massive project like Barcelona Super Blocks risks becoming a work designed for the elite. The area is revalued and those born and raised here no longer have the right to stay as they can no longer bear the prices.
I admire the survivor more than the winner. I like the one who tries harder than the leftover, the repetitive more than the nerd or the strong opportunist.”
Q. There are many losers in their novels. Does writing about them inspire you more than the winners?
r. Depends on Baldrichs And good friends he painted a portrait of what a winner should be like. The lives of deceivers and ordinary people seem more worthy of narration. I admire the survivor more than the winner. I like the one who tries harder than the leftover, the repetitive more than the nerd or the strong opportunist. Only the very powerful can afford to live outside the system and at the same time ignore the beauty of art, culture and knowledge. I like self-made characters who have something to regret.
Q. His prose is a persistent search for lost time. Is the memory not enough to return to childhood?
r. Childhood, adolescence, youth… All of these are a mythical region to which one often returns. Some people work more with documents or imagination. I work with the material of my life and my memory. Joseph Brodsky said that traveling enriches memory. When you write a novel, which is another journey, the memory is enlightened and comes to help you, giving you human behaviors, scenes, regions, and landscapes that you wouldn’t remember if you didn’t start writing.
Q. As a matter of fact, you always refer to travel. The journey is implied as a salvation, but at the same time Sandra’s travels seem like an escape from herself. Is traveling a way of getting closer to oneself or a process of returning home?
r. Travel, sex, friendship or knowledge has given me almost everything. I don’t understand life without traveling, without the pleasure of exploring, without curiosity. I believed in Cernuda’s poetry pilgrim: “don’t miss an easier target / your eyes always look at the one never seen before”. Literature fixes life, and what most resembles literature is travel, which also fixes routine, and that’s why it nourishes us so much.
Q. Barcelona, the main city in all your novels, is complemented by the non-existent town of Valdecádiar, an imaginary region. What role does it play in the construction of your literary universe?
r. My imaginary realm responds to the dream of perpetuating the universe of my novels, of creating a human comedy, of all novels being one and part of dialogue. That’s why scenarios, characters and Valdecádiar are repeated. I come from that generation of readers who believe we are Macondo, Comala and Santa María, imaginary regions that are more real than some real places. Literature manages to equip the imagination with truth, it manages to equip the most terrible with beauty. Valdecádiar is a nice counterpoint to the city.
Today everything comes to us piecemeal or we tear it apart, conversations, hustle and bustle. The literary novel, which plunges into moral dilemmas and traces the characters, is an element of transgression.”
P. Xavi, novel classics, structures with a beginning, development and end, and novels with plot. Bet on fragmented forms to replicate the spirit of Tinder, WhatsApp, Instagram. Is the classic novel dead or more alive than ever?
r. We live in an era of persistent innovation, fragmentation, screens and displays. Everything comes to us piecemeal or we break it down, conversations, haste. The literary novel, which plunges into moral dilemmas and traces the characters, is an element of violation. There are many ways to tell, a novel is better not to have a linear structure. If the story and style are good, I don’t care if it’s an experimental or a nineteenth-century novel.
P. So, do we need stories in any format more than ever?
r. My friend Guillem Terribas, a bookseller from Girona, always says: If you don’t read, nothing happens, but if you read, something happens. If there are new formats, they are welcome. Admiration for a good story, whether written, filmed, or theatrical, has not diminished; on the contrary, fiction fulfills an educational function.
P. A sentence from the book: “Written for revenge, it is a revenge with life, with the passage of time.” Why Use Lahoz?
r. To feel free. When I was little I had a ball, a town, a devoted mother, an endless summer, a beach, a yo-yo, some trading cards…
Source: Informacion
Brandon Hall is an author at “Social Bites”. He is a cultural aficionado who writes about the latest news and developments in the world of art, literature, music, and more. With a passion for the arts and a deep understanding of cultural trends, Brandon provides engaging and thought-provoking articles that keep his readers informed and up-to-date on the latest happenings in the cultural world.