The night of the city is the great void filled by the hero who calls himself Vagalume and whose writings remain anonymous until after his death, his family discovers him amid mystery and lies. He brings it to light for his friend, the narrator, to read and appreciate or keep forever. Capable of penetrating the depth of writing, loneliness, pain, emptiness, Llamazares here demonstrates the inexplicable memory and desolation of the author and his family, how he was able to write so much without revealing it. Mystery is a kind of poetry, and here the novelist from a now sunken town returns to this perspective on water or oblivion, so that an undercover novelist can help him explain what literature has to say about grief that comes out of nothingness or death. This interview was held at his home in Madrid, away from the stage, although in his mind and writings the consequences of the secret town he came from were always in his prose and poetry.
What is the word vagalume to you and how do you live with yourself?
This is something that has become a part of my life. Let’s see, I have a problem: I don’t have a novel until I get the title. Let’s say the title is the spirit of the novel. I changed the title three times. I don’t know when it came up, but when it came, I understood the novel. Now, funny, the word vagalume comes to my mind in many places. I was walking down Ponzano street the other day and found a restaurant called Vagalume. A friend told me he went to Galicia and found a bar called Vagalume. Someone sent me a poem by Manuel Rivas called Vagalume. Anyway, that vagalume is already a part of me.
Vagalume loneliness?
Vagalume is the light of the night. The solution to the mystery. A journalist called me today to interview about the publication of the book and said: “I thought it was a novel about the need to write and the passion to live.” Look, yes. I write at night and I look out the window and I see the lights come on and I say: maybe someone is not sleeping or typing like me or life goes on while almost everyone else is asleep. I write, and there comes a time when fiction is more important to me than reality. I think that’s the underlying reflection of this novel.
It is also poetry. How did you design the sound of this novel?
I don’t know if it was Javier Marías who said that there are two types of writers: writers with a map and writers with a compass. I’m a writer with a compass, no maps, and I’ve always been fascinated by people’s secret lives. You get on the subway, you look at someone and you say, what about his secret life, right? The secret lives of writers have always caught my attention, and I’ve collected a few stories here. I remember Marcial Lafuente Estefanía, who wrote to earn a living because she couldn’t work, and people like Fernando González Ledesma and Eduardo Guzmán, who started writing Western novels for food. They are a kind of secret writer. Then there is the story of Mario Lacruz, a publisher who opened drawers in his office when his parents died and found several manuscripts. So they learned that there is always an editor who writes. Anyway, people who refuse to be writers are fascinating, don’t you think?
How did you combine journalism with literature in this novel? Does this story have anything to do with you?
Well yes. Because all characters are masks of their authors. This novel is autobiographical, not because it tells about my life, but because it talks about what my life was like: an absolute commitment to the storytelling trade. So all the characters in this novel are mine. All.
And is this book also an urban interpretation of Yellow Rain?
It could be. It can be an urban reading of a lonely life. As Fernando Pessoa said: “Writing is my way of being alone.” I think about that in this novel. It’s about getting away from the noise to think about life, about the life of oneself and others. Life is a novel where we know the end of the plot, and you have two choices: leave life or live with the greatest enthusiasm possible.
Have you thought about this dilemma yourself?
No. I love living and enjoying life.
Is that why he left his town?
Well yes. I remember having to leave town to do something. Because if it wasn’t so, maybe what happened to another writer could have happened to me… One day, he was offered to manage a publishing house and he did not take a step because he had to be with his mother and stayed at home. il and then they ignored him until I told him they had a big prize. There has always been severe centralism in every sense in Spain. And in small cities, even if you have a very strong inner life, the world can come crashing down on you.
It seems that this book is between La lluvia amarilla and Juan Rulfo’s La Comala.
We’re just always writing the same book. It is exactly as said. I’ve always been inspired by provincial cities, which not only can be very good to live in but also very bad due to social control. As a result, places in literature arise from reality, but when they are told, they cease to be real.
I liked the poetic encouragement he offered to journalism here.
I think journalism is a genre of literature. You should write a story with the same passion as a novel. Journalism is a novel to be written today, and literature is a novel to be written in the past. The tool is the same: language.
One of the characters describes current journalists as computer mice. Do you see us like this too?
Journalism has changed as much as society. What is happening is that there is a sanctification of technology and the virtual, but at its core journalism remains the same as it always has been. Of course, journalists do not leave the computer, they do not go out on the street anymore. I go to a newspaper and see that everyone there is on duty, and they look like Japanese people who don’t stop producing. But the real newsroom is outside, not inside.
You are writing about a literary man and it seems that you are the man of letters.
He is a writer who explores the life of another writer who wrote a novel about his father, who is also a writer. That’s why I say that I wrote this novel to reflect on my life’s passion: writing. All in all, Vagalume is a novel about the mystery of writing and how we writers sometimes become fireflies at night.
To what extent does the author write?
Especially when I was writing this novel, I had the feeling that I was writing to myself. This is true. The characters told me. I felt that way too.
What role does literature play in publishing today?
I am not one to say what is good and what is bad. I believe writers are like radio stations: we broadcast on one frequency. That is, if you broadcast on FM, the modulated frequency readers will respond to you. If you type in medium wave, medium wave readers will respond to you. I know what I want to do, I was lucky enough to do it and therefore I am not jealous of anyone. What I want is for literature to have some justification, because it has been so trivialized, commercialized that in the end commercial success seems to determine literary quality.
It is interesting that, as in his other books, the shadow of the war and the post-war period is here too.
They are the shadows that continue to be projected in Spain today. It is something that goes on within the human being. This is evident in the landscapes of Spain: you drive along modern, beautiful roads, but if you dig around… you’ll find human remains in the ditches. That’s it. The ongoing resistance to the identification and burial of the dead shows you that the shadow of the war and the post-war era is still upon us.
There are even references to moles in the novel.
Yes that is right. Remember that in the post-war era, moles are not only people who hide to be safe, but also spy on others and then betray them.
It’s also very cold in the book. Snow. But the important thing here is the lie and the mystery and how he says it.
I didn’t notice the cold and the snow…. Lie, yes, but not in a moral, religious, or criminal sense. The mystery of life, yes. Because many of us, like writers, turn life into a mystery in order to keep living.