Author hostels, which offer writers the time, space, and tools to work in the best of circumstances, are commonplace in our cultural scene, but no one has had the honor of having such a stellar contributor, or as hard a time as he has. Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. South Africa will First author to benefit from ‘Escribir El Prado’, as this newspaper found out. A project supported by art gallery director Miguel Falomir in conjunction with the Loewe Foundation, allowing various international authors to immerse themselves not only in the works displayed at the museum, but also in their collections and workshops. taking a real artistic bath, as in meetings with its specialists, technicians and restorers. The aim is to promote a literary text to be published. ‘Grant’ magazine, first in the Spanish edition and later in the English edition. Publisher and editor, North American Valerie Miles, is advising the international project.
The fact that Coetzee (a Nobel Prize winner and two Booker Prize winners) initiated the initiative shows the ambition of a project that will lead the author to visit Europe. next June and July The capital city of Madrid is probably a highly appreciated stay away from the media spotlight and journalists, given its notoriously sullen nature. “Questioning is a tool I am not good at. I am very short in my answers, and this brevity (dryness) is often misinterpreted as a sign of anger or anger,” he explained in a letter to his friend Paul Auster, well aware of his apparent harshness.
Love to Castile
Throughout his life, but especially in this 21st century, the Nobel Prize winner has demonstrated a desire to move away from the most prominent poles of cultural power on the Anglo-Saxon scene, the cities in which he came to reside, such as New York or London. . What has resulted in recent years particular fondness for the Spanish language -Coetzee is a major connoisseur of Latin American literature – which has led to his writings displaying a reflective militancy in favor of the geopolitical South. Following these assumptions, His most recent books have been previously published in Spanish. -notably in the Argentine publishing house ‘El Hilo de Ariadna–more reluctantly than the English original as a “language of globalization”.
Just a year before he won the Nobel Prize in 2003, Coetzee moved to Adelaide, Australia, as a professor at his university, and soon received Australian citizenship as well. symbolically claims the southern hemisphere. And the author gradually left behind the naive narrator to become a critical thinker on issues such as animal defense, vegetarianism, and social injustice.
Spain, a country he has personally visited several times, has also been a recurring setting for some of his stories. In 2000 he wrote a short story entitled. ‘A house in Spain’, He explained that Bellpuig in Urgell had bought a house in the town of Lleida and, according to the story, spent seasons there. After sowing suspicion, Spanish publishing house Random House Literature denied the information, explaining that the story was confined to the realm of pure fiction only, but someone so jealous of their privacy can always doubt whether the author really resides there. secret, for a while. impossible to know.
His last work without giving up on the Catalan geography ‘Dialect’, appeared last year, moved the plot barcelona, A Chopin expert pianist is invited by a woman he is in love with. And on another note, Elizabeth Costello, a wandering character who appears in many of her works and is considered the author’s alter ego, retreats to the cinema for a while. small town in Castilla.
As for the weight of art in the works of South Africans, there are many pages devoted to cinema, dance and especially music. It is noteworthy that the author plays with a picture of a dog in ‘Pole’, which is frozen as if it were a painting in a park in Poland and serves to appeal to the hero’s strong thought on the world. how memory transforms our perception of images.
Offer for resident writers of Prado, A total of six authors or authors who visited the museum, one in the spring and the second in the fall for each of the three years of the project. The pair of writers selected each year will respond to a writer model with a long career and great recognition, and a writer model with a more emerging structure, with stays ranging from three weeks to two months.
Letters describing El Prado
The combination of writing and painting has a long tradition in the museum, and there are many literary works that use their collection as inspiration. It has had a direct impact on writers like the permanent collection Eugeni D’Ors Who’s in the seminal’Three hours at the Prado museum’ Written in 1922, it outlined what the museum saw itself as an essential guide to visiting. The Argentinean’s book has a similar purpose. Manuel Mujica Lainez “A novelist at the Prado Museum”. without forgetting the poem ‘picture’ The play in which Rafael Alberti, who wants to be a plastic artist, interprets the paintings and the play that impressed him the most when he first came to the art gallery, in a poetic language. “War Night at the Prado Museum”It describes the transfer of paintings to the basement of the building to protect them from Francoist bombings during the civil war and the revival of the characters in the paintings. A similar didactic intent enlivens the piece. ‘Las Meninas’ by Buero Vallejo by discovering the mysteries of the realization of charismatic painting.
Lately, Antonio Munoz Molina published last year “Prado Tours”is a compilation of conferences given in 2019, which coincides with the bicentennial of the institution. From a more eccentric and less formal point of view, we must remember the beginning of the ‘memory’. ‘Leaving Atocha station’ A comic book by English poet Max Porter in which he takes a hallucinatory walk through the rooms of the art gallery and also orders it from him. Max, the ‘Trio of the Magical’A special look at El Bosco’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ on the 500th anniversary of the Flemish painter.