speed Manuel Jabois matched by the quality of its prosethe liveliness in his eyes, the sudden sadness he sometimes expresses by looking, and the combination of melancholy and courage that, as they act together, leave their mark on his prose and therefore on his soul. This novel can also be an autobiographybut above all it is confirmation that this journalist, one of the best in this language in recent decades, is truly a poet, that is, a novelist, supported by the difficult writing passion and talent of these writers. Those who are not satisfied with any adjective.
‘Mirafiori’ (Alfaguara) is a love story of dissatisfaction, constant struggle, where everyone loves each other but no one loves each other. It’s “my darkest novel,” he says.
Jabois was born in 1978 in Sanxenxo, Galicia, and sometimes looks like he was 17, which is roughly when he started writing for the press. He’s been running ‘El País’ for a while now and is the fastest this side of the West. By the way, the novel almost always looks like a bolero. Like Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s best books.
Reading it is like listening to it speak: it is easy to follow.
I always thought it would be easy to talk to people. How to write. It’s not like that, but it could be. The hard part is leaving it on paper. It also happens to us when we talk to people.
So, to what extent will there be some questions you will ask yourself in this book?
A reader friend of mine just told me that she read my book in my voice because I have a very personal style and it’s very difficult for someone not to read me in my voice. Everything I say comes out in my voice since I wrote it. This friend of mine said to me: “I started the novel with your voice and finished it with my own voice.” People somehow identify with what I say, perhaps because I too identify with the voice I express there.
This happened to the journalist until the 200th page, but this time he read it with his voice because up to that point the novel reads like a bolero. Love, pain and music coexist in it. Until the end, which is even more bolero.
I like that you said that. Because the ending cost me horror, the editors know it. I’m 3000 words away and I wasn’t rushing the end! A trip came along that I had to accompany, and on my birthday I went alone to the Malaga coast, under not sad but very entertaining circumstances. The inspiration that shaped the ending was summoned there. I think I have written very good pages, the best I have ever written: that is, the best I can give. Maybe in a year I can give more, but this is what I can give and I’m happy.
There is a lot of literary music.
As in ‘Malaherba’, there are many things, many landscapes that perhaps constitute the same corpus. There are some passages that have been mentioned before in other books; There are nods to writers I hold dear, as well as sections with specific music that can be attributed to those admirations.
It’s common for you to feature it in some way in your books. What was unexpected was that he would appear as the author of obituaries, as he did here…
A novel that deals with death, talks about death, and approaches it from different angles. I think it is appropriate to introduce a character, a journalist, who devotes himself to this and seeks out information to advance obituaries in the Anglo-Saxon style. The character travels to Madrid to look for actors, fails to publish, and it is the obituary world that opens the doors for him. Being a journalist opens doors for me, because it is easier to write in the field you master, even if it is completely fictional.
The novel is full of ghosts. How did they come?
They are with me, the ghosts are with me. Journalism, like hustle, gives you a lot of versatility in terms of writing, reading, and I really enjoy playing with characters who look like ghosts and who don’t. And I have fun with them, feeling like I’m having fun with those characters. I have a lot of fun writing. While doing this, I find myself on different pages, in different styles, like ghosts.
The presence of Manuel Jabois as a journalist is inevitable. Did you struggle at any point to avoid this character?
No matter who I am, I think my character is not in the book, or at least it doesn’t seem to me to have a conflict with that possible appearance in that sense. It was so much fun for me to write about the obituary journalist because I imagined a journalist actually doing that.
There are dreams, there are drugs, there is falling in love, there is fear, there are secrets… How do all these elements become a summary? Mirafiori?
I think this is my darkest novel. There is so much light, so much light that the characters become transparent. But it is a darker novel than the other two (‘Malaherba’, ‘Miss Marte’). It is a novel that, in a way, covers the other two, but remains in a darkness greater than the one that dominates them. When I wrote my first novel, someone told me that there is beauty at the core of horror, that there is always compassion even in the darkest hours. And this is found, for example, in the first chapter and the last chapter, which are almost the same but told differently. In those dialogues, in those encounters, the characters tend to forgive each other, to insult each other, to justify themselves, to shed some light on themselves with the saddest, poorest candle they can get their hands on.
Does saying “the darkest novel” mean that it is the most personal novel?
I do not believe in that. It has nothing to do with my material or personal biography, yet it is the most autobiographical in terms of emotions. It is said at the beginning that it is based on real characters, not real events. Perhaps the most biographical thing in this novel are the ghosts.
The book is about failure, love and beauty. The beauty of the people, the beauty of the landscape, the beauty of the place they will return to years later. Is it right to say that the beauty we see in the stories is also the background of terror?
There is so much beauty in two people falling in love. This is absolutely miraculous. It’s miraculous that something like this has happened for millions of years and that we’re here for that very reason, because others love each other. Imagine that two people suddenly see each other, encounter each other in the world, in life, in every situation, and it turns out that they think the same, feel the same, say that they were created for each other… And they break up. … I never thought of the breakup as a failure. The separation is the result of a previous victory. If you break up because you are in love, I think this can be considered not a failure, but the end of some kind of miracle that happened at a certain moment and brought two people together. It’s a mystery.