The early death of a sister marked Dolores Redondo’s childhood. She was five years old, and as Rosalía de Castro wrote, death settled in her house with its black shadow. The girl who was then Dolores took refuge in books. Literature was the refuge that illuminated his childhood until life triumphed again and with it the light returned. Stories and more stories stimulated his imagination and set him free so much that he had no choice but to invent other possible worlds for others to live in. In adolescence, having read the entire established canon and freely seeking sources of literary inspiration, he began writing diaries. He wanted to relieve his stress, leave the remote place where he was born, and start living far away without even leaving his home. Years passed and Dolores, once a lonely girl, became a writer. Today, almost a decade after the beginning of the Baztán Trilogy phenomenon, he remains a best-selling author: a year after its publication, his last novel, Waiting for the Flood, became a best-selling book in Spain.
Do you know when you say “I want to be a writer”?
Yes, I was 14 years old. I loved reading and I really loved being alone, in silence, calm and at home. I almost remember moments from my childhood when they forced me to play games as torture. “Put down the book, go play!” When you know death, it gives you a view of the world that I wish you didn’t have until you were an adult. And I think the magic fades when you become a child.
Literature allowed him to regain the magic that death had taken away.
Clear. I gave myself permission to travel because the place I was living suddenly looked extremely squalid. From everything I read when I was 8 or 9, I must have been an insufferable child. I read books that did not correspond to the established canon, I was struck by children’s literature, so to speak, before I learned to read. I read The Godfather when I was ten, but I didn’t see the sex or violence.
How did growing up in a matriarchal society affect you?
Completely, unknowingly, of course I was unaware. Because my father was sailing, my mother was always alone with us at home. But it wasn’t just that; So were their sisters, their neighbors, their friends.
So which Dolores came out of there?
With neighborly conversations and coffee. I remember having coffee at home with neighbors and friends, women telling jokes about everything, and staying and listening because I didn’t play with the children.
Was this the seed of later feminist consciousness?
Something had to contribute. There’s something about this kind of forced matriarchy that I like, because it’s imposed, they have no choice, and they help each other. And men from this type of culture allowed themselves to be loved.
So then we think that the word brotherhood belongs to the day before yesterday.
Of course not. They did everything, even managed it. One of the things that seemed perfectly normal to me was that my father would come with his salary and give it to my mother.
Years pass and he meets references such as PD James, Juan Benet, Agatha Christie…
Matute.
Why did you become a writer?
Written by Stephen King. It sparked my imagination. I still love the freshness of their dialogue. You hear Stephen King in your head, and without giving a detailed description of the character, the dialogue reflects his personality and you know how he says it, how he speaks, and what his voice is like. This is amazing, this is a masterstroke.
Is there a book that affected you so much and changed your life?
One of the ones that influenced me the most was Mario Puzzo’s La Mamma. He comes from an Italian family of very poor immigrants who intended to leave Little Italy, the neighborhood where he lived. I read it when I was 15-16 and it made me think a lot about how hard it is to leave where I live. In those years, I repeatedly heard something I hated: “You will marry a sailor.”
Did they tell you much?
Yes, I realized and said: “I will not accept this life.” So there were a few misguided years when I focused on the fact that, as someone born where I was born, I could never be a writer.
Why did I think this?
Because it was a miserable place where poor, uneducated, hard-working people lived, people were dying while working. It was a dirty, smelly place full of fish entrails. There were ammonia factories and cod drying plants. It was awful there. I didn’t want to live there, I wanted to go somewhere else. Having read so much, I was open-minded, so when I heard things like “You’re going to get married” or “I don’t know who’s married or pregnant” I found it so ignorant, so provincial… The saying goes: reading makes your world bigger, but reading is mine. It makes my real world smaller. I hated living there and thought it was a local thing and if I lived in Madrid this wouldn’t happen, stupid me.
But he left there and became a writer. Tell me the difference between a writer and a writer.
I started thinking about this at the beginning of my career, when success came so quickly and people started asking me: “So why don’t you write about other things?” So why not write about the Civil War? So why don’t you write about ETA? I remember one day, with the Planeta Prize, Patria was having tremendous success at that time, and a journalist asked me: “So why don’t you, a Basque, write something like Fernando Aramburu?” And I told him: «Because Fernando Aramburu writes this and he does it very well. Fernando had been writing for many years and was writing things that the four of us read. So do you know why Fernando wrote Patria even though it wasn’t about fashion and he didn’t know if it would be published? Because he was born as Fernando’s child. He wrote because he was a writer, and writers have a novel growing inside them and they have to write it without knowing why.
That’s why you write.
That’s why I write whatever comes to my mind. Writers can choose what to write about because their choice has to do with the political moment, the death of Kissinger…
So, do you think this question would be asked in the same way to a man?
I think I get asked a lot of questions that wouldn’t be asked of a man. There is a very good filter for this: If it is absurd to ask the question of a person, it is also sexist to ask it of a woman.
Where are you writing from?
From a very happy place. I always write from the palace.
So what is a palace?
It is a mental place where all the stories take place. The most beautiful palace you can imagine, a place where all the windows are open, the curtains blow in the wind, where I run barefoot and am very happy.
In the foreword of his latest novel, Waiting for the Flood, he describes the pleasure he feels in continuing to be exposed to the “sweet torture of disasters” that he imagines in his mind.
Of course, because these things don’t happen. The genre I’m in…
Do you think this is a genre?
No. One of the things that some journalists said at the beginning of the Baztán Trilogy was that it contributed to the democratization of the detective novel. But it is true that mine is not a crime novel, it is a hybrid novel, and this mixing enriches it because it allows me to have literary boundaries, to speak from another voice, from another time, or to create an idea. I improve because I like it and I enjoy it. On the one hand, this is. But on the other hand, being able to mix everything together: love, adventure, historical moments… Who said everything had to be a certain way?
Why write with limits?
That’s why I don’t like the pure type because there are very specific boundaries. I like to go beyond these boundaries and do what I want.
How do you understand literature?
It’s a privilege. It’s a privilege to have readers and to dedicate myself to it because it’s what I love most and it’s what makes me freer.
So, do you see writing as work, effort, sacrifice?
I come from a business background and see this as a job. There is nothing like dedicating yourself to work you love because most of the time you don’t realize that you are not working, but doing what you have to do. And right now I see it as a natural thing. I am a writer, but I don’t write books as a job, I write. And because I’m a writer, I’m always dreaming. And because I’m a writer, I write when I’m not writing. I don’t see it as a job anymore, but I’m still very hardworking and disciplined. I work every day, but this is not a job, it is a necessity. We can all write on the train or plane, but that’s not the way. What works for me is granny mode: warmth in the front, whether from the sun or the stove, still, calm, with muffs on…
You said that having readers is a privilege. Readers have welcomed him from the beginning and continue to accompany him. Have you felt that welcome from the publishing world?
No, what’s happening is I’m also telling you that they don’t have any more balls and you can put the balls there. They had no choice because what happened was so enormous that it swallowed everything. We have 115 editions of The Invisible Guardian. First of all, it was in the world of crime fiction that I realized they had to bring me in. And I remember these articles: “What he did is not a detective novel.” And I said: «No, this is not a detective novel. This is a mestizo novel. And?”.
Do you see the same fraud outside of Spain, do you perceive it the same way?
Of course no. This does not happen in other countries and in countries with a very sexist tradition. But let them look, that’s all. They had to eat it with potatoes.
By the way, do you still celebrate successes like you did in the beginning?
Yes, do you know why? Because I come from a world of effort and everything has cost me a lot. It wasn’t easy. My first novel was published in six hundred copies but did not sell. On top of that, I lost the rights because the publisher I published it to had held on to it for ten years. There are also things like this. Sometimes almost because of your desire to publish signatures immediately. You want to move forward, you don’t know where you are, you’re not from that world and they scam you and something happens to you and things go wrong or you get a good result with a good publisher but the novel is not like that. I am not working. One more son, one more. Once I publish one novel, I immediately move on to the next. My philosophy is: that’s it, let’s move on to the next thing.