Writer from Zamorano Juan Manuel de Prada publish the book “Weirdos like me”A volume that brings together forgotten literary figures.
–Sometimes with irony, sometimes with lots of humor, and even compassion, he approaches a group of writers from the 19th and 20th centuries who had very different ideologies and beliefs and went beyond the cultural patterns of the period in which they lived.
–A book that I enjoyed writing, which is the product of many readings over many years, and that I have been writing throughout my life. It is a book that tries to share with the reader the excitement I feel for these proletarians of art, these characters who have been left in the shadow of literature and who are condemned to take a little place in the footnotes of stories from literature and give them away. Make an emphasis, even if modest, a tribute to them by putting them back in the spotlight.
–Among the wide list of writers there are some very well-known ones.
–Indeed, like Concha Espina, who was well known in her time, or Víctor de la Serna, who was known for his journalistic side and who, interestingly, was the son of Concha Espina and was forgotten due to various circumstances, mainly because they found accommodation here. but then they lost this time by becoming disturbed writers for ideological or aesthetic reasons. Others were writers who were cursed while they were alive but recovered over time, but the vast majority were writers who were not applauded while they were alive and were not applauded after their death.
–What criteria did you follow in the department?
–A criterion arising from my interest in reading. There are times when authors interest you and you want to read their entire work. This is almost a vital criterion. The second part of the book is dedicated to the Argentinian writer Leonardo Castellani, and the last part is dedicated to the Catalan writers I reached during my research on Ana María Sagi. In this work, I encountered a generation of writers from the 20s and 30s, when I started studying in Catalonia, and they were all contemporaries of Sagi. I found this very interesting because you see a rich panorama compared to the somewhat monotonous and stereotypical vision we are presented with.
–You mentioned cursed and disturbed writers. Have you felt cursed throughout your extensive career?
–I consider a writer who goes against the ideas of the time to be cursed or strange. Without a doubt, I consider myself a weirdo. Although it is rare to find a person who is not bothered by his time, who is not comfortable in the time allotted to him and in the country to which he is assigned, I consider myself a curse. This doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be Spanish or that I don’t want to live in the 21st century. It just means I want to be able to change it, it’s the damn person’s attitude, but reality is pretty hard to change and one has to bang one’s head against the wall, but one has to get angry.
– Is swimming against the current tiring?
–It’s tiring, yes. We all want what we say to sound impressive and to be applauded. Praise and applause may be comforting, but they are lethal to the writer.
-Because?
–Because they kill your nerves, your critical vision, and everything that, in my opinion, characterizes the original writer who is disturbed in the world. Only when you are disturbed by the world do you think of changing it with words. When we are very comfortable in the world, we ultimately want to live, but we do not need to discuss the world we live in by writing about it. In this sense, swimming against the current may be more tiring, but ultimately more spiritually rewarding.
–Because it is not like that financially.
–Writing is obviously a job that will not allow you to live a very busy life. This is the kind of job that if you work hard and are persistent, it can provide you with a modest living and nothing more.
–Has the value of literature been devalued?
–Yes, we live in an age devoid of spirituality, and this social process has some consequences, and one of them is the extinction of art. Art loses its power, at first it turns into something purely aesthetic and empty, but then that aesthetic also dies. Then art ceases to be like that. There are many artistic expressions that are dead or survive as remnants. I think of opera, almost symphonic music… There are artistic expressions that are about to die, and there is also literature, of course. If you look at today’s best-selling book lists and compare them to the best-selling book lists of 20 years ago, you will discover that many of the works from decades ago may be works that we can do now. They may seem mediocre, but almost all of them were works of literary intent and quality. The works on the lists today, with absolute exceptions, are devoid of literary ambition, are purely functional, and can be a Netflix series just as they are novels. Every day a novel is published about psychopaths committing ritual crimes; This is an event that occurs at most once a year around the world. We turn a strange anecdote into a literary genre.
-Why is this happening?
–Literature has lost its way, turning from an artistic expression aimed at illuminating the mystery of humanity into pedestrian entertainment.
– From your perspective, can you get back on track?
-Yeah yeah. I am not a fatalist. I believe that history is not cyclical but spiral, both turning and moving forward. I believe that after a material age comes a spiritual age, after an age that despises beauty, comes an age of admiration. I believe that human beings learn from mistakes.
–Has being a Catholic writer caused you any greater harm among Catholics?
–Being a Catholic has very quickly become a residue and something that forces you to confront the world. The Catholic can separate himself from the world so much, but I cannot. I am a person who loves to be in the world, and therefore my literature is one that presents very specific problems and issues to the world in which I have to live in many ways. This makes my literature a problematic one, and I believe that today’s Catholic has developed a more syrupy aesthetic because of the need not to confront the most challenging aspects of the world. The writer must be alone, if I were a modest Catholic I would not be the writer I am today.
–You are engrossed in writing right now, but what are you working on?
–I am finishing a novel or a novel of novels. A very ambitious and very long novel that tired me out and drove me a little crazy. I’d like to finish it before Christmas but I’ll finish it in January and hope it comes out that year. It takes place during the years when the Nazis occupied Paris, and it stars all the Spanish writers and artists who were there during those years. This is a very interesting microcosm because figures like Picasso lived alongside exiles and others who were there because they wanted to.
–At that time Zamorano was living in the city of light Baltasar the Wolf Are you including Picasso because he was one of the artists he supported?
–I do not include this for the very simple reason that Lobo’s existence is a shadowy existence about which there is no reliable information, although he wrote about his wife’s exile in Paris. He has not yet identified himself as an artist, he does not lead a public life, he does not appear in the press of the time or in the testimonies of those who wrote about that period. He was working but he didn’t show himself. It is a text that I regret not being able to include in the novel, but it is a text that is supported by documents that I was able to collect in archives, letters, and books published about those years, and which I am very sorry that I could not find. anything about it.