Identity of the finalist of the latest edition of the award’Planet‘ emerged with a final surprise: Alfonso Goizueta jumped to the front page thanks to (Madrid, 1999) ‘Father’s blood’A historical novel about Alexander the Great. The author will speak about this this Thursday at the Asturian Press Club of La Nueva España of the Prensa Ibérica group. It was an Asturian publishing house. NobelThis gave him his first opportunity, publishing the article ‘Limiting Power 1871-1939’ at the age of 17. ‘The Last Monarchs of Castile’ appeared the following year. Goizueta has a PhD in International Relations from King’s College London and a diploma in History and International Relations from the same university.
Winning ‘Planet’ exhausts…
It was a very fun tour, you should make good use of it because next year they will give the award to someone else and no one will remember you (laughs).
Alexander dominated the political sphere…
He had great political savvy in knowing how to win over his allies. There are also those who claim that you lose this ability as you progress on your journey. It initially has one of the characteristics of the Greek monarchy: cunning, knowing how to deal with the enemy, knowing how to be very careful with him and at the same time not becoming an enemy to the ally, and not very used to a political monarchy where you have to earn the respect and support of your Allies, the much more cruel Persian progresses through Asia, sensing more characteristics of its monarchy. As he begins to lose these abilities, he also begins to go insane, which causes many of his companions to rebel against him, and with such paranoia about the loyalty of his generals, he begins to see betrayals everywhere. . .
Power brings madness…
This is one of the most enduring themes, the methods have changed, but this idea of absolute power corrupting even the ideals that were originally supposed to be noble is still very current and it is obvious what effect this power management has. personal cost that becomes unaffordable. Alexander leaves Greece thinking that he will liberate the oppressed cities and give them back the democracy that the Persians took from them, but as he begins to advance, it is impossible to maintain this virtue. It is swallowed by the emperor himself, who begins to emerge at the beginning and end. I was amused and even quite interested in showing these two faces of power, these two faces of Alexander, who lived with himself, who returned to his inner world at night and observed everything he did during the day, the terrible actions he committed. they do, they realize, and this is nothing but the result of their own steps.
Is there too much Alfonso in Alejandro?
Quite a few. The novels are quite autobiographical, especially in the beginning, and this is a journey that Alejandro and I take together, and it is also a journey that the reader can take as well. It’s not a novel that leaves you indifferent because you grew up with it. It teaches you an attitude as a writer, the idea of improving yourself, the idea of knowing yourself so you can understand what’s happening to you, and also thinking a lot about how that self-understanding plays out. It reflects a better life for others. Ultimately, Alejandro’s problem is that he doesn’t understand himself, he avoids many answers about why he gets along badly with his mother, his own sexuality, or the idea of having children. The moral of the novel and the final scene is that this escape is useless, and if you spend your life running away, you’ve wasted it.
It’s a very current thing.
A young man’s novel told by a still young man. Of course, centuries have passed, but the idea of growing up and not being able to fully see yourself as an adult and not fully seeing yourself as a child is still valid; expectations, disappointments, first loves, friendships that you thought would last forever and suddenly gone wrong, relationships with parents, the desire for freedom and adventure… Managing pain, that is, freedom, is in human nature, because Alejandro must have it. I can have that too, like everyone else from my generation who doesn’t know very well where to step, who lives with that kind of fear and uncertainty, but also with the desire to want to confront it. life.
Can publishing at such a young age harm you?
This is the beginning of the journey, I don’t see it as the goal, if it were it would scare me more. Eventually you have no choice but to remember the reasons why you started writing and keep writing because if you enjoy it, you have no choice but to keep going.
Could Artificial Intelligence have written its own book?
No, at least not yet. AI has no creative or creative capacity. To write a book, what you do is borrow from many other books. Artificial intelligence doesn’t know what suffering is, it doesn’t know what love is, it doesn’t know what doubt is. You know what all the authors of the history of these topics have written because that is what you have recorded in your database.
If Alexander were alive today…
It may have something to do with the world of information, perhaps as a geographer. In the novel, he seems motivated by a curiosity to know himself, eventually reaching a point where he has no enemies left to defeat; geography was his rival because he wanted to decipher it, he wanted to decipher it, the world was as he drew it, his teacher Aristotle, whether the maps were as the Greek geographers drew them or whether the world was different from what he imagined.
There’s no character like Alejandro anymore, right?
He is a groundbreaking hero, and we can feel lucky that we did not have an Alexander who led entire armies from Macedonia to the Himalayas for the sake of an ideal. There is something magical about writing about these heroes, these lives that are impossible to repeat in history and so distant in time as to be so mythological. Literature also has a way of revealing the magical things in the world. What interests me is the human hero with his failures and great abysses, like Alexander. I’m not interested in the archetypal hero who does everything well, I’m interested in chiaroscuro.
How do you handle criticism?
As long as the negatives are constructive, it is very interesting, you will learn a lot, because this is a job that you cannot come and learn from and I did not write Don Quixote and I will not write it. Every work is open to criticism. It would be so boring to have written a masterpiece as soon as you arrive and then have to leave, the fun thing is to develop and then read the positive reviews of course very grateful.
Could Pedro Sánchez be a good character?
What really interests me about the characters is that they have a more human, more magical side that brings them closer to literature. Pedro Sánchez is quite an automaton, but like all politicians today, they do not have a basis from which they can empathize and draw life lessons.
PISA is coming our way…
It is seen with sadness because we are a country with very little reading comprehension skills, which is the basis on which everything is built. Humanities is a field we return to when we want to reconnect with ourselves, our essence. We are in a very fast paradigm where there is a crisis of attention, and this causes you to be largely disconnected from your own essence, which is saved by returning to the classics, reading information for information’s sake.
Princess of Asturias, take a note.
It has a fundamental role not only in terms of dynastic continuity, but also in the continuity of the monarchical system, which is ultimately the constitutional system, and while the work that the Princess does is endearing, we need to remind ourselves that it is tremendously personal. All this, she is still an 18-year-old girl at the bottom of the canyon, the second institution of that corporate pyramid. I admire him very much. And Ms. Letizia did a very professional job in everything related to the functions of a wife.
Interested in a political career?
I am entering more into the world of literature, the world of knowledge, the world of teaching, and I do not know if I will be a good politician, I would not feel very comfortable in the current environment.