From his novels, many of which are populated by slightly mismatched girls, Sarah Table It had dark spots. This is one of the author’s major themes, examining family relationships and/or uses of love, armed with a scalpel that dissolves emotions and often toxic power relationships. His previous work, ‘Un amor’, will go to the cinema with Isabel Coixet, which made a huge impact in bookstores. The current ‘Family’ (again Anagram) will have multiple readers consider creating their own family.
Many Hollywood movies show us the family as a fortress in the Far West, facing multiple threats and violence from the outside. But in his novel ‘Family’ we are warned that danger is within.
It can happen, yes, luckily it doesn’t always happen. The biggest problem in these cases is the lack of visibility that guarantees impunity. Well, we’ve always been told that dirty laundry is washed at home, right? I think this idea still applies to a lot of people. Talking about family matters is embarrassing and even frowned upon. It sounds disloyal and ungrateful. Socially, the family should be a source of pride, not discomfort. There are even those who boast of family knots, they are constantly seen on social networks. But the truth is that the more closed the family space is, the more isolated it is from the outside world, the greater the risk that abuses will be committed inside. For example, children find themselves in great helplessness because they have nowhere to compare. They believe and assume that this is normalcy.
He wrote this book in the midst of a pandemic. Do you think that the oppressive and necessarily ‘family’ environment we live in determines the style of this novel?
I do not think so. This story has already been in my head for a long time, indeed for a very long time. There are stories from my book ‘The Bad Letter’, which are first cousins to the stories of this family. And incarceration, seclusion, etc. opinions. They already appear in my other books. What the closure did was give me a great deal of continuity in writing, I was able to write a more compact and coherent book, in that sense the incarceration was good for me.
The characters in my novel carry the weight of a legacy. They learned to hide in order to survive. They will do this for the rest of their lives, even if they are no longer needed.
His books often talk about characters who are out of tune or uncomfortable with the world, but I can say that this is the first time he’s taken up the idea (in a molding sense) of how such characters can be created.
Yes, this is very well seen… Remember that some of the stories of this family are told by the children as they grow up and even live outside the home. The rope that connects them to the rest of the book is finer, but it’s there. The characters carry the weight of a legacy. It’s a psychological, emotional legacy that makes them who they are. They learned to hide in order to survive. They will do this for the rest of their lives, even if they are no longer needed. By the way, this idea of transfer, family resonance also appears in two recent novels that I truly love: ‘Eco’ by Carlos Frontera and ‘I come from this fear’ by Miguel Ángel Oeste.
His ‘paterfamilias’ relates to the ‘follower’ in ‘Cicatriz’, a seductive male figure who seeks to control (and thus destroy).
I never thought about this relationship but I don’t ignore it, I am often the least fit to analyze my books… They are different characters of course, but they both try to submit and are simultaneously subject to the unwritten laws of what it means to be a man: ‘The Wound’ Must entertain and conquer Knut no matter what, the Father of this book must lead the educational and moral baton of the family. Both controlling and demanding, both conscious, both narcissistic. I hadn’t thought of that, but yes, they do look alike.
When I write, I usually take inspiration from real people, I don’t start with abstractions, and there is a model for this character as well. In reality, the complexity of this Father is the complexity of life.
Is it because Baba is a dictator (as he is called in capital letters as representing his own state) and also a kind of Gandhian follower, rejecting the Church and adopting highly progressive positions, adding complexity to the character, escaping the obvious?
Yes, sure, but only because the reality is so complex. When I write, I usually take inspiration from real people, I don’t start with abstractions, and there is a model for this character as well. In reality, the complexity of this Father is the complexity of life. He’s a dictator, yes, but his feet are made of clay and he’s undoubtedly in a lot of pain. The eldest son, Damián, who, despite his masculinity, has a very vulnerable personality, or perhaps precisely because of this, suffers from what is expected of him as the firstborn. I always say that patriarchy makes many women unhappy, but also many men.
The characters in ‘The Family’ are said to be “obedient on the outside, but overly nervous on the inside that even they can’t understand.” Would that be a good description for most of the characters in your stories?
This inner current is common to most of my characters in all my books. The tension between pleasing, adapting, being kind, on the one hand, and rebelling, protesting, expressing true feelings, on the other. They may appear submissive at times, but they are never completely submissive. There is a feeling of freedom in them, or rather an undying longing for freedom. For example, if we look at the children of this family: Would any of them believe in the Father by assuming his principles? None.
Other problems arise from how social conventions overwhelm the individual, such as prejudice, abuse of power in everyday situations, or difficulties in growth.
If, as a writer, you had to choose a topic that Sara Mesa was interested in, would social conventions oppress the individual like that?
Yes definitely. Other related issues arise from this, too, such as prejudice, abuse of power in everyday situations, or difficulties in growing.
I know he doesn’t know himself very well in that rare, dark, ‘villain’ label that critics have ‘adorned’ him with. The truth is, the reader has a hard time accepting that they can identify with these disturbing and mismatched characters.
No, I’m not looking for such reactions. Maybe some people think I’m the ‘bad guy’ because deep down they identify with the stories I’m telling and they don’t like it. I do not know. I’ve been worried lately about a trend that judges whether a book is good based on whether you empathize with the protagonists. The concept of empathy is beautiful, it’s undoubtedly what connects us to narratives, the problem is that this empathy is now understood very superficially, as just a correspondence or even a desire. Under this premise, ‘Crime and Punishment’ could never be a good book, because let’s see who empathizes with Raskólnikov, the murderer of old women.
Now he is waiting for his works to be adapted into movies or TV series. Are you expecting something from him or is it something far from writing?
Look, they offered me to write scripts and write for television from time to time, but so far I haven’t been able to see clearly, I think my language is different and I prefer to avoid distractions. The truth is that I was so focused on writing that it took me many years to achieve it and now I don’t want to let it go by taking on other tasks. As for audiovisual adaptations of my own books, I look at them with curiosity and pleasure, but from afar.