author. He triumphed two years ago with his novel Un amor. Various film and television adaptations of his works and his previous book will be brought to the big screen by Isabel Coixet.
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 The 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. 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 unavoidably familiar environment that we are forced into determines the mood 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 Bad Letter, the first cousins of this family’s stories. 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.
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 transference, of family resonance, appears in two of my favorite novels recently: Eco, Carlos Frontera and I come from this fear, Miguel Ángel Oeste.
The paternal family concerns the follower of Scar, a seductive male figure he wants to control (and thus destroy).
I never thought of 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: Scar Knut can The Father of this book must lead the educational and moral baton of the family. Both controlling and demanding, both narcissistic. I hadn’t thought of that, but yes, they do look alike.
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 and very excited on the inside that they can’t even tell.” 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, 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. As for the children of this family, did any of them believe in the Father and follow his principles? None.
If you as a writer had to choose a topic in which your concerns weighed on, would social conventions oppress the individual like this?
Yes definitely. Other related issues arise from this, too, such as prejudice, abuse of power in everyday situations, or difficulties in growing.
I know you hardly recognize yourself in that rare, dark, and worthless label that the critics adorn. 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 a nuisance because deep down they identify with the stories I’m telling and they don’t like it. I do not know. I worry about a trend that decides whether the book is good or not 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 I couldn’t 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.
Source: Informacion
