After three novels and several motherhoods, something that seems admirable to me, the Cantabrian writer Nuria Story has just presented his new book of short stories in Madrid, at the Alberti bookstore, Things are not going to be ordered on their own (Editorial Páginas de Espuma, 2024). I have come across six very suggestive stories, the kind that stay hanging around in my head, with different stories, but I got the impression that they had a common thread: the dislocation, the lack of a place in the world and the need to look for it; Erratic characters who, upon coming into contact with other human beings, generate new forms of relationships. And, perhaps, in these types of new relationships, hope lies in these stories.
There are six stories of between twenty and thirty pages. Lately I have been reading several books that are close to that format, stories, yes, intense, yes, but that gain psychological depth, where language plays a primary role, understood as different languages to communicate in a global world like this one. Thus, the language of a young man who communicates with a friend, in As if you had forgotten the meaning of living; the Moroccan who teaches his Spanish teacher key words in Tamazight, your native language; the Yiddish words from the last story… All of them pointing out to us the need to communicate despite the fact that the world is turned upside down, even though we do not know the place we live in or to whom or what we belong.
The book opens with God only understands esdrújula wordsa great story of two women, an atavistic, quasi-animal tale, as the narrator sees the Bolivian woman who takes care of her daughters while she works, a jaguar woman, with the ancestral wisdom of the land, with feline cunning and protection, with remedies landlords with whom he takes care of the three. She, the immigrant, who had to give up taking care of her children, who stayed there, takes care of some supposedly middle-class girls, and loves them almost as if they were her own. In it he gives us a glimpse of the hardness of emigration, the need we have for all of them, the final symbiosis that occurs between two worlds, embodied in these two women.
The last story, I’m not an alte kaker It seemed to me the most philosophical, that of an older man who, when the washing machine breaks down with the clothes inside, reviews his life, his facets, his Jewish roots, learned words that now become embarrassing in the face of what he happens in Palestine.
Between these two stories that open and close the book very well, there is a small universe of stories that the author offers us, from the obsession of a young man who does not like his physique to the absence that occurs after the death of a couple. for cancer. Or the disturbing excursion in Never trust me, with suspicion of strangers, without seeing that the enemy is within.
However, it is better to listen to the author through the questions I asked her:
Somewhere I read that the story is for you like an intense infatuation and the novel is like a marriage. After three marriages, do you need to feel that infatuation, that intense and short passion, as if it were summer love?
If you refer to the novels that I have written after my first book of short stories, the comparison is complicated, because a marriage requires a very intense infatuation. What I’m trying to say is that a storybook requires seven of those crushes. Maybe each novel is a crush, but each story is too. Writing a book of stories requires, for me, an erotic disposition with life and with the world. A continuous eroticism that does not culminate in a single object but rather a constant dialogue with the desire and seduction that writing is for me. In that sense, six stories, six crushes already surpass the three crushes of my novels, in number. It is not enough to feel it and act with the will and determination that the writing requires. But the erotic of the story needs to be felt again and again, with different voices, with very different characters. It is an exciting genre, in every sense.
There are six medium-length stories, around 20 pages or something more. Is it a format in which you are comfortable? What does it gain compared to the intensity of those that are shorter?
Don’t know. I’m also not sure that the intensity has to do with the length of the stories. In my case, I give each story I have to tell the space I feel it needs, no more and no less. For this it is important to know which areas you want to illuminate, which you don’t. What is going to shine, what is going to scream and what elements of the narrative will speak from the silence. I have not measured the length of these stories. If they are stories it is for me because of the poetics that articulates them. They could be even longer in this regard.
The title comes from one of the stories, and in turn is stolen from Wislawa Szymborska, referring to what remains after a war. But in this case it is used for an intense and short love, a romance between Amin and his Spanish teacher. What do the protagonists have to order, the world, their own loneliness, their specific language?
Szymborska’s poem appears in the story, which is a story of love and also of war, since it is the story between a Moroccan immigrant who has arrived in Spain without papers and a white woman from a wealthy class. Their own origin already marks a great distance between them and violence. They are characters who fall in love but do so in a world at war. I think that’s why Szymborska appears at one point in the story. Later, the verse becomes the title of the book precisely because these are stories for disordered hearts, so to speak. If your soul is in order, stay away from this book. If you feel like your world is in order, walk away. All the protagonists of these stories have in common that they struggle to fit into the story of the world in which they live and their own lives. And they are terrible at both one and the other.
Writing a book of stories requires, for me, an erotic disposition towards life and the world.
The book opens with a story God only understands stupid words, the most atavistic of all and closes with I’m not an alte kaker which is the most philosophical. In between is a whole world. Would you like to tell something about its order and composition?
The truth is that organizing a storybook is a complicated task, precisely because it must work like clockwork even if it is not obvious, but if something changes place or location everything falls apart. The first sentence of the book is: “I have before me the cabinet doors of a kitchen that is not mine.” The last one says: “But the truth is that the day is about to begin.” In between, in fact, there is or should be a world, at least the music of ours. The issue for me has been being able to listen to that music and place the vocals in the right place so that the end result is not the usual noise. I needed that listening and it has been very healing to dedicate time to it. I hope it is also for the readers.
Of these “infatuations” or stories that you have written, which one do you prefer and why?
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I’ll take the six, of course. Because in reality each and every one is necessary in the gear. There was another unpublished story, actually others that we considered including but they couldn’t be here. It is very delicate for me to choose when a story should or should not be in a book. It has taken me fifteen years to publish a volume of short stories, so there is nothing casual about the choice of each one. I take responsibility for all of them. All in all, I understand the question but I must say that I do not have a favorite and that the readers I am listening to do not have a clear one either. Curiously, everyone has a clear favorite. The one from Juan Casamayor, my editor, surprised me a lot, we won’t say which one it is. I don’t know. There is the general malaise in which we live and then the particular malaise of each one. These stories are a reflection of that state of affairs but also, sometimes, if we are lucky, of something intimate within us that is not where it should be. In my case, nothing is quite in place. That’s why I read so much. And that’s why I also write.
(I was expecting that answer, it’s like a mother who will never say which of her children is the favorite. But I do have it: read the first story, God only understands stupid words, and they will be captivated to read the rest).
* Carmen Peire She is a writer. His latest book is ‘Asphalt Maps‘ (Menoscuarto), which will be published on October 21.