The fifty-seventh edition of the Valladolid Book Fair has continued to pay tribute this Sunday to its guest country, Mexico, with the presence of the writer Jordi Soler. A native of Veracruz, and specifically of the La Portuguesa community of Catalan exiles, the author … This Sunday afternoon he held a meeting with the public at the Círculo del Recreo, accompanied by El Norte de Castilla journalist Victoria M. Niño, with whom he presented his latest published work, ‘In the kingdom of the wild bull’.
This novel is set in the jungle of Veracruz, a passage especially dear to Soler, which he has used in previous works such as ‘The Children of the Volcano’, ‘Rudimentary Uses of the Jungle’ or his trilogy ‘The Lost War’, which includes the novels ‘The Reds of Ultramar’, ‘The Last Hour of the Last Day’ and ‘The Bear Party’: «I was born in an environment symmetrical to this literary space, and I keep in my memory an archive of images where memories are confused with imaginations, from whose mixture arise situations that perhaps never existed but that create a place from which to start when inventing stories,” he explains.
Now, with ‘In the Kingdom of the Wild Bull’, he incorporates Greek and pre-Hispanic mythology in a narrative that is based on the myth of Pasiphae and King Minos and that plays to oppose both imagery, as in a series of mirrors: «They have archetypes identical, not because there was contact between both cultures, but because we are creatures of the same species frightened by the same situations,” he explains.
“Everything that we do not understand was translated into mythologies in a similar way, the Greek god of wine Dionysus is identical to Tlaloc, the rain god of Mexico.” This phenomenon is baptized by Soler as ‘environmental wisdom’, which means that, although it is impossible for a Greek to have traveled to Latin American territory with this aesthetic vision of the world, comparable symbologies germinate between areas and peoples that have nothing to do with each other.
Form to support bottom
Soler has also revealed some of the keys that make up his creative process: “I always write my novels without a prior outline or any special direction, they take shape as I create them,” he explained. In this specific case, he started from the image of the white bull that, in Greek myth, comes out of the sea in front of the island of Crete: “From that scene, I had to invent 300 pages with which to justify my whim,” he ironized. .
Soler also confessed how, from his different perspective on reality, he prioritizes form to support the substance: “I write by ear,” he noted. «I am interested in my work “sounding” good, that it has musicality and rhythm, and once it is well tuned, what is said is also a tuned product; There are philosophers with interesting ideas but very dry to read, that is why I believe that if the form is extraordinary the substance will be magnificent.
Soler wrote the essay ‘The celestial shore of water’ in 2021, where he also talked about musicality and criticized the technological era and the pressure that marks times of hyperproductivity at work: «We have gained time, but I think we all agree on that we need a pause to see where we are; otherwise we would become robots », he points out. Yes, he confesses that he is enthusiastic about social networks and even the ‘mud’ that is breathed in them.
However, Soler admits that part of this frenetic activity has been transferred to cultural consumption, especially in films and television series, compared to which his books are just one of the many products against the current: «I am not the only writer who demands a time and a pause to consume the work, but you have to resist with hope,” he points out. «Today’s young people are already lazy with a one hour and forty minute movie; “And the same with music, no one listens to a ‘Dark side of the moon’ album anymore, but they watch series or listen to certain songs to live with them, rather than to understand them.”
“If I want to understand something, I better read a book, and to do so requires an effort: if the author has dedicated three years, what less than asking them to dedicate four hours to it,” he adds. «This job requires that we keep people away from the screens and that they are not making money; and the day there is no room to exercise it, I will become a ‘youtuber’ or ‘tiktoker’.
