How do you define ‘Diary of Astonishment’, the book that has just been published in Los Libros del Gato Negro? Signed on Thursday the 6th, in the afternoon, and on Sunday the 9th, morning and afternoon, at the Zaragoza Book Fair, in the stamp booth run by Marina Heredia.
It is a diary that collects four years of my life, from 2019 to 2023, based on the published texts, and then manipulated, which without interruption – including the pandemic – I have written every week with great effort in many cases. It is also a self-portrait in which I have tried to be as honest as possible. Sometimes I come out well and sometimes I come out horrible.
It is, to begin with, a book of articles, many of them published in Heraldo in its Tuesday column, but to what extent could it be a novel about small things?
I don’t distinguish the size of things well and I am tremendously short-sighted, as I say in the book. Maybe that’s why the little things, the closest things, are the most important to me. I cannot say that it is a novel although, today, many things fit into the concept “novel”.
It seems that what inspires him most, deep down, is everyday life, what he lives, what is stealthy, what is unnoticed, what passes without any emphasis. It would be like this?
Yes. The wonderful is everywhere. A look like mine tends to literaryize even the most insignificant because it is what saves me from the crudeness of life.
Do you have Natalia Ginzburg, Alice Munro and Chekhov in mind when you write, would they be your main teachers?
Natalia Ginzburg is a beacon for me, both her novels and her essays. I recently wrote a review for ‘Turia’ magazine about her ‘Imaginary Life’ and reread all of her essays. Her point of view, her sincerity, her writing, which is transparent as air, are a prodigy. ‘The small virtues’ is one of my favorite books.
There is everything in the book. For example, family affairs and secrets. Is it still an arsenal of inspiration for you?
“Family is backwards,” my grandmother used to say, but it’s what we have. There has never been so much family literature as there is now, I don’t know why. And the truth is that family is in everything I write from the beginning.
Friendship occupies another special place. You quote friendly writers, you wink, you gloss. Because?
I am a lucky person in that sense. Friends have saved my life many times. They love me just the way I am and I am deeply grateful. That some of them are writers gives me a great feeling of welcome.
Travel and rural life are key. Are you going to the countryside to enjoy, to remember, to make up for lost time?
Nature helps me relocate when I don’t know where I am. As I say in the book, the rural world and the urban world coexist in me. I need both to maintain some emotional balance.
Zaragoza is an essential setting. Her theater, the place where she seems to be very comfortable. How do you define the city, how do you find yourself in it, how do you tell it?
Zaragoza is my city, I have loved it unconditionally since I arrived from the town in 1980, and not only because most of my affections are located there. I love her even though sometimes I don’t like her. I have always lived in the old town. I like to walk through those streets where time and civilization walk with me and where I never feel alone.
A permanent sensation of the book is a kind of vital estrangement. Do you feel a little foreign in the world and even in your own life, or is it just a reader’s impression?
That vital estrangement could come from the amazement that life produces in me. Let’s say I’m a little eccentric, or a little strange. I usually look at everything from the side.
At the same time, there is a harmonious tranquility in you and in your writing, like a calm and blissful pleasure. Is it like that in some way?
Harmony, what a beautiful word!
