The Duelists – Zenda

María José Solano and Arturo Pérez Reverte at the Fencing Academy

“Books help you, but if you don’t have a Virgil, if you don’t have a teacher who takes you along the right paths, who selects for you, who guides you, it’s harder for you to get there.“

A book of this nature could not be presented with a boring proclamation. To share it with readers, Solano chose the Ateneo Fencing School, led by maestro Jesús Esperanza. In a conversation halfway between the combat and the colloquium with the writer and language academic Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Solano spoke about the literary nature of the trip in his work. and the importance of the classics in defining its narrative voice.

Foil in hand, Solano and Reverte talked for more than an hour not only about the Sevillian’s book, but also about her life, her childhood and those episodes that have made her the writer she is today. Fast, agile, accurate, Conradian. Solano and Reverte became duelists. They exchanged shots. Pérez-Reverte spoke to Solano like a teacher examining his most gifted student. It is well known that the two contenders must have the same rank to be able to fight. And in this case, María José Solano has exhibited stripes and style.

—To what extent did projecting the books you read help you understand life and move through it?

—Books help you, but if you don’t have a Virgil, if you don’t have a teacher who takes you along the right paths, who selects for you, who guides you, it’s harder for you to get there. I was lucky to have very good teachers along the way.

—What books were definitive?

—That question is tricky. —Solano jumped, feline— because you and I know that those books that made us happy are the books that we now publish in Zenda-Edhasa. Those adventure titles are the books that turned me into a reader.

READ ON THE GO

“For me, traveling is reading on the move. My biography is made traveling“

Half presentation and half conversation, attendees witnessed not only an exhibition of skills: they witnessed the first-person portrait of María José Solano. Arturo Pérez-Reverte managed to discover before readers who this brilliant woman is who is preceded by an adventurous spirit.. «María José is a walker, a walker around the world, with an important difference from the rest of the walkers, and that is that she knows how to tell it. She does not limit herself to decorating the places she visits, but she tells them, and she tells them very well. The books and her journey have been closely linked to her since she was a child,” explained Arturo Pérez-Reverte as a preamble, then going straight to the point.

—For you, what is the trip?

—For me, traveling is reading on the move. My biography is made traveling, first with my parents, with my family, with my brothers and then alone, very soon and very soon alone. And since books have been my life companions, I have never conceived of a trip without books.

—You have read since you were little. You were a short-haired girl who read in the schoolyard while the others played. What was the first place you found reading? In the bookstore at home, in the library, at school?

—In the bookstore at home. I was lucky to be born into a family with six brothers much older than me. When I reached reading age they were already university students, all of them. Each one had already made his own specialized library: one was an architect, the other was a historian, an Americanist, the other was an English philologist, the other a Hispanic philologist, the other a lawyer… So I moved around a house with six libraries. I was very lucky, I could not have been interested, but I found in that place, in that ecosystem, I found the place where I was happy, without being aware of it. Then, of course, of course, came the certainty that this was the way, and a way of happiness.

—Can you imagine a life, a relationship, a world without those books?

-Never. It wouldn’t be me.

Touchée.

AROUND THE WORLD

Pérez-Reverte praised the elegance of the prose of María José Solano, a woman accustomed to traveling because she carries it within her. An outstanding explorer and writer, a few years ago she took a carry-on suitcase, put a notebook and several books in it, and went alone to Greece to reconstruct the journey of the war hero, writer and traveler Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011). . From there it was born a greek adventure (Debate), which also occupies part of the conversation this afternoon. «A woman in love looking for a dead writer». Reverte’s definition could not be more precise. Nausícaa searching for Ulysses throughout the Peloponnese.

“Zenda was the opportunity to, in a natural way, write. I believe that all readers, in a natural way, tend to want to write“

With passionate, adventurous and strong prose, elegant as silver cutlery, Solano mixed novel, biography and travel diary in that book to portray a mythological being. Corinth, Mycenae, Epidaurus, Sparta or the island of Hydra… With the help of María José Solano, the reader gets lost in the Lemonodasos mill and drinks retsina in their taverns. In and out of his books, Solano doesn’t stop moving. To illustrate this symbiosis between travel, exploration and creation, Arturo Pérez-Reverte decides to delve into those classic characters of adventure literature that Solano brings with her as part of her reading essence, since she was a child.

—Who is Phineas Fogg? And D’Artagnan? What came first, Willy Fogg or D’Artagnan?

—Willy Fogg, of course. He would have been six or seven years old when that series was made… Now I would say crazy, but I would say viral. It was crazy. I went to look in the library to find out who had written it and I read it.

Film buff, polyglot, art historian, mother, writer, Zendian, reader. The conversation shows all the layers of María José Solano, a woman who also analyzes a western how he sits down to talk to José Luis Garci from The Maltese falcon. In Solano the trip occurs permanently, even to areas unknown to many and that this afternoon is manifested with beauty and honesty in an inexhaustible conversation between the woman who kissed Virgilio and the fencing master.

—It took you a long time to write and publish. Because? Did you wait until you lived and read to write? Why so late?

-Is that good or bad?

-It is a question.

—I was late because I wasn’t planning to write.

—Did you never have ambitions as a writer?

-Never. I have the ambition of a reader. When you came up with the magnificent idea of ​​Zenda and that magnificent team was formed.

-Are here.

—Zenda was the opportunity to, in a natural way, write. I believe that all readers, in a natural way, tend to want to write. I had never wanted to publish nor had anything written. I didn’t want to have a novel in the drawer, I wanted to have many books on the table. That was my ambition. And what happens is that Zenda led me to write.

THE HEROES AND HEROINES

“Heroines build themselves, alone. The heroism of women is loneliness“

Sevillian to the bones. Also Lampedusian, Jerezian, Venetian, Florentine, London. Woman of airports and brown eyes, Zendian and warrior; heroine in the process of telling heroes. What is not María José Solano? This afternoon the writer explains to Arturo Pérez-Reverte that she is interested in heroes with fissures. Recognize, too, how they become such depending on who looks at them. “If there is no woman’s gaze to build it, no matter how much they sing their epic, there is no possible hero.”

—You say that the hero is then explained by the woman’s gaze…

—Ovid explains it, Thucydides explains it, Butler explains it, who is certain, after translating the Odyssey and the Iliad, that books have different hands. He goes to Sicily to investigate what he can deduce with a map and the book in Greek and comes to the conclusion that the author of the Odyssey is a woman. This is Nausícaa. And Robert Graves, who follows that line, explains it in The white goddess

—And the heroines, who builds them?

—They build themselves, alone. The heroism of women is loneliness.

Surrounded by foils, swords, breastplates and sabers, Pérez-Reverte and Solano engage in a dazzling conversation about a dazzling book written by a dazzling woman. If Artemisia was in command as a general in the battle of Salamis and Joan of Arc led the French armies against England in the Hundred Years’ War, how could she not be, the woman who kissed Virgil, the swordswoman skilled in dueling? with a teacher this June afternoon, at number six Academia Street.