Retiro Park is filled again these days for the Book Fair. The Carriage Walk, from Alcalá to Niño Jesús, is a coming and going of curious people, readers and writers, who walk from end to end of the booths of this … 83 edition. As in all fairs, you can find everything in the park. From new authors who hand out cards from their self-published book, to established letter writers who generate queues and hopes to get one of their signatures.
In between, a good number of editors, distributors, local agents, literary agents and various figures from the world of television, who have become authors with the help of a black man and the little shame of a large publisher. It is a practice that moves between intrusiveness and opportunism, since the editors defend themselves by claiming that, with one of those bestsellers, which present both a heart program and a method to lose weight with intermittent fasting, they can finance literary careers. emerging and those that are worthwhile. Or perhaps it is the excuse for not recognizing the absurdity of many of the titles they publish, while people become a little more stupid for each page they do not read. Manuel Azaña already said it, “in Spain, the best way to keep a secret is to write a book.”
On the other hand, if the publishing industry stays afloat thanks to poets who don’t know how to rhyme, no matter how handsome they are, champions of social networks who spend the day uploading images of their lives, or actors and film directors who They get excited when the president writes epistles (but a black man is also used for memoirs) so what are we going to do, welcome.
I remember the mornings of my childhood hanging around the Book Fair. I accompanied my father and sneaked into the booths of Paco Umbral, Cela, Juan Marsé, Antonio Gala, Manolo Vázquez Montalbán, Jaime Campany, Ana María Matute or Antonio Mingote. Some pretended I was their own son, and I generally ended the day with some confusion because some signature seeker would bump into me at two or three booths, and they thought I was being raffled off by the authors, as Mingote told a couple of ladies: “It would be a privilege that you bought my book. “I have to feed three like this one and you will understand how uncomfortable it is to have to bring him to the fair because the poor thing is an orphan of father, mother and everything.”
‘Telluric tales’
And when my father signed a whopping fourteen hundred books and at the touch his stamp was reduced to a few initials because he had lost the signature from repeating it so much. Everything tasted like paper and ink, and although now everything is almost the same, everything is different because almost none of them are there. Now I try to get mine to come, even if his father doesn’t reach 100 buyers. There are also many writers who are worth it. So it makes sense to continue stopping by their booths even if they haven’t made it to the fair this year with ‘Borroka’, which is scheduled for October.
Rodrigo Cortés, the last of the Cavias, knows what the wrist hurts and he carries a booklet so that his hands don’t feel heavy with everything he signs. ‘Telluric Tales’ is his new creation, and you will find him with his stamp and his ink on the weekends. Or Jacobo Bergareche, who has that synthetic way of telling you the things that are in between everything, which is where life happens. He cooks as he writes, and he also has a point between Hemingway and a hitman from the Klinahan clan of that underworld Ireland.
Milena Busquets will also be there with those diaries that dance between class and casualness, the brute naturalness of the lack of complexes that knows she is different because you also know that she can afford it. Or Lucía Alba Martínez, who does seem like a real ‘Little Animal’ of the prose that emerges. Surely there will also be pains.
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But if you are in Madrid these days of booth and book, go to Retiro Park, take in the fair. It’s worth it.
