Alberto Zurron writes an unpublished history of behind-the-scenes literature focused on the great authors of the 19th and 20th centuries and their most unknown obsessions. ‘Sex, books and extravagances’ (The Book Sphere) is a hilarious journey full of anecdotes, tragedies and curiosities that explain in another way the painful origin of masterpieces like ‘Ulises’ either ‘1984’. There is no shortage of sex, fetishes and all the phobias in the world in this fascinating shortcut to the nerve center of literature, which is, neither more nor less, those who made it.
There are writers with manias worthy of a shrink and lives so amazing that they make those of their own characters pale. Novelists incapable of writing a page without having a drink in their hand or so prolific that they ended up suffocating in their own ego. An Ernest Hemingway going to the other world under the exact circumstances chosen by his father, two of his sisters and a granddaughter. A Scott Fitzgerald who entered casinos on all fours or a Virginia Woolf who couldn’t stand reading his texts. Not to mention Juan Ramón Jiménez who ruled out going to collect the Nobel Prize in person because Sweden was far away, it was cold and he was afraid of dying on the way. The history of literature is full of passages and authors full of secrets, extravagances and unconfessable sins.
“Writers have always traveled from the inside out with a double bottom suitcase: in the exposed part, naturalness, to go unnoticed; in the hidden, the uniqueness, the smuggled personality. The writers’ inspiration is a complex three-pole world; There is a northern hemisphere populated with memories and a southern hemisphere populated with sensations, and these two hemispheres can only embrace each other by crossing a third pole made of millions of bricks: words. They are the ones who have brought about that goal of immortality to which everyone has reached, either by crawling, or as Horace imposed on himself: wounding the stars with his head, although for this we do not have to look for weapons. most appropriate, but the most precise words, to know where to hurt without killing and where to kill memory without hurting feelings,” says Alberto Zurrón.
“Glory is that shadow that the writer pursues with a straitjacket to protect it from the cold, and the reader is responsible for maintaining not only that temperature, but also the weight of the writer, to the point that what is lost when dying are not those grams that scientists have ascribed to the soul; That weight is lost by humanity as a whole, in the form of discouragement. When one enlists as an infantry soldier in the army of literature, one knows that there will not be a moment of respite in the outposts of the envious, in the cannon shots of critics and in the cruel ambushes of everyday life, where there are no even and odd days, but rather inspiration on the given days to reserve for the unlucky ones a total lack of creativity, watching meters and meters of thread go by without a stitch to sew them,” continues the author of ‘Sex, books and extravagances’ .
“If I have not found something in the writers, it is peace: neither external nor internal; neither mental nor digestive. Antonio Machado once said that he lived at peace with men and at war with his insides, so that, one of two, he either left a confessional or entered the bathroom destroying everything. With writers there is no middle ground. For them, peace is a great inconvenience because it is the terminal illness of routine, the poppy of their ghosts, the death certificate of their demons. If you are a writer it is because all the angels have failed and only the demons remain, claiming a prize that is frightening because it consists of giving them their entire lives without the need to first make it true. Writers are good proof that demons have a lot to offer, precisely because of how much they receive, and the fact is that, as soon as you get them the right crib, they end up becoming the perfect pet,” highlights the writer.
“The selection of authors that I have carried out resides in staunchly subjective preferences, sometimes moved not so much by the dazzle of an entire work, but by the darkness of an entire life; so here I present you all, or almost all, with your fears and phobias, their anxieties and their concerns, their hatreds and their resentments, their miseries and their manias, their depressions and their discontents, their fantasies and their antics, their defeats and their conquests, their noises and their furies, their pranks and their quarrels, their innocence and their tricks… What more could you ask for? Maybe light, more light, like Goethe dying; but… for what?”, emphasizes Alberto Zurrón to conclude.
Alberto Zurrón, lawyer and writer of poetry, novels and essays
Alberto Zurron, born in Gijón on December 14, 1968, is a lawyer and writer based in Oviedo. In 1988 he published his first book of poetry titled ‘Aria and fantasy’and since then they have seen the light ‘Living in the wave’ (1994) and ‘The land was also a lie’ (1998), as well as the novels ‘The judge who dreamed of whales’ (2009), ‘The loneliness of dead boxes’ (2012) and ‘The paradise I told you about’ (2018). He has also approached the essay genre with ‘The myth of ugliness’ (2005) and ‘Unusual history of classical music’in two volumes (2015 and 2016), dedicated to his passion for chords and historical dissemination.
He has been awarded several national poetry awards, including the III Villa de Cox Prize (Alicante), in 1993; he City of Tomelloso Poetry Prize, in 1998; or the Latin Foundation Heritage Poetry Prizein 2010. Between 1998 and 2001 he was a columnist and literary critic for the newspaper Trade. Furthermore, in 1995 he founded and directed for years the Spanish Rilke Societydedicated to the dissemination of the life and work of the Czech poet.
