‘The peninsula of empty houses’ (Siruela) is the novel of the season and one of the most surprising in recent years. “The story of the total decomposition of a family, of the dehumanization of a people, of the disintegration of a territory.” … The Civil War told in the key of magical realism but with its own voice, that of David Uclés (Úbeda, 1990), who presents it today in Santos Ochoa (at 7:30 p.m.). A writer with his own universe and his feet on this earth.
– Who told you stories when you were a child?
– Nobody. Neither stories nor reading. It has never been read in my house.
– That being the case, it is even more surprising to have that overflowing capacity to fantasize.
– In reality, the only one who told me stories was my grandfather and he was very useful to me in creating that history of my family.
– There were no books in Miguel Hernández’s house either.
– My father scolded me if I bought one. There were no books in my house, although there was another type of culture, the culture of the countryside.
– Coming from a family of olive farmers, I suppose humble, with a civil guard father… how did you become a writer and artist?
– I don’t know well. As a child I was very restless, he had a lot of OCD, at school they bullied me because he had a pen, they called me a faggot, they threw stones at me and things like that. That was hard. So I think that literature, music… evaded me from that hostile environment. It’s not that I was traumatized, because I defended myself and stood up to them. I was a happy child despite everything and I had many friends. I have always been a very social boy. But I suppose it comes from there, from the silence that art gives you both when you consume it and when you produce it. Maybe it was a shelter, I don’t know.
– I suppose you have been asked this a hundred times, but how did it occur to you to write a novel about the Civil War in the key of magical realism?
– The project began fifteen years ago and it was halfway through when I considered that I had material to tell the entire war. It told the story of a family that was going to disappear with so many members and I thought about spreading these characters throughout the Peninsula and thus telling the story of the war.
– So the war was not in the original project.
– The idea came to me when I started reading about it. I realized that there were a lot of things that had happened that were magical realism in themselves. And the challenge also arose for me to narrate our most recent historical wound from a different point of view.
– The reference to García Márquez and ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is inevitable, but it is not the only one.
– In fact I have not read García Márquez…
– Really?! I do not believe you.
– Really. I bought ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ when I was seventeen or so, I started reading it and, after twenty or thirty pages, I said to myself ‘I want to do this’. And I didn’t finish it so there wouldn’t be any kind of contamination. I promised myself that I would read it the day I finished my Macondo, but I haven’t had time yet because of the promotion. García Márquez encouraged me to tell the story of a family with many generations and with certain dreamlike descriptions, but, that’s it, I don’t know anything else.
– But Jándula, the Andalusian town in your novel, is undoubtedly ‘your’ Macondo, and the Ardolento, its protagonists, the Buendía.
– It inspired me, it’s true, but, let’s see, it was twenty pages. Now, with everything that has been compared, I am afraid to read it [risas].
Civil war and magical realism
«The challenge arose for me to narrate our most recent historical wound from another point of view»
– So I envy that I can still read that book for the first time. But, apart from those twenty pages, those other references are…
– Günter Grass…
– ‘The tin drum’…
– That marked me a lot. I was like, ‘Wow, I want what I’m doing to look like this.’ That book has been a great reference.
– In fifteen years of writing, I imagine that your project has had to change a lot. You yourself must have changed.
– I have gone to the Intellectual Property Registry up to five times to deliver the finished manuscript. Every three years I rewrote what I had and added a new layer to it. It has been a metamorphosis, little by little.
– His prose is very poetic.
– For me the lyrical component is fundamental. I am a writer of images more than characters. I like to stop at them and describe them very strongly, as if I were recording them with a camera.
Great reception of the novel
“We expected blows from all sides, but I have not received them even from very conservative media”
– How did you come up with the idea that the narrator suddenly intervenes and interacts with the characters and even with the reader?
– It comes out alone, I like to chat with the characters and with the reader. And, furthermore, that busy narrator helped me a lot to organize myself and got me out of a lot of trouble by having to fit together and finish more than forty stories.
– That narrator has a conversation with Franco in 1936 and he announces that a chapter will be censored, as a demonstration that his power will continue in our days. What would that chapter 96 contain?
– Good question. I do not know, that’s the truth. Actually what Franco is doing in that scene is demonstrating his power, showing off. These tyrants are evil because they need to be, because of their childhood traumas, because of their things… They need to feel superior to others and apply terror and power. Franco would have cared little about the content of that chapter, what mattered to him was demonstrating its power.
– Are you worried about censorship today?
– Of course, I am worried about censorship, manipulation, misinformation, fake news… That’s how some things started.
– Have they called you things like civil war?
– No, it’s a miracle. We expected that sticks would rain down on me from all sides, but I have not received criticism of that type or from very conservative media.
– In the novel we never talk about Spain but about Iberia. Does the ‘Spain concept’ cause you any qualms or is it an Iberian demand, like Saramago?
– In none of my three novels does Spain appear, always Iberia. I am very Iberian, I am Iberian romantically, politically, humanly… I want the reader to become familiar with that idea and perhaps even ask themselves the question of whether we would be better off this way. It is almost a political act. I am very unpolitical, but, in this case, yes. I think we would be better off being Iberia.
– What do you think of the debate on historical memory?
– This is like languages, which need linguistic changes but over time. I am not in favor of drastic changes, that is why we have a democracy.
– What do you write after ‘The Peninsula…’?
– I have a novel written about Barcelona and the project I am considering is to tell the entire dictatorship in magical realism. I’m there, evaluating it.
– Are you surprised by the reception it is receiving?
– Yes, because I know that it is very complicated for this to happen with such a massive literary production. But, on the other hand, there is so much work behind this novel that it makes me feel very good, because I have not scammed anyone, it is not a success by chance.
– And the welcome at your home?
– They are super happy, very proud. The greatest prize for me is the pride of my parents, because for the last ten years I told my father that I was writing a novel about the war and he did not see it well, he did not see it well that I did not work on something with a salary .
– It means that it was a father’s concern for the stability of his son, not because it was a novel about war.
– That is, because I am a translator and a good student and I could have gotten a place and all that. But I believe that we have come here to play and we have to try. And, if it doesn’t go well, I’ll get my job at forty, right?
