The nicanores of Bañor, sweets typical of their region, and the abundance with which Lourdes Lancho has been received are beyond the daily life of Julio Llamazares’ home. Every morning, coffee, some orange juice and toasted bread with oil usually appear on the writer’s table: a breakfast that says more Andalusian than Leonese, where he is from. His origin requires a somewhat more extensive explanation: the town of Vegamián, where he grew up, is today submerged in a swamp: “We could have breakfast on the edge of the reservoir,” he humorously suggested.
“There are no better lives than others”: with that phrase, Llamazares clarifies that, although he recognizes that coming from a town that is now under water has marked him, it has not done so in a more special or particular way than for each person. influences his own biography. He speaks, in fact, of some fifty thousand people with a similar situation. He thus remembers Juan Benet, a writer with whom he shares a surname, although their homes were on opposite sides of the same dam: “You are a writer thanks to me,” Benet told him when he learned about the work of Llamazares, then only a young poet around thirty years younger than his interlocutor. In the conversation with Lourdes Lancho, Llamazares has acknowledged his initial annoyance upon hearing this, to which the years have added surprise – upon seeing that Benet recommended his work – and some concession – well, in a situation like the collapse of the stage of his childhood, his creativity found impetus—: “The loss that it entails of memory, of feelings, is surely at the origin of my literary vocation.”
The relevance of Correos in his literary career
After years immersed in verses, Llamazares arrived at his first novel almost accidentally, after an exercise that had been born as the compilation of the stories that he had grown up listening to. “When I finished it, I didn’t know what to do,” he recalls. He then sent it by postal mail to an editor at Seix Barral—a label that has recently published the reissue of two of his novels—without possessing a copy of the original and with a mistake in the address of the recipient: “If Correos had lost the copy , would never have existed wolf moon“. The good work of the postman responsible for delivering your package thus allowed for its narrative debut.
Against the cultural establishment: “I have always written what my soul asks of me”
Llamazares was a pioneer in writing novels about the maquis: “For someone to write about the post-war escapees was to be a spoilsport,” he says. He acknowledges, however, that he was not aware of being the first to do so. He wasn’t either when he wrote about his submerged people. His themes were not born with the desire to be original, but rather outside of what he calls “the establishment media and political culture.” “I have always written what my soul asks of me: I have not thought in strategic terms nor have I listened to the siren songs of the media, of the publishing market… of what those who direct say he establishment culture that must be done at all times,” he claimed.
The conversation with Lourdes Lancho concluded with a reflection on the present and, in particular, the near future of the European Union: Llamazares says he lives with great concern “the revival of the past, in the worst of the senses, that we are living in Spain and in Europe.” “Losing your memory and forgetting where we come from” is, for the author, the worst of the contexts for a society. It is also the that predicts as close, but already present.
