On the surface, Piel de plata (Seix Barral, 2019), the novel with which Javier Calvo returns to the narrative after seven years of silence, may seem like a work on adolescence - not for adolescent readers ; "I am panicked that it can be confused with a youth text, here there is sex, drugs and Nazis," says the author. The protagonist, Pol, a boy of 14 years without experience, immersed in his own universe and highly suggestible, meets in the waiting room of the psychiatrist Bronwyn, a girl of magnetic appeal and overflowing personality, almost a dark angel, and his obsession It takes him a frantic process of persecution of his muse through a nocturnal and ghostly Barcelona that will culminate with his passage to the Other Side , which is how Calvo identifies the mystical plane in which artists who have managed to sublimate their aesthetic ideal to create a universe enter own .

In the meantime, we were saying, there is some sex, quite a lot of drugs and dark music, specifically that of Death in June , a British project that emerged from the ashes of punk that has maintained, since its crystallization in the 80s, a profile controversial for his way of addressing issues such as religion, paraphilias and death. But that superficial plane, once the silvery skin of the plot is removed, what it shows is an ambitious novel in which a rich symbolic world throbs and that is a fiery defense of the inner universe, of the creative breath and of the need for artist take refuge in his obsessions.

To understand this, it is necessary to understand several recent circumstances in Javier Calvo's life. In 2012 he won the Short Library award with The Hanging Garden - which meant his move from Random House Literature to Seix Barral -, which for him seemed almost an unreal event. "I arrived at a place that I had not imagined arriving, and with that I was already hitting a song in my teeth." Instead of taking advantage of the pull and accelerating his narrative production, he decided to withdraw from the novel and concentrate on the essay and literary translation, "until he had something different to do." His previous book to The Hanging Garden , Corona de flores (2010), was also a text with increasing levels of difficulty : both were on the surface detective novels, thrillers with their house brand references to magical Barcelona, ​​the occult and science fiction, but within it was a substantive thesis that consisted of "criticizing public space, affirming that life had been corrupted and tainted by power." But that subject, which should have guided one more novel and left half-written, Calvo considered it exhausted. Hence his seven years of patient silence.

Silver skin, on the other hand, poses it as a novel about the inner world, about the hermetic reasons - and that nobody else has to share - that feed the inspiration and make the artist move on. And that's where the name of Bronwyn - which, at first, Calvo shuffled as the title of the novel - covers everything with a radiant symbolic layer when referring to the experimental poetic cycle of Bronwyn that Juan Eduardo Cirlot wrote in the 60s. " My idea was to replicate the cycle, "Calvo admits," which is the obsession of an object by a subject . That is what forced me to write in the first person, something that I did not want to do, but which was inevitable. In Cirlot, Bronwyn it is the inspiration, the portal to get out of reality to enter another reality, "an idea that he shares with other authors, Alan Moore or William Blake, for example, who have conceived writing as a magical act.

For the narrator, both Cirlot and Death in June are absolute triggers: they abstract him in a prereality that is preferable to the outside world, and absorb all his energy. But there is a third: Cooper Crowe , code name behind which Michael Moorcock hides, one of the obsessions as a reader who have caught Calvo during these years in which he has not written a novel and that, to make that isolation even more throbbing from his usual world, he has also resided for four seasons in New York. "Moorcock has been a late discovery for me , " admits Calvo. "Most of the people who have read it came to him because of his fantasy sagas, I had the idea that he was a kind of alternative Tolkien, who subverted the genre, but had no patience for that. Until I met many British authors - from Grant Morrison to China Miéville or Iain Sinclair - who had him as the great author of his generation, someone who remained intact, underground, experimental, still active but responding to a type of author nonexistent today , off the radar. "

Through Moorcock, Cirlot and Death in June , the Silver Skin narrator discovers the importance of evasion and rebellion against the norm, which are themes of adolescence and fantasy literature . At one point in the book, the protagonist - who has a lot of the author - receives several tips: flee from his contemporaries, not be like the others, get involved in secrecy and go against the tide, slogans that continue to direct the work of an author who wishes to reinforce his condition of outlaw in the narrative in Castilian of the 21st century and that, touching the fantastic genre with a lateral envelope, he aspires, like his characters, "to enter into a vital drift based on the rejection of reality". And, who wants reality, being able to be on the Other Side?

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