• Profile From Ovid to Kafka

"I wrote this book after resignation because I had to reconcile with myself. I started it with a suspicion. I was thinking: to see if I am going to be bad in everything I do? And it became a parenthesis of happiness, a period of between wars between my time in the government and the pandemic. " In half an hour of conversation, Máximo Huerta refers a few times, spontaneously and with apparent good humor , to his brief passage through the Government of Spain.

Are you laughing at that mess today or pretending to be laughing? "Both. Well, the facts are stubborn and known, but there is a charm in oblivion that is inexplicable but works. I thought I was going to be rebellious with this topic but keeping quiet has been good therapy. Today I think about it painlessly, with a certain pride. It is a part of my life ».

Another part of his life that has just closed is the program Starting Today , which he had been presenting for nine months. Last week TVE announced its end. " I have left TVE because they have thrown me out , of course, but I also think that TVE has lost an oasis and a great program full of voices that are not in the media. At that time, in a weak strip, the writers and singers spoke. a lot of valuable people who were happy to hear. " think.

"It was a program that was growing month by month, which has been dismissed at its peak audience," continues Huerta. "I am very proud of the team. I am very sorry for them, for what has happened. It is ugly in the midst of a pandemic to do this remodeling when the team had been promised to return after the ERTE. I prefer not to prolong the troubles but lose a great program and it was very good for Spanish Television ».

Well: the issues of the Ministry of Culture and TVE have already come out. Now it will be necessary to clarify that the book to which Huerta refers is called Con el amor basta (recently published by Planeta) and is the 12th of his career. It is beautiful. With love it was enough as an initiation story. There is a time when it looks like a Pasolini movie with boys who first insult each other and call themselves "fagot" and then kiss in the open; then there is another time of discovery of freedom in France, facing the sea, and then it looks like Call me by your name . And, in addition, fabulous things happen to its protagonist: his name is Helio Icarus and he can fly and speak to the dead and all of this is very natural . So the story looks like a Michael Ende novel.

The wastelands of the book, the sordid landscapes, where did you get them from, if you are an educated man, a former Minister of Culture ... What's going on, that's my world. I'm from town and my father was a trucker, a tough guy. I lived my childhood and adolescence in that landscape, in those same lots full of shit and dirt with a wonderful eighteenth-century mansion next to it. There are two settings in the novel. One is Aix-en-Provence, which appears with his name, and the other is referred to as "the city I was born in" and is no longer identified. Aix has a name because it is the scene of liberation and evasion. The other city is a mental space rather than a specific place. It's like in Les Miserables: there is a scene in which Jean Valjean is chased by Paris and Victor Hugo gives the names of the streets so he flees, which are real streets ... And then, he takes a fictitious street, which it doesn't exist, and that's where Jean gets lost. And why did he invent a fable for her? Wouldn't this story have worked like a realistic story? Because we are all weird and that's what this novel talks about. He talks about prejudices, about complexes, about the fear of being different, about the burden we put on ourselves and that prevents us from being free ... The character calls her Helio Icarus and can fly, but her father, instead of making wings for her ankles, puts a few weights on it so it can be normal. He does it for love, but for love, sometimes, with the best intentions, we do harm. The word love appears in the title of the book but it does not have a romantic meaning. It's a harsher than a romantic novel. I once heard a homosexual friend say that the experience of growing up in hiding is the most intense experience of his life. The important thing is not to take a grudge from that time but still be memorable. Because rancor turns into another weight, another backpack. Well, my novels always talk about the same, about love, time and memory, and they always look for a revenge of reality. The future is uncertain, the present does not exist and we only have the past. What am I going to do if I don't go back to adolescence and forgive myself for the things I did at that time. The risk is to make a hypersthetic version of that time, in the style of Call me by your name and that is a bit unreal. All generations have a movie that has that function. I do not know who has lived his initiation in that world, with parents like that, well. I believe in books as evasion because I have also needed them for that, so that they would give me a refuge to spend the winter. But this novel does not speak of heroes. It speaks of desire, repression and social criticism. It is interesting the character of the protagonist's brother, who goes from being his worst enemy to being the one who cares for him most tenderly. I have not had any brothers and that is why I am obsessed with fraternal relationships. I am fascinated by the transfer whereby the person who sleeps across the room is a hostile stranger one day and, the next day, offers the most unconditional love. I have not experienced that but, as Ana María Matute said, life must be invented to be true. There are several moments in the book in which she refers to beauty as a revelation. I relate beauty to everything that generates tranquility. I know that there is beauty in the disorder, in the emptiness on a cliff, but, for me, the clearest perception of beauty is in the absence of problems.

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  • RTVE
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  • Màxim Huerta
  • Pedro Sánchez
  • José Guirao

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