'Fine Rain' - Best Novel of 2019
Luis Buñuel forced himself every day to invent a story, for at least half an hour, to exercise his imagination.
This is what Luis Landero said to his students when he was a teacher.
"Be passionate, audacious, and to a point arrogant not to accept (...) knowledge already packaged and ready for consumption
."
These comments and others have now been collected by Landero in book format, in
Emerson's Garden
(Tusquets).
In these fifteen texts, Landero has pulled the thread of the memo
I was in no hurry but without fainting, to see what came out.
And he has not stopped, because he neither wanted nor could.
Or so it seems. "Life is a one-way trip" or
Against the drowsiness of habit, the vigil of wonder.
, I was saying.
Who would not have wanted a teacher like that.
These considerations arise from a good-natured and peaceful man, but also from someone who slides in moving waters: «Often
I am assailed by episodes, characters, aromas, flavors (...) and sometimes I don't know if I've read them, or dreamed, or imagined, or if I wrote them myself ».
This is how the life of this writer who was born in Alburquerque, Badajoz, 72 years ago has passed: between the quiet daring of playing the guitar next to the Folies Bergère in Paris in 1975 and the longing for childhood.
"Childhood is the age of lasting discoveries, that is why it is forever", he writes in
Emerson's orchard
.
And from there it has not moved. To live it is not necessary to run the world, Landero comes to say.
«I liked dreaming life more than living it»
.
And when he does not dream it, he remembers it.
He has the advantage of having grown up in the country, where "the owls came out at night and drank the oil from the lamps and the nasturtiums", when "the snake, the salamander and the owl were wise, of an archaic and unfathomable wisdom that man does not know ”, perhaps only Alfanhuí. Luis Landero is envious because he has known the times“ when in houses people all gathered by the fire ”, and on those winter nights“ someone always told you that death he knows all the roads of the world.
Then, with the snows, one speaks more quietly and, writes Landero, "dogs without a master walk a little sideways, like on the bias." Luis Landero says, by email to EL MUNDO, that he has secretly prolonged childhood.
«Without the child that I was, and without the child that I continue to be, I would not be a writer.
From the child comes fantasy, amazement, intuition, and even the music and the rhythm of the language
, because my best school has been the oral language that I heard in my childhood.
Above any other teacher, he is the first, the best, the inexhaustible and the truly creative ". So much so that the past writes it in capital letters," The Far Then.
It's like saying the Wild West.
On the other hand, it seems that
the clock of history has broken.
It gives the impression that the 60s and 70s of the last century are getting closer to the XIX than the XXI
.
What shall we say then of the 1950s, in which my childhood passed? ”Although I am now finishing a novel (“ I have about 40 pages left ”), what may come later may have to do with a discovery.
«A couple of months ago we cleaned the storage room, which was a real mess, and
some 40 notebooks from the 70s and 80s appeared, written on both sides with a small and tight handwriting
.
They are literary exercises, pieces of failed novels, unfinished stories, or writing to be written ... I thought I had thrown them away, or at least most of them.
Seeing them, I was pictured with dazzling clarity what my life has essentially been;
words, words and words ". At that time I lived" in a time and in a country where many of us were in love with life (...)
We esteemed and trusted our politicians (...) It was an uncertain time, but we lived confident and joyful
(...) All that display of happiness and vigor began to become routine, disappointment and imposture ».
Why add anything to Landero this suit of other times suits him, he feels comfortable.
"Let's say I went out to wander aimlessly through my past, to see what I found, just for the pleasure of remembering and writing."
And when he wanted to give an account, he already had the book.
In between he crossed
Fine rain
, and the great echo of that novel that recounts the dimes and diretes of a family. And he returned to his own, to Kafka, its "most enduring" author, to Schopenhauer ("he is the one who has best explained this mysterious thing that is to live . I never tire of reading it. And how well it writes! ").
His life is in books. Is it written to be liked?
"Inevitably, it is written to be liked, because otherwise it would be ridiculous. Now, never at the price of accommodating the majority tastes of the readers and betraying oneself. The best way to be liked may be not to try to like. too much for readers, who later, like their children, become fussy and unappetizing ". In the text
Sea from the orchard
confess that
«Of all my trips, those that I have lived with the most emotion, the unforgettable ones, I have made them with Jules Verne, with Defoe
, with Homer, with Kapuscinski (...) I have lost myself in jungles and deserts, I have suffered scurvy and maleria. ”Emerson's Garden is a book of poetic prose.
Landero says that he does not write poetry, but reads it.
And often.
Now is with
The green branch
, by Eloy Sánchez Rosillo, and with
The nudes
, by Antonio Lucas, "a dazzling book."
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