Juan Manuel López
,
Juarma
(
Deifontes
,
Granada
, 1981)
was picking cherries
, when around 2017 a couple of friends rolled the blanket over their heads, set up the Camping Motel publishing house and published his first book.
But not on a bucolic walk in the countryside: picking cherries for several hours a day, like thousands of other day laborers, crushing their hands the way their parents still crush them, "for 40 years", going to France to harvest or touring Andalusia for the olive.
Before
,
Juarma
had worked from
palette
in construction, "just before the bubble," and after
camareta
through bars in Granada, looking for life and eventually finding it, always on roads that are no longer secondary but regional, letting themselves be carried away by everything and nothing, a bit like their own characters, the thirty-somethings with no direction or flight plan -beyond the farlopa - that populate the definitive version of that sketch published by a couple of friends, which he now edits, "much more polished",
Blackie Books
under the name of
In the end the monsters always win
, and in which the recent National Prize for Literature, Cristina Morales, sees a "
Trainspotting
in a town in Graná ».
Cocaine, despair, lies
in many of its aspects, a most nihilistic desire to party and, again, cocaine shake hands like this in a choral novel, in a wildly colloquial style and at times bordering on toilet literature, which somehow was born , the times rule, like so many things today: on Facebook.
From stories on Facebook to novels
"I started uploading stories, openly, without any intention of anything ... And as people began to answer and they began to like it, I made a closed profile and began to upload more and more", López tells
Paper
with a disarming humility. «Inside there some 65 people got together, who began to give me ideas and help me to weave the theme ... At first they were unrelated stories, unrelated, but then I was polishing them, little by little, and ... "..Y
Juarma
,
also cartoonist and cartoonist
«Since I can remember», since I was a child used to scribbling «my things», photocopying them and distributing them in their own fanzines, then graduated in
Spanish philology
and, therefore, unemployed meat and garbage jobs, - "but beware, I've learned a lot from my jobs" -, now assails the literary scene as an authentic, stark and somewhat nineties voice, clinging to the familiar refrain of that “there is no future.” “What I wanted to tell is the life of people who do not have the possibility of leaving a place, who feel trapped, who have no perspective, who
he only has to get high and pass the time
, with shitty jobs and little else, "he says.
And the thing is that in the end the monsters always win, it's pure bitterness, bordering on tragedy, wrapped up in nights and nights of partying and "slices." "What if I'm worried that I'll be pigeonholed because of the cocaine roll?
Well, yes, I am not going to deny you ... I have written a book, in my opinion, about lies, about the lies that we build around us, that then continue to haunt us, and that no longer leave us.
And it is true that there is a lot of drugs in the book, but for me it is more a set, it is like the glue that binds all the stories ... I stopped to think what all those characters and those stories had in common, I realized it was cocaine, and I threw it around.
The tradition of drug literature
With the result that whoever wants to see in At the end the monsters always win an update to the rhythm of WhatsApp of the very fruitful tradition of
the so-called drug literature
, without a doubt you will be able to see it - starting with Cristina Morales-.
Juarma
He defends himself: "What I have certainly not done is glorify drugs or apologize for them." On the other hand, he does not like being asked about his experience with psychotropics.
There the man puts the brakes on: «Well, talking about that I don't think is relevant. Does everyone make their life what they want, right?
I always say that literature is a lie that tells many truths, and I am not going to go beyond that. "
Juanillo
,
the Lolo
,
Vanessa
Y
the Cockroach
, among other characters-monologues, narrate their misadventures in
Villa of the Source
, the town near Granada that is much more than a simple setting and that the reader cannot fail to see as a literary transcript of Deifontes, the town of birth of his own
Juarma
."The village?
Well, yes, it is the town from which they somehow cannot leave, in which they are trapped ... I lived in Deifontes until I was 18, then I went to study in Granada and then I have spent seasons that I have had to return there, and delighted, eh ».
The memory of the novetera adolescence
That nineties adolescence, because the past is obviously the future, incessantly plans on the form and substance of In the end monsters always win: «That's where it all started, I began to invent my stories, to draw my drawings, I wrote my stories and kept them , just for me, although I burned many, the truth ».
local public library
, of about 3,000 inhabitants and "about 15 kilometers from Granada, not where Christ lost the lighter", suddenly appeared as an oasis of youth for him: "It is true that something curious happened to me there ... I began to read what it was, whatever, even if it was, I don't know, a scientific journal, and other things came from there.
There was a very special peace in that place. "Then came the Philology major," I was the first in my family to study, "and perhaps because of that, followed by that certain declassification, the underworld of the brick, the bar and , like his parents, to shake the olive tree again: “I have been doing what I could.” At the same time, he was weaving an intermittent career as a cartoonist that led him, for example, to the magazine
Thursday
... And that now ends in literature, to
special pride of his mother
, which had him "very young, 17 or 18 years old": "She is the one who has been most involved in the book, the most active person on that Facebook that I opened.
My best review ».
To continue reading for free
Sign inSign up
Or
subscribe to Premium
and you will have access to all the web content of El Mundo
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more