Pedro Simón Prize wins the Spring Novel Prize
Los ingratos
is called the largest and brightest station that Pedro Simón has reached in his journey from journalist to novelist.
His
literary consecration
is named after the award of many bells: the Primavera de Novela 2021 Prize. A beautiful and delicate book that Espasa publishes this Wednesday and that talks about everything that is worthwhile in life.
A
deep, sincere and intimate tribute to the rural world
that gave birth to us and that fell into oblivion and abandonment.
An exaltation of memory, childhood, family and affections in simple, complex and brilliant language.
Like a fancy dictation.
«Let's see when you grow up, they point you out.
And when you do it one day, your father and your mother start with the longings of when you were little () And the mud and the knees with injuries and the spelling mistakes and the vomiting in the car and that perfect disorder was happiness ».
P. 283.
David
el Currete
, protagonist of
Los
ingratos
,
remembers Daniel
El Mochuelo
from
El camino
de Miguel Delibes. Delibes is in everything, even today.
He is a very important writer for all of us who are from Old Castile and have an anchor in the rural world. You have defined your novel as a journey. It narrates a double journey.
A vertical trip to the storage room of each one to review the smells and flavors and the old papers of your life.
And the other more horizontal trip, from the town to the city.
That Spain without a seatbelt, in 124, smoking with the windows up.
From childhood to adulthood.
From the first kisses to the last hugs that we do not arrive in time to give. Who are the ungrateful? We are the ungrateful.
It's you and me.
Ungrateful with a caregiver, with a mother, with a grandmother It is a generational ingratitude.
We didn't say the word "thank you" much, no.
We were ungrateful to the women of that time, it was a matriarchal society, but we never recognized it properly.
There is much talk about those urban women who broke the mold, but never about those rural women who stayed to sweep up the broken pieces.
They had no studies, but they did have a brutal intelligence.
We made the trip thanks to them, or on top of them, burying them.
And I think about you, and you hurt me.
I like to look at you when you don't realize it, son.
When it rains outside and you are there, gawking at the TV that I don't know what gives you, or what it tells you.
Everything in its place and as God intended, eating the bread with chocolate that I have put you ».
P. 262.
Emerita caregiver is the shadow that runs throughout the novel, a woman who draw much ternura.Cuando saw
Roma
, by Alfonso Cuarón, I realized that I had known women like that.
I remembered that these women existed and were there to take care of children.
I had the need to thank that Emerita, or grandmothers like mine, from San Marcial del Vino, in Zamora: she could not study, but at the age of 90 she was the only client of the bibliobus. Childish tenderness and innocence coexist with the harshness, misunderstanding and hostility of the people towards women alone. That society was much more crude, but less cruel.
However, the one with a handicap was excluded: a person with a disability was the fool or the moron;
A woman without children was suspicious ... It was important to pick up that harshness to soften the book a bit. Is the child in the novel you? Yes and no.
All fiction is autofiction.
This book has a lot to do with me.
My father was a worker and my mother a rural teacher, we went where she was destined.
In the villages the tribe educated, what Mrs. Maria told you was as important as what your mother told you.
He sat at the door of the house, it was a charm that has to do with Eden.
Now it's the other way around, we build a palisade on the doormat at home. Do you idealize that world? The only thing I idealize is childhood.
And the affections. The novels that portray the rural Spain from which many of us come are successful now.
Do we feel guilty for having abandoned it and seek redemption in the pages of books? I like that.
The redemption of sins.
In these uncertain times in which we do not know where we are going, the catastrophic thing would be if we forget where we come from.
And this happens to a lot of people.
I try not to forget it.
Returning is always a pain, because in the end you return to a cemetery, to places that are no longer there, to happiness that will not return.
We always spend the best summer of your life in a town. The novel is a vindication of the town and the family.
Is making peace with family important? Mmm Sure.
For yourself, you have to give thanks, be polite and honor your parents, which is what they taught us.
there is nothing more important.
You have to do the exercise of going down to the storage room and that hurts, many people are not willing to do it.
In this society it is not well seen to show weakness; each one of us has a motivation when writing.
Why do you write? First, to pay bills. Come on, don't "furnish."
And I use here a word from my town, close to yours, that you have reminded me in the novel: I write to be read, to rescue things from the trash and oblivion.
Writing is going down to the storage room and opening boxes to review your life.
COU's notes that I don't want to throw away, a photo of your godfather ... Getting to write has to do with one's memory.
We do not want to go down to the storage room because we say that it is lazy.
Is a lie.
What gives you is fear.
And that's what happens when you go to the town of your childhood. Not everyone has the merit and the ability to review the storage room with as much success as you. Good success we'll see. The novel was born with an international award under his arm, nothing less Yes, yes.
I am happy, although I am a journalist. Do all journalists want to be novelists but only some of you succeed? Most journalists do not want to be novelists, what they want is to be talkative ... You say that it is not enough for us to be just journalists, We want more, we want to give our opinion from a vantage point.
Away from people, but above people.
From there, high up.
I do not forget that what little I have in life I have thanks to journalism.
Thanks to the reports that I do.
Being a novelist is not an end, I do not consider myself a novelist, I have written a couple of novels, nothing more.
That does not make you a writer, for that people have to love you as a writer.
I hope they love me. For the moment the jury of the awards want you. The awards are worth you, yes.
But the good things as well as the bad must be lowered, managed.
We are not what others say we are, but what we know we are. That is why you are not on social networks. I do not have networks because, really, I think they would make me more vain.
And I, who know myself better than anyone, have to protect myself.
The compliment would end up blocking me.
And I don't waste time on what they say about me, neither good nor bad, but rather on continuing to build myself as a person.
With my flaws and virtues, try to keep growing a little bit every morning.
Be a better uncle.
Trying is hell, the book is written before the pandemic.
Did you change anything later? The novel is a tribute to what we children of the 70s were. But, when the pandemic arrived, I realized that it had a lot to do with all those people who have died alone, without seeing their children.
So I deleted 50 pages and reread everything for the umpteenth time, but I only added one sentence ... I hope a book like this can also serve as a duel.
What I would like the most is for the book to be given away by people as a way of telling the other person that you love them, that you appreciate everything they have done.
It is a book that talks about love, life, death, ingratitude, childhood, old age, the guilt that they put into our heads.
Because of me, because of me, because of my great fault ...
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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