José Antonio Montano: "Vox filled the nationality with spurious content and energumenismo"

• Malaga and Montano Go to be

It was inexplicable that José Antonio Montano did not have a published book, unless it was to continue to coquettishly maintain that of Borges: «Let others boast about the pages they have written; I am proud of the ones I have read. Montano, voracious reader, sharp and sensitive writer, self-empowered as

, has gathered in

(JDB Books) some of his articles on cultural criticism. The result of this

clever

is a lively and hilarious portrait.

You are one of the best readers I know. I have been an intermittent reader. Throughout my life I have gone through periods of apathy reading. Actually the euphoria started when I managed to finish

by Marcel Proust, I think it was in 2015. Lately I've been thinking about an aphorism by Karl Kraus, who says that "a writer who spends the day reading is like a cook who spends the day eating." I think the time has come for me to dedicate myself more to writing than to reading. One of your great virtues as a cultural critic is that you don't do a moralistic reading. These psalms that culture makes us better. One of my devotions is Thomas Bernhardt. He has a reputation for being a difficult and even boring author, because he writes long paragraphs without a full stop. I read it because I have a great time, just like when I read Mortadelo and Filemón. It is the same pleasure, what happens is that Mortadelo no longer gives it to me and Bernhardt does, but the foundation is the same. Without moralisms. When I was thinking about this interview I said to myself: «bah, let's talk about

and that's it. ”Look,

is an example of a book that I abandoned. I wasn't ready for

and it got me tired but something stuck with me. The horror of white, the color white. Then I read it later and I was passionate about it. It is normal that you abandoned

, in fact one of its great attractions is boredom, a necessary tedium that transports you to the environment on board the

The same happened with

by Flaubert, a very attractive title for a young man.

He also talks about a boy from the provinces who goes to Paris to succeed in literature.

It was my case.

I started reading it in a romantic mood and then I got bored.

When I finished it, I understood that that was the purpose of Flaubert, he wanted to make an epic of mediocrity.

That is very nice when you are already a reader capable of appreciating that kind of thing.

The chicha calm of

or

Conrad's

.

When an author gets you to perceive that, they are at a higher level.

José Antonio Montano.MARTÍN MESA

With Francisco Umbral you are fighting and reconciling, I do not know how your relationship is now. Umbral was one of my first literary passions, then I rejected it and I did not read it for a long time. One of the readings I started with this year was

and I was delighted but at the same time it saturates me and I just got fed up. What I liked when I discovered it when I was 15 or 16 years old was the double game. The Known Threshold was the provocative, the unsympathetic, the vacillating, the frivolous. Then you would read his books and there was a very tender man, with a stark sensitivity and a way of telling intimacy that was not seen in other authors. The fact of being able to access both gave you the feeling that you were part of a club. You predict that of current Spanish literature almost only Andrés Trapiello's diaries will survive. In that article I say that only two works will survive, also whose authors They don't like each other too well, which are the Trapiello diaries and Javier Marías's novels. Although in the last of Marías I think the decline is beginning to be seen, so Trapiello is winning.At first I thought that his with the newspapers was excessive but there is a moment when quantity became part of quality. The extension and the cathedral give it even more value. It is also supported by a beautiful writing. It hurts you that with Woody Allen it is not going to end illness or death, which is inevitable, but rampant puritanism. To his latest films his viewers came with a twilight spirit. Every year we went to see his movie thinking it might be the last. We were installed in this soft decadence, accepting this twilight in a vitalist way and suddenly these clerics come to you to strike you down without coming to mind. And one thing that was a placid numbness until disappearance, these come here with their knives and turn it into ... bah! It is irritating!I dare to define you as a columnist: you are an anti-nationalist social democrat who pretends to believe that the left has redemption. The "pretend" thing is important. No, I'm not pretending. Let's see. I am very pessimistic and I believe that the PSOE has been wrong and is a great culprit. What happens is that, raising myself on this, I think that without the PSOE nothing can be done. What I see is the division of the country and that annoys me and has me unsettled, but there is something that is in all your journalistic work, which is the betrayal of the left for its alliance with nationalism-Another constant is the destruction of the high school and anti-Francoism as the last bastion of nostalgia for Francoism. I remember the demonstration in Barcelona on October 8. That was a great moment of flags without nationalism. It was a great ceremony of the famous constitutional patriotism.A very clean thing. That has been loaded by Vox, which is nationality as formal content, Vox has filled it with spurious content and gestures and energumenism that I don't like at all. You don't just talk about cinema and reading. I especially like your praise of the Pink Panther, the bun, and the Peta Zetas as your artificial paradises. It is that, where is the Pink Panther in nature? Where is that flavor? The pure artificiality. Borges said that every trip is a space trip. Well, all flavor is chemical but that is accentuated chemistry. The color ... A few years ago a friend brought me a Bony and a Pink Panther and I realized when I ate them that those are our Proustian cupcakes. Our Proustian nonsense are those colorful and garish things. Nothing fancy, something pop.-What book would you like to have written to you? Choose one.

Ernst Jünger

, how?

I say you write it, not the one you like the most. Ah, well, of course ...

no, because I would not have liked to be an officer in the German army in World War II, nor to invade France and that would have been necessary ... to live languidly in Lisbon like Pessoa does.

But I choose

by Bryce Echenique, who is like a Peruvian Woody Allen. When do you leave Twitter?

I haven't tweeted for eight days and I'm not going to do it again.

[His last tweet before the interview is from 39 minutes ago.

A declaration of love to Lillith Verstrynge]

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