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"A father alone unties the rope with which his son has hanged himself", this is how

Theseus, his new life

(Gutenberg Galaxy)

begins

, with a small u that hides the brutality of suicide. A suicide that is also that of a brother, that of the author himself, Camille de Toledo, which unfolds in the Theseus of mythical resonances of the title. Essayist, historian and philosopher, De Toledo (Alexis Mital's literary pseudonym) has stood out for works such as' El haya y el birul. Essay on European sadness', 'In times of monsters and catastrophes' or' History of vertigo '. But with Theseus he faces his own life.

"Fiction allows us to protect the living and say the unspeakable, reveal without exposing, bring to light a family history with a broader echo so that literature finds itself at that crossroads between the singular and the universal. Theseus is a double. But between the model and its double, as we know from Jorge Luis Borges and his map of the empire, between the original and the copy, there is always a gap ", recognizes Camille de Toledo, who plunges into that gap to rescue the ruins of his past, that of his family and that of a Europe devastated by wars. "Theseus is a response to the history of violence, of power, of force, with a history of fragility and forgiveness ... I pose a question worthy of a detective novel:

who is responsible for the murder of a man who commits suicide?

Theseus searches, does not understand, collapses and at first fails to survive his own people. Then he opens his family archives wide to go back in time, to contemplate the

monster

, that Minotaur of history ", explains De Toledo. In the labyrinth of 20th century history the death of a soldier is intertwined in the front of World War I, the despair of a father in the interwar period, the discovery of the suicide of an ancestor, the oil crisis, the failure of the dream of a European Union ...

"I always try to give an accurate picture of where we are in European history. And it seems to me that this is our reality at the end of the 20th century, both for

Spanish society - which still bears the traces of the Civil War and after the dictatorship. -

as for the French, the German and the European: the wounds of past wars are still there, they continue to act in our lives, pursuing our lineages, our genealogies ", considers De Toledo. And the Theseus of Greek mythology, who faces the Minotaur to free Athens from her punishment (every year he sends 14 ephebos and maidens to Crete to be sacrificed), is the symbol of hope, of historical change: "Theseus is responsible for freeing the youth from the debts of the war. It is he who puts an end to the tribe, to the sacrifice paid to the Minotaur, in the name of the past. So, in a way, it makes it possible to "unleash the future." Remembering Theseus is, therefore, waiting for this force that would come to put an end to the ghosts, to the persecutions ... ".

Theseus, your new life

is a wound, a mourning, and an attempt to heal through the word. The traumas of the past are revealed in a journey-metaphor, a flight by train from the West (Paris) to the East (Berlin), a life trajectory parallel to that of the writer himself, who rescues family photos, old letters, the forgotten diaries of the ancestors ... and intermingles them with the text. A text that oscillates between symbolism and the introspective, between the poetic and the investigation. "First Theseus flees, isolating himself from his family and his dead, going to live in the East, in Berlin. But the past catches up with him and then he will begin to search for another dimension of existence: deeper, more archaic, to see what, in the past connects him with a longer time, with a meaning ... ", he points out.

The specters of the past

Beyond the classic psychoanalysis of

Freud or Jung,

De Toledo has studied the main writings of so-called transgenerational psychology, from Jacob Levy Moreno -psychiatrist who developed psychodrama as therapy- to

Anne-Ancelin Schützenberger,

creator of psychogenealogy. In his novel he delves into the idea that a person's problems or traumas are inherited from their ancestors, that there is a 'body-memory' that drags them: "If we summon longer temporalities and ancestors we see how wounds and traumas that go back Generations later can be found a long time ago. There are many enigmas around the transmission of traumas through time, and how a body can be haunted by ghosts, specters of history ", he defends.

In this sense, the key date of the book is 1973, when the brother who will commit suicide at the beginning of the 21st century is born, "but also the date on which European societies understand that infinite growth and free energy are over", aim. "It is as if the energy and oil crisis of 1973, by ending the illusion of prosperity and growth, caused the return of the ghosts of the two World Wars: trials of genealogical destruction and collective mourning. In the narrative, I tried to use the form of an investigation to identify these bridges between collective wounds and bodies ... ", he adds.

The publication of

Theseus, his new life

has practically coincided with the launch of his new book in France:

Le fleuve qui voulait écrire

(The river I wanted to write).

The writer proposes an institutional utopia: what if the Loire were the first river in Europe to have a legal personality and could defend its rights?

"I am working on the rights of nature, of lakes, rivers, forests ... It is not only the human dead of the 20th century with whom we must learn to live, there are also all the non-human absent: the species that are disappearing, the animals that were killed during wars, the landscapes that were destroyed ... "The wounds of nature are also those of the modern Theseus.

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