Sara Mesa: "The sanctimonious ones are very dangerous, because they are narcissistic and demagogic"

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's writing

illuminates slowly.

He enters into the thicket with a light step, apparently light, and thus he makes a path until he takes the reader to a space where the visible was invisible and vice versa;

where the normal acquires an unexpected, strange, unsettling, grotesque condition.

Depends.

In this novel,

(Anagrama), it happens that Sara Mesa tunnels a family that appears normal but is full of anomalies, fears, and shadowy corners.

A functional family that really is not and where secrecy is poorly considered.

A clan where the father admires Gandhi above all things.

And only that detail warns of danger.

A novel where humor and low voices generate a disturbing expedition through affections, affections, loves, suspicions, apprehensions and cautions.

has a precedent in the stories that Sara Mesa collected under the title of

(Anagrama, 2016).

But here it goes further.

It reaches the very center of a dark jungle that leaves an indelible mark on the lives of its members.

He lifts them up or crushes them.

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Nobel Prize for Literature.

Annie Ernaux in five books

• Writing: ANTONIO LUCASMadrid

Annie Ernaux in five books

Literature.

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• Drafting: LETICIA BLANCOBarcelona

More books sold, more bookstores and less Amazon

The family is also the first political institution.

Yours is a laboratory for something tremendous: secrets, affections and blackmail.

What is this novel a mirror of? Difficult question.

At first I would say you're welcome, because when I write I don't think in those terms, but if I consider it more deeply, perhaps it would be a reflection of how we adapt to the world.

In this book I tell the story of a specific family, I do not intend to generalize, but something is clear: the family in which we grow up determines who we are.

Here I dwell a lot on childhood, as I did in the stories of

.

In fact, they are sister books. Loneliness is crossing history, paradoxically so full of voices and people together. Yes.

In the story I am telling, due to a misunderstood concept of authority, no one shows himself as he is, everyone hides something essential about themselves for fear of disappointing or losing love.

This is especially the case with children, who soon learn that it is better to remain silent than to speak.

The exception is the smallest, Here, because we cannot reduce ourselves to behavior patterns.

Faced with the same stimuli, not all of us react in the same way. The family is also a space of blushing indulgences and tremendous accusations... And yet, nothing seems more sacred than the family. It is something that surprises me.

I have written a novel about a family, let's say, not at all perfect, and just for that, and for reflecting on these imperfections,

I have already received lots of insults, when we are all close to or know stories of this type or infinitely more terrible than the one I tell.

That abyss between what is told in a low voice and out loud, or between what is kept quiet and what is boasted about, is very disconcerting to me. Would you say that the structure has the contours of what we understand by mafia? In some cases yes, although the family in my book is more of a sect than a mafia.

But it is a sect with a weak guru, even a little ridiculous, a kind of charlatan full of absurd and contradictory ideas.

This is perhaps the most curious thing: how can someone like that come to have so much power. The men in his novel have something dislocated.

The father, for example, is an admirer of Gandhi and a despot at the same time.

Reflection of an anomaly. The father is a sanctimonious layman.

And sanctimonious people are very dangerous with those around them.

They demand a perfection that no one achieves.

They are narcissistic and demagogic.

On the other hand, admiring someone praiseworthy does not make one praiseworthy.

This is so obvious that sometimes it is forgotten. And then there is that strange condition of the family to judge good, evil, dependency, need... Doesn't that generate dark manners in coexistence? Of course, there are rules of coexistence for family members among themselves, but also among themselves and the outside world.

This is central in

the need... Doesn't that generate dark manners in coexistence? Sure, there are rules of coexistence for family members among themselves, but also between them and the outside world.

This is central in

the need... Doesn't that generate dark manners in coexistence? Sure, there are rules of coexistence for family members among themselves, but also between them and the outside world.

This is central in

, where parents impose confinement on their children.

Theoretically they do it for their own good, to protect them from danger and vulgarity (in their own words), but good intentions are not always enough. Shame and silence are other substances of 'The Family'...Look, I think the word shame is repeated several times in the book, in several of the stories.

One of the problems that the characters face is not having words to express what is happening to them.

The eldest son, in a fit of desperation, tells a friend about a specific situation of abuse, but she blames her cowardice because she does not understand that neither he nor his brothers rebel.

This is interesting, because it supposes a re-victimization.

There are submissions that are ashamed to admit only because they are very difficult to explain.

And the flight.

Sooner or later, the flight. Of course.

It can be an exterior or interior escape, in the end there are always cracks through which to escape.

Before, he described the father as a kind of enlightened man who tries to transmit his values ​​and ideas to his wife and his children, at all costs.

But the funny thing is that he doesn't get it.

He manages to dominate them in some way, he makes them hide or lie, but there is an area of ​​them that he cannot reach, something that will always remain intact. The family, any family, can be understood as a tool of control, as one of the molds of power. That is what the philosophers who have studied the structures of power say, with Foucault at the head.

David Cooper, the father of antipsychiatry, also said that the family structure serves as a paradigm for other social institutions such as school, university, etc.

large companies, the church, political parties, the armed forces, hospitals and psychiatric hospitals, because in all of them there are "fathers" and "mothers", "brothers" and "sisters", "grandparents" founders, etc. This novel it is, of his, the most intense, the one that shakes the reader the most. I think not.

There is a lot of humor in it.

I would like to talk more about this, about the humor in my writing, which is mainly in the children's dialogues and in their peculiar way of interpreting what is happening around them, but also in the figure of the father, who is sometimes a bit grotesque. How can we all become so when we take ourselves too seriously. Do we also leave the family? Partly yes and partly no.

I would have to develop this answer much more, I know,

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