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The only thing Ray Loriga

(Madrid, 1967) asks for

before starting this interview is "two minutes" to go smoke.

And he leaves an empty room, populated only by a scarf and a nokia that seem to belong to a bygone but resistant life.

Like the writer who faced a brain tumor, he dealt with death and now he allows himself to joke with it in his latest novel,

Any summer is an end

(Alfaguara), while he flirts with the idea of ​​assisted suicide and with some characters that they are not very clear if they want to continue in this world.

Until he reappears through the door and this can already start.

Have you ever felt like dying? I haven't felt like dying, but when you undergo a delicate operation you think it's better to die than to remain in a vegetative state.

That terrifies me more than death where the horrible thing is suffering, agony and the degeneration of your living conditions. How is your relationship with her? Some deal with faith and others without it, mine is unfortunately that of an agnostic and I say 'unfortunately' because the other is much more exciting.

If you can't convince yourself, you live it in a way as dry as if you turned off a machine. And what about euthanasia, how do you see it? That is the path of societies that defend free will towards progress and the return of rights.

And within that margin is the decision about death in dramatic situations because we often talk about saving suffering. Perhaps the Catholic tradition is even stronger than free will to choose when to die. I don't want to attack anyone, but it seems that those laws They were going to force someone to die.

That is not considered, but to respect the free will of someone in an agonizing and meaningless situation to prolong it.

That others think differently should affect their own behavior, not social rules.Are you afraid of getting old?Youth is magnified, I don't miss being young nor does it have any added value.

Since the 1960s, this myth began to be encouraged as consumer machinery because they found a very exploitable sector.

And I'm not afraid of growing old

but they do have worse living conditions and physical deterioration. We all crave that myth of youth, right? Cool clothes... The impostor syndrome, which your character talks about, have you really suffered from it in your career?

When it comes to writing, I have never felt like an impostor because it is a true passion.

Socially and in the image it is difficult not to feel it because my job is to be alone in silence writing or reading. But you were almost like a rock star in your beginnings in the world of literature.

In other countries, like the United States or France, it was not so strange to be a media writer, but in Spain it still is today.

They are phenomena that you do not foresee,

ANGEL NAVARRETE

To know more

Literature.

Ray Loriga: "They told me: either we remove the brain tumor or you die in 15 days"

  • Drafting: PEDRO SIMÓNMadrid

  • Writing: PHOTOS: ANTONIO HEREDIA

Ray Loriga: "They told me: either we remove the brain tumor or you die in 15 days"

And how did you live inside it?

When you're young you can always be a little too stupid, but just going home to read and being alone brings you down a lot. How were those three years you spent without writing because of the tumor? I spent them reading .

If I could afford it, I would live the rest of my life reading without writing anything. Weren't you afraid of not being able to write anything again? When they operate on your brain, they are touching the fundamental element and you think that if you suffer a serious disability in access to your ideas is over.

There the fear is, above all, of a reduction in your intellectual capacities. As a good example of a winner, why are you always so interested in failure? I don't know so many winners, failure has a higher percentage in the vital career.

But this must be qualified a lot because life is not Operación Triunfo or Masterchef, it is a training process and what differentiates success and failure is very subtle. Looking at your life, don't you consider yourself a winner? In my scale of values, I am moderately satisfied because my whole life could have turned out much worse, that is the reason for my optimism.

My work and I get along well although there is always a degree of disappointment when you write because it is not what you dreamed of.

But you feel calmer when you accept that what has been achieved is much less than what you dreamed of but much more than you had feared. What you have not achieved is getting into the world of technology because of what I see on your mobile. I am no stranger to some contact with technology: I have a computer, but I don't like it and I don't think I'll ever have a smartphone.

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