Douglas Stuart: "Violence is life, you cannot control it or escape it"

• Glasgow Literature, the 80s: when the mother is the alcoholic

• John Boyne Fate, Pessimism, and Comedy in the Life of a Fortysomething Homosexual

• Advance The book that Salman Rushdie wrote before the attack: a novel horrified by violence and ignorance

(Glasgow, Scotland, 1976) says

that better literature is made from personal experience because "your own being tries to digest the past."

"I write from the past because I want to know. I don't write to capture, but to interrogate, to ask questions."

And one of them is what is behind the unbearable pain, that which explains entrenched violence, violence as a way of survival and even violence as a lifeline to which an entire community clings.

"The origin of the wound fascinates me."

His is the one that crosses the streets of a working-class and humble neighborhood in

.

"I grew up on those streets and felt invisible as a

man ," admits Stuart.

The boy of an alcoholic mother who grew up without books at home and who at the age of 17 felt moved by literature.

The same one who became a fashion designer and gave it all up to write The

.

That first novel that won him the

and that changed his life.

"I wasn't set up for success, but the award was like permission to be a full-time writer."

To know more

Literature.

Interview with Elena Ferrante: "We run the risk of a new enslavement of women"

• Writing: PAOLO GIORDANO (Corriere della Sera)

Interview with Elena Ferrante: "We run the risk of a new enslavement of women"

Literature.

Rachel Cusk: "Women have complex and violent feelings towards men after being mothers"

• Drafting: LUIS ALEMANYMadrid

Rachel Cusk: "Women have complex and violent feelings towards men after being mothers"

So Stuart now returns to the Glasgow of his adolescence with

(Random House), the harrowing

.

His alcoholic mother who he takes care of on the days he returns home, his brother frustrated that he hasn't been able to make him a

, and his lovely sister who knows he can only progress. if he runs away from all of them.

"Nothing that happens to Mungo happened to me. In that sense, Shuggie Bain was more autobiographical

," explains the writer in an interview via Zoom.

"I wanted to talk about the lack of hope that Mungo lives in, a young man who tries to open up to the world but doesn't see the other side of the city. That's my life," says Stuart.

"From Glasgow I only knew the two kilometers around where I moved."

Like the characters in his novel, whose lives are trapped in a neighborhood from which there is hardly any way out.

That same neighborhood in which young people remind a homosexual man of his place in the world: "Below any human, below themselves."

He beats her up as a reminder to anyone who dares to

.

Because

.

Better than Mungo.

It is that neighborhood where the neighbor is silent while her unemployed husband beats her.

Where abuse is put up with like Mungo and his sister put up with a mother who disappears because she thinks she has the right to be happy without them, and where you still have to ask for forgiveness: "You should know what it's like to make excuses for someone you love, right? can you forgive me for the same thing?"

She is the abused woman asking two children not to save her from her, just as they do not seek to save themselves from the mother they love deep down.

Are they all victims in some way?

"

. As a novelist, you don't have to focus only on the pain of the characters, but on what causes it. I write so that people feel ask why they are like that."

Is there no escape from violence?

"Violence is life. You cannot control it or escape from it. You just have to find a way to manage it. There is violence in practically everything, even if it is hidden."

Even in the love of that alcoholic mother for her children, she maintains.

The love of that neighborhood is the one that hurts.

," Stuart confesses.

For Mungo, love is the key to another life he didn't know existed.

So many lives just two miles from his house, and they all seemed to have a brighter future than his, the boy thought.

As was the case with Stuart.

In Mungo's case, the reveal comes with the

playing in the background in the car.

... Stop sobbing.

Stop, stop, his brother tells Mungo.

Like the day she dragged him away, she shook and slapped him for not being like him.

Stop crying.

As Stuart points out, "those who have resources can escape a bad relationship, a bad job..., but this is not available to everyone."

The poor can only resist.

And stop crying.

"What I show is the randomness of life."

Stuart is now in the middle of writing what will be his third novel, from which he only progresses as he leaves behind that literary territory that Glasgow had become for him.

"The third is being very difficult," he confesses.

"The first book was like a baby that you have to spend all your time with, so the second was a joy. I felt ready."

The truth is that

finished it just when he won the Booker:

. "

With his third work, he looks into the abyss in a way.

Stuart lives in New York today, but looks to Glasgow with satisfaction for how "it has opened the door to

by breaking free of its industrial roots."

He is aware, however, of the wave of neoconservatism sweeping the world.

. "

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

• literature

• Articles Noa de la Torre

• novel

• LGBTI

• United Kingdom