His novel 'Joy' is a finalist in the award thanks to a story that follows in the footsteps of his previous (and successful) work, 'Ordesa'.
Santiago Posteguillo receives the Planeta Family Award
Manuel Vilas (57 years old) became the finalist of the 2019 Planeta Prize last Tuesday with 'Alegría', a book that, in some way, continues along the path of 'Ordesa' (2018). After pocketing the corresponding 150,000 euros , the Aragonese writer explained that the new book was like the second part of Don Quixote, in which Alonso Quijano reads himself, his adventures. And is that 'Ordesa' has become an editorial phenomenon for an author at the late age, with more than 100,000 copies sold and numerous awards for the book of the year, such as that of EL MUNDO. Conceived as a farewell letter to his deceased parents, Vilas then portrayed the difficult relationship with his mother - installed in a fantasy dissociation with reality - and his father - a man with whom he could barely exchange words. But not only that: he also recounted crudely his alcoholism, his infidelities and the subsequent divorce of his wife, with whom he had had two children.
"I haven't been drinking for a long time. I thought I wouldn't get it, but I've done it," Vilas confesses in one of Ordesa's fragments. " The drink was killing me, I was going to her compulsively, looking for the end . I reacted. Now I still suffer but I don't drink."
Thus, he recounts how he fell on the street, how the police picked him up, how he had two hospital admissions. And he reflects: "Every alcoholic comes to the moment in which he must choose between continuing to drink or continue living. A kind of orthographic choice: either you stay with the kisses or with the grapes." In that election, he emerged victorious. "It turns out that you end up loving your own life very much, however insipid and miserable. There are others who don't, who don't go out, who die." And he says that "who has drunk a lot knows that alcohol is a tool that breaks the lock of the world. You end up seeing everything better, if you later know how to get out of there, clar or".
For Vilas, "drinking was more important than living, it was paradise . " Drinking "improved the world, and that will always be so." And as if to record it, he strips for the reader in a scene on the day when, after his divorce, a bank granted him a mortgage. "I remember being asked if I was in good health and said yes. When I left the bank, with the mortgage granted, I went to a bar next to the branch. It was half past one or two at noon. I was drinking in that bar without stopping. I drank wine. I was elated. I left the bar and walked just behind the branch and there, in a square, I fell round. Unconscious next to my granted mortgage. " He woke up in the hospital. "The first thing I thought about regaining consciousness, there, in an emergency bed, was if they would take my mortgage, if they would have seen me at the bank, falling round, completely drunk." Something that, like this and everything, "had its humorous imprint," as he says in a passage: "I carried my rare seal, my permanent comedy, my mother's inheritance, because my mother did things like that."
'Alegría', which arrives at the bookstores in the first week of November, imagines Vilas' parents before this emotional striptease that has conquered so many readers and that, in this extension, it seems that it will reach many more . However, not everyone has blessed the recognition of the Aragonese writer. The editor Constantino Bértolo (Navia de Suarna, 1946), founder of the Trojan Horse seal, denounced on his Twitter account the fact that the prize came after Vilas had applied for a scholarship from the Academy of Spain in Rome to write there a novel over a year. Shortly after the name of the finalist appeared, Bértolo wrote: "Wow, we already know what Vilas wanted the scholarship of the Academy of Rome: to quickly write the novel of the 150,250 euros of the Planet. And what applied: he wrote it in just two months instead of a year. Hopefully now I will give up (to the scholarship, of course). " And then another tweet: "Vilas is given the scholarship for the project of writing his next novel and he has already written it! So let's hope he doesn't want to spend a good holiday in Rome at the expense of the public purse. the Planet! Long live honesty! Long live honest awards! "
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