2023-08-19 19:02:35
China remained closed to the rest of the world for three long years, absorbed in the pursuit of a health campaign mutated into an ideological utopia. With the doors recently opened, Spain has launched a cultural offensive to gain access to an advantageous position, in keeping with the weight of its tradition and the interest it arouses at the opposite end of Eurasia. Over the last few months, this effort has achieved milestones such as two exhibitions at the Prado and Thyssen Museums in Shanghai, as well as a retrospective on Salvador Dalí in Guiyang. In the literary realm, Lorenzo Silva paves the way for letters with his participation these days in the Shanghai Literature Festival and other events organized by the Instituto Cervantes. Silva chats with ABC and, as it could not be otherwise in the case of the most famous Spanish writer of crime novels -along with a reporter recently arrived from Thailand-, the conversation starts from the case that an entire country comments on.
–A police friend once told me: writing novels is very difficult. Writing them in half an hour and when you’re nervous, very difficult. Even more to hold them before someone who is used to being told.
In a way, writing novels is like planning a crime.
–There is something criminal about making a person believe that something that has never happened is true [ríe]. But yes, of course, the big problem is how to make fiction consistent when it has a certain complexity. I also always think that the recipient is someone smarter than me.
–Either a reader or a policeman.
-No no no; in my case a reader [ríe de nuevo]. I have to see how to cajole him. You want to bring the characters into the situations that interest you, because they are the ones that move and overwhelm the reader, but if you’re not careful you lose the verisimilitude and then the whole impact collapses like a house of cards.
– How concerned are you with plausibility?
–There is a verisimilitude in real life and another within fiction, which may not coincide with the previous one. Most of my stories are realistic, so I need to pay attention to the coherence of reality. For example, in my detective novels there is no bizarre criminal who kills eighteen red-haired women to carve a Sumerian symbol on the back of each of their hands. [vuelve a reír]. It’s fine to write weird novels but nobody does that, they kill themselves for other things. Killing is a decision, even for this kid from Thailand, I don’t know what problem he had, but at some point he made a practical reasoning: the solution was to kill a person. There is a reason, whatever. And I worry that in my stories there are crimes that have to do with the real reasons why people kill other people. I try to make my novels obey those coordinates that reality offers.
–On the line of those coordinates. It is his first trip to China and, at the same time, the first visit by a Spanish writer after three years of isolation. What cultural environment has been found? How open have you been to foreign artists and their ideas?
–My experience is particular, concrete and limited to the five days that I have been here and the activities in which I have participated. I have found openness and interest. In Shanghai I participated in a plenary session with twenty-five Chinese authors. Beneath all the differences, I was surprised that listening to their interventions did not mean collecting a sample of concerns very different from those of authors from Spain, America or Europe. In the end, literary creation is something universal, which mobilizes the same levers, obeys the same ambitions and, in the globalized world in which we live, is measured by the same challenges. Many of them were concerned about this massive shift to audiovisual narration to the detriment of the literary one. Some of them approached me later because I was a bit more dissenting, I tried to defend the autonomy of literature as a complete narrative language in itself that does not have to be subordinated to other languages because they are more successful or more industrial power. The Chinese were more likely to accept that these were the rules of the game, to try to get their books adapted for film or television as the only way for a writer to survive in the ecosystem. In a way, I saw that they accepted that defeat that I refuse to accept.
–Have you had the opportunity to familiarize yourself with Chinese literature?
–Since adolescence I have approached some of the most accessible Chinese classics. In my teens I read the ‘Daodejing’ and ‘The Art of War’. They caught my attention a lot, there are quotes from one and the other in my works. Then I read ‘Dream in the Red Chamber’, Li Bai’s poetry, to authors contemporary to Mo Yan and Yan Lianke… If we think that Spanish and Chinese are the first and second languages in the world and then we review the flow of translations, it is to make us both look at it. In a global world, the dimension of culture and the importance of creation must prevail. Here is something wrong. Look, today I’m going to be with an author [Ah Yi] who has a book translated into Spanish. I have been looking through it and, look what a curiosity, I have discovered a thematic parallelism: the forces that operate in the criminal dynamics are very similar to those of a novel that I placed in the Spain of the 21st century, so it would not be difficult that with a little more lubrication the system will flow better. Here I want to take the opportunity to thank and recognize the work done by the Instituto Cervantes, which has quite limited means compared to other competitors. It is important not only for me to be here today, but also for a Chinese publisher interested in translations.
Lorenzo Silva, this week in Beijing EFE
–That work that will soon see the light of day in Chinese is his latest novel, ‘Púa’ (Ediciones Destino, 2023). The text implicitly draws a very particular socio-political scenario: the fight against terrorism, the dirty war… As an author, do you regret that the reading experience of a Chinese person lacks this frame of reference?
–Look, in this case it is something that I celebrate. Many people are reading ‘Púa’, even though I have tried to avoid it, as a roman à clef about the dirty war against ETA. There is no doubt that there are elements of the story, despite being located in an indeterminate country and time, that refer the Spanish reader to the reality of ETA terrorism and particularly to the GAL, although there are many differences. When I have wanted to write about ETA I have written with proper names in non-fiction and with absolutely precise details in fiction. If I have not resorted to all of this in this novel, it is because I wanted to transcend that specific episode to talk about the dirty war in general, which, moreover, is not exclusive to Spain, or even to modernity. It is true that I was interested in the phenomenon of terrorism, the criminal threat that falls on a society. And I was interested in the dirty war as a possible solution, or as a false solution, which coincidentally many consolidated democracies have followed. I wanted to tell that and ask the reader the question: “Can a noble end be pursued through the most ignoble procedures?” This question is universal, it is posed in all societies and in many cases it is answered in the affirmative. And then there is the result. Harari makes a rather interesting and intelligent analysis, in which he comes to say that the societies where dirty war has been used more freely have produced a lower degree of progress.
– When translating the book, have you considered whether such a question is problematic in this political context?
-Well, I don’t know, it’s not up to me, the editors, the authorities, the readers will see it… But I think it’s a universal human issue to which, ultimately, all societies must respond, regardless of their way to organize All societies sometimes give a response that leads to crossing the lines, and all societies must then face the consequences. Because we are not talking about the lines set by another, but the lines set by society itself. When a servant of the State breaks the laws of the State, basically what he is deciding is something as morrocotudo as abolishing the State, because the State is a system of laws. When you start not to apply them you start to disassemble it. And in all systems, whatever they may be, this ends up having consequences and assuming a corrosive factor of the legitimacy and moral authority of the State itself. For example, not to get into what I know less about, during the Franco dictatorship everyone knew that the political elite was corrupt, so all citizens were authorized to corrupt. And it was not a regime that had to respond to democratic legitimacy, but simply this way of breaking the rules increased the dysfunctionality of society.
Let’s finish at the beginning: reading. The protagonist of ‘Púa’ begins the novel running a bookstore, a tribute to an extinct youthful passion. Given that every writer was in the first instance a reader, what is his relationship with reading, that is, with the work of others? The way how it has evolved?
–Fortunately, unlike the character, there have been times in which the reader and writer that I am has had it difficult but has never died. I have always been attached to writing as a way of life and reading as a way of interacting with the world. I have never lost my passion because both things have rewarded me. I have been very lucky, there are many people who dedicate themselves to writing and have talent and writing does not reward them. Luck has been with me, but as a reader you don’t need that luck, all you need is to stay curious and keep finding good books, and that has never disappointed me. Look, I can tell you, I am in China for the first time, and what happened to me in so many other places is happening to me: I had already been here. Because I had already read about all these places, and what I had read did not fool me. I was lucky enough to read writers who were talented enough, sometimes even in a few lines, to give trustworthy testimony to the soul of a people and a society.
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