2023-10-08 20:28:35
The novelist and philologist Clara Sánchez (Guadalajara, 68 years old) entered the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) this Sunday to occupy chair X, vacant since the death of the poet Francisco Brines. With a speech dedicated to time and space in literature and life, Sánchez praised reading and the fascination with the printed letter. “Could there be anything better than a bed and a book?” she asked rhetorically. The writer’s notebook is his conscience and his emotional baggage, the memory of her, the writer.
Sánchez’s candidacy was endorsed by three academics: Soledad Puértolas, Carme Riera and Paloma Díaz-Mas. Counting the new addition, there are currently eleven women in the plenary session of the RAE, compared to 33 men.
The new academic had a memory for Brines, her predecessor in the chair she now occupies, who died on May 20, 2021. «What greater glory than leaving this life with the wisdom and serenity that we find in her verses and that are continued in the foundation that bears his name in his beloved house in Oliva,” he proclaimed in his speech, titled ‘The Time Machine.’
For Clara Sánchez, whose work is translated into twenty languages and has a significant number of readers in Italy, the writer’s true notebook does not consist of handwritten notes. “In reality, the writer’s notebook is his conscience and his emotional baggage, his memory, because memory is selective and everything that falls outside of it is not worth much if it is written down on a piece of paper.”
Many years have passed since a teenager named Clara Sánchez, who was extremely shy, overcame the distressing idea of being liked. That child who was terrified by the mere idea of being called to the blackboard in class, is still amazed at her dedication to literature. “What is paradoxical and masochistic is that I have dedicated myself to a task whose ultimate goal, no matter how much it is masked, is to please, seduce and fall in love with words.”
three novels
In his speech, Sánchez said he loved time travel. But no artifact, no ingenuity to come, no sophisticated current technology can emulate the capacity of literature. “Fiction gives us supernatural powers with which to create a reality that we can turn to again and again, again and again,” said the writer, who dedicated special attention to three novels: ‘The Time Machine’, by HG Wells ; ‘Micromegas’, by Voltaire, and ‘The Invention of Morel’, by Bioy Casares.
When rereading Bioy Casares’s novel, he realized that the Argentine was a visionary in his own way. “It seemed to me that he was prophesying the dehumanization of success on social networks, in the media, the madness of not conceiving a full life if not through permanent exhibition and permanent success.” His brief fiction is illuminating. «Losing your soul to gain love involves a certain poetry. Losing one’s soul to gain posterity, imperishable fame, is monstrous.
“The writer’s notebook is his conscience and his emotional baggage, his memory,” says the novelist upon joining the RAE
Before the big technology companies tried to compensate for the limitations of our senses, long before the metaverse was invented, in the times of classical Athens, a wise man had already sensed the irresistible attraction that screens would exert. «Long before we were able to represent ourselves on a screen, Plato around the year 380 BC. C considered the nature of reality in his allegory of the Cave, guessing that thousands of years later the walls of the cave would be the screens and the shadows projected there, us.
The philologist feels very honored to occupy chair X in the plenary session of the RAE, the letter that represents the enigma and what is yet to be solved. «What would the equations be without the x? What would become of X-rays and Malcolm X and Generation Represents the unknown number. A whole world to discover is concentrated in the capital X, which is what makes us dream, imagine and move forward.
Without needing to know much about Albert Einstein’s theories, we are aware of the relativity of time. Cervantes already suspected that time is not the same for everyone. “That is why Don Quixote believes that he has remained in the Cave of Montesinos three days and three nights, while to Sancho and his cousin it seems like an hour.”
In her welcome speech to the Royal Academy, Soledad Puértolas maintained that the novelist has been skilled in showing the complexity and contradictions of today’s world. «Clara Sánchez is attentive to the beats of our time, to her words, which are linked to specific spaces and times, to today’s daily lives, and impregnated with memories and traces of the past, words that, sometimes, , are shadowed by old sorrows or new frustrations and in others, to which we cling, in which they are illuminated by dreams and the power of desires.
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