2023-11-12 09:31:47
The stories that Iban Zaldua now publishes in Spanish with Páginas de Espuma, ‘A hidden’, had their first life in Basque almost a decade ago. It has rained a lot, but the “obsessions” remain the same. Also the idea that to talk about the everyday, it is worth jumping a little towards the fantastic.
– “It is a universally known truth that, among all the formulas during an interview, journalists always choose the phrases that make you look the most stupid,” says the writer of the story ‘Interview’. Yeah?
– I don’t think it’s the journalist’s fault, but rather it’s part of the promotion experience. We have to work in favor of the book, but in reality everything has already been said. What we do, what we say, is redundant, it is like a non-deliberate lie, not manipulation, but especially with a book that was written a few years ago, remember and answer why this and why not. .. You make literature about literature, you make promotional literature.
– We will try to do something worthy with it. I wonder if you think ‘In secret’ is a book about obsessions, about the loops that humans can get into.
– I think that’s what literature is, at least from a certain moment: obsession. Art in general is obsession. It is returning to themes and perspectives over and over again, it is turning things around. Those of us who have been and are readers already know that entering that world implies a certain degree of obsession. Your parents forbade you to read at night, in the dark, and you looked for all the tricks to do it. And a writer who returns to the same thing over and over again seems more reliable to me than one who does the opposite in the previous book, there is a certain artifice in that. Although there are some who do it very well.
-And what are your obsessions?
– Relationships as a couple, family or friendship, those are less talked about; I like to explore what we hide from ourselves and what does not quite emerge, the suspicion. For a time, when the children were little, I was also obsessed with the fear that comes from assuming those responsibilities, or the paths not taken in life: where they would have taken us. And there is more: the Basque conflict, which appears less in this book because he had already published a previous book about it. I have a very distant past imbued with the epic of war movies, and I want to look for the reverse. Like football, they were hobbies of a certain type of man that I haven’t been interested in for a long time.
– In ‘Drafts of the future’, published by the publishing house Consonni does nothing, a story of his appears in which he talks about the attraction for weapons.
– They let the rest of the participants choose the topic for those speculative stories, but not me (laughs). It’s just that I have that ‘background’ of insubordination…
– In ‘In secret’ there is also a lot of speculation, but different. Why start from the most everyday to peer into the fantastic?
– Like Cortázar, the creation of worlds radically different from ours – or not so different, but fantastic – does not interest me; I am more interested in writing about a very recognizable world, the one that surrounds us, and then going a little further, using mechanisms of the fantastic, the alternative and unusual. It is the means of underlining the strangeness of the very everyday things that we experience and of trying to give them a meaning that everyday life does not offer us. Science fiction is not such a different place, it is another perspective to look at this reality.
– In the story ‘Kafka’s Translator’ the narrator says that writing in Basque is a way of being discreet.
– In Basque I write calmly because my father cannot read me. In Spanish, yes. That’s why I self-translate.
#explore #suspicions #hide