Jorge Alacid portrays the “moral backbone” of the Transition in his first novel

by time news

Journalism and literature are the two passions of Jorge Alacid (Logroño, 1962). The first, to which he has dedicated his entire professional life, is also the driving force behind his first novel, ‘Los seres queridas’ (Los aciertos & Pepitas). A “very literary” intrigue around some disturbing suicides that the director of a provincial newspaper with both trade and nose, Viberti, investigates during the Transition.

«I wanted to portray the moral backbone of Spain at that time, of a country in black and white, a border territory with its own narrative, and for that it was good for me not to be too specific», justifies his decision to situate the novel in a Spanish city that is never named.

After a life in the newsroom of Vocento newspapers such as El Correo, La Rioja or Las Provincias, Alacid debuts in storytelling with this exciting story “that is gray more than black, like the inhospitable and precarious Spain that it portrays, and that it deliberately avoids.” be red.” He relies, yes, on the police canon to go further and flee from the blood and offal so abundant in the police genre. “The crime in the novel is an accident that allows explaining the moral support of the characters,” insists its author.

“Since Hammett there has been a lot of crime novel tinged with red and I didn’t want to wallow in morbidity,” he says. And she treads carefully to avoid the gruesome when addressing a subject as tricky as suicide. «I realized that suicide can be a strange crime, with diffuse contours and multiple moral aspects. That it can be a homicide by other means or a murder by other means, although we will never know the ultimate reason for the suicide or if we invaded his privacy when investigating it, “she says.

liquid morality

Alacid believes that journalists and novelists are a lot like “hunters” and in this debut feature he puts his bloodhound Viberti to investigate these disconcerting suicides. «He has a liquid morality, gaseous at times, but which is revealed to be very powerful. Beneath his disbelieving façade there is a high sentimentality that he hides, and finds his match in journalism », draws Alacid to his protagonist. “There is the journalist fisherman who throws the rod to see who bites, and the one who goes hunting in search of his prey, and that is what I have tried as a novelist and before as a journalist,” he points out.

Alacid breaks a spear for journalism that is practiced “with excellence” far from the centers of power, in capitals like the one in which his novel takes place “in which apparently nothing ever happens and that could be Logroño, Soria or León.” “Need sharpens wit, and if you have nothing and look for gold and diamonds where there is only routine, you will end up finding them and you will improve your professional praxis,” Alacid claims that pick and shovel journalism.

Committed to the bone with his job, “if I were born a thousand times, I would be a journalist a thousand times,” he boasts. «Journalism is the story of life and those who in the future want to know what our time was like should go to the newspaper archives. We journalists help to interpret the world and I hope that we also give it a moral foundation. The main thing in journalism is to inform, but also to contribute to a deeper democratic quality », she concludes.

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