2024-01-07 13:59:57
Every day, at the beginning of his long day of writing, César Pérez Gellida, (Valladolid 1974) turns on a powerful hair dryer. The writer and recent winner of the Nadal Prize with the novel ‘Under dry land’ is bald as a billiard ball. That doesn’t stop him from being stimulated by the whirring of the contraption. “He comforts me and isolates me,” he explained minutes after winning the dean of Spanish literature prize. A Nadal that on Three Kings Day and with 80 years of history, was a fabulous gift for a writer who feels “the obligation to make the reader uncomfortable.”
In his novel there are many ingredients “to achieve the objective of a ‘thriller’, which is to maintain sustained suspense from the first pages to the end. Something that is not always achieved,” says the author of a “very dark” intrigue. He wants the reader to “have the need to ask themselves who César Pérez Gellida is, the turkey that Nadal has won with this novel.”
Its protagonist is Antonia Monterroso, “the character who will impact readers the most,” he promises. «She is an unscrupulous woman who everyone knows but no one knows who she is. They know about her strange anatomy, a very attractive morphology for the time; a very big, very direct woman who has fought against almost everything. “Her behavior and her intentions will raise doubts in the reader,” she says. «She will not leave anyone indifferent. Either you fall in love with her or you hate her.
Pérez Gellida warns that the novel “is in itself a deception” that will make the reader “question page after page what they are reading and will feel that the approaches of the previous chapter are not valid. It is likely that in each chapter the option will change.
Estremadura
«When you think about the setting of a novel you see that there are stories that work in many places and others that only work in certain places. This is the case of ‘Under dry land’. I was looking for a hostile medium so that the ingredients of the story would be hostile. I went to the most hostile time we have had in Spain in the 20th century, outside of the civil war: Extremadura, the place where there has been the most hunger, where the most damage has been done and where there have been the most difficulties to survive, but at the same time the one you want to live the most,” he says. He visited Extremadura before writing “and I understood that it was the setting I needed. “That this story had to develop no matter what between Zafra, Almendralejo and Mérida,” he says. “It’s Extremadura in 1917: a lot of poverty, despotism and hunger, a lot of hunger,” she insists.
The novel has a political and social background. “One of its crucial points is the hostility in the environment.” «Under dry soil nothing germinates. That’s where the title comes from. If your basic needs are not covered, it is very difficult not to awaken in you the desire to satisfy them. An environment where nothing good germinates is the breeding ground for a ‘thriller’ where you can make people uncomfortable and deceive. «Making the reader uncomfortable is an obligation. “It is my fundamental objective when I write a novel that I want the reader to be moved by the end of each chapter,” he says.
It is a novel “with a very cinematic structure.” «It has the clear intention of being a series or movie. When writing I structure the plot like a script, with short sequences and zooming in and out like the camera does. I use many cinematographic resources in an audiovisual narrative. “Hopefully I can confirm soon that this will become a film,” he confesses.
He began writing ten years ago “due to insomnia problems.” «I found a method that still works for me today: making up a story without disturbing the person next to me. A story that invades my head and that the next day I pick up where I left off. That was the origin of my first novel and it has been the origin of all the others,” says the author of ‘Memento Mori’. «Since then nothing has changed. Still building my novels like this. I never outline a previous script or plot. “I can’t change,” he says, proud of his method.
Does the Pérez Pérez Gellida style exist? “It has a lot to do with not planning the novels, torturing the drafts a lot until they confess what they don’t want,” he points out. «Besides, I have to have fun in this solitary job. Every day you sit at your laptop, turn on the hairdryer and no one tells you anything. You have to tell it to yourself. During hours. It is a job that requires a lot of concentration, perseverance and full dedication. The method is what makes you want to get up again the next day to hit the keyboard. «Why is my way of writing so identified with me… Well, I have no fucking idea. I suppose because it is something different but I am not incapable of defining it.
Write with the hairdryer on “from the moment I sit at the desk until the moment I get up.” «It relaxes me and isolates me. I don’t know which of the two things is more important. I focus the dryer against the right side of my face. His air caresses me. I work with Formula 1 dryers, with three temperatures and three power levels, at least 2,200 watts. Each one lasts me six or seven months and is not bad if we take into account that I use them daily for 10 or 12 hours. “Electricity bills are outrageous,” he admits.
Pérez Gellida entered the select Nadal club remembering the “master” Miguel Delibes and Gustado Martín Garzo, two honorable Valladolid authors who won the prize in 1947 and 1999, respectively. “Being the third Valladolid native with them is like entering a dream,” he congratulates himself. «The Nadal is different from all literary awards. It’s aspirational. It is the oldest in this country and for the authors it is the summum. Super exciting. This year there were more than eight hundred candidates and being here talking about my novel is the bomb,” says the winner, who until now has been published in Suma de Letras, the imprint of Ramdom House, the great competitor of Planeta that protects Destino, creator and editor of Nadal. .
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