2023-10-29 11:12:20
The speed of Manuel Jabois is paired with the quality of his prosethe liveliness of his eyes, with the sudden sadness that he sometimes explains by looking, and with the combination of melancholy and courage that he imprints on his prose and, therefore, on his soul, because they go together. This novel is also, perhaps, an autobiographybut above all it is confirmation that that journalist, now one of the best in recent decades in this language, is truly a poet, that is, a novelist who is assisted by the passion, and the gift, for the demanding writing of those who They are not satisfied with any adjective.
‘Mirafiori‘(Alfaguara) is a love story, dissatisfied, in continuous struggle, in which no one loves each other while everyone loves each other. It is, he says, “my darkest novel.”
Jabois was born in 1978 in Sanxenxo, Galicia, and sometimes it seems like he is 17 years old, which is more or less when he started writing for the press. He has been working at ‘El País’ for a while now, and he is the fastest on this side of the West. The novel, by the way, almost at all times seems like a bolero. Like the best books by Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
Reading him is like listening to him speak: it is easy to follow him.
I always thought that talking to people can be easy. How to write. It is not, but it can be. The difficult thing is to leave it on paper. It also happens to us when talking to people.
And to what extent won’t this book also have some questions you ask yourself?
Right now a reader friend of mine just wrote to me to tell me that he was reading my book with my voice because I have a very personal style and it is very difficult for someone not to read me with my voice. Since I write, anything I say comes out with my voice. This friend told me: “I started reading the novel with your voice and I finished reading it with mine.” People in some way identify with what I tell, perhaps because I also identify with the voice I express there.
It happened to this journalist until page 200, but in this case he read it with his voice, because until that moment the novel reads like a bolero. Love and pain, and music, coexist in it. Until the end, which is even more bolero.
I like that you say it. Because the ending cost me horrors, the editors know that. I’m 3000 words away and I wasn’t rushing the end! A trip arose in which I had to be accompanied, and I went alone, in circumstances that were not sad, but very fun, to the coast of Malaga, on my birthday. There the inspiration that shapes the ending was summoned. I think I wrote very good pages, the best I have ever written: that is, the best I could give. Maybe in a year I will be able to give more, but that is what I was able to give, and I am happy.
There is a lot of literary music.
There are many things, many landscapes, as happened in ‘Malaherba’, that perhaps form the same corpus with this one. There are some passages that have already been evoked in other books; There are many nods to authors that I love closely, as well as episodes in which there is particular music, which can be attributed to those admirations.
It is common for you to appear in some way in your books. What was not expected is that, as here, he appears as an author of obituaries…
It is a novel that is about death, that talks about death and that approaches it from different perspectives. I think it was appropriate for a character to appear, a journalist, who dedicates himself to that, and in the Anglo-Saxon way, to seeking information to advance obituaries. The character goes to Madrid in search of an actress, he cannot publish and it is the world of the obituary that opens doors for him. The fact that there is a journalist opens doors for me, because it is easier to write in the field that you yourself dominate, even if what counts is entirely fiction.
The novel is full of ghosts. How did they arrive?
They are with me, the ghosts are with me. Journalism, like the rush, gives you a lot of versatility, to write, to read, and I really like to play with those characters that seem and are not, ghosts. And feeling that I am having fun with them, with those characters, I have fun. I have a lot of fun writing. And while I do it I like that, like ghosts, I find myself on different pages, with different styles.
It is inevitable to find Manuel Jabois a journalist. Did he fight at any point to avoid that character?
I think that my character, who could be me, does not exist in the book, or at least to me it does not seem to me that in that sense he has a conflict with that possible appearance. Writing about the obituary journalist was a lot of fun for me because I imagined a journalist, in effect, doing that.
There are dreams, drugs, falling in love, fear, secrets… How do all these elements that end up being a summary of Mirafiori?
I think it is my darkest novel. It has a lot of light, so much light that the characters become transparent. But it is a darker novel than the other two (‘Malaherba’, ‘Miss Marte’). In a way it is a novel that closes the other two, but remains within a darkness greater than that which dominates them. Someone told me, when I wrote the first novel, that at the bottom of terror there is some beauty, and that you always find some tenderness even in the darkest hours. And that is found, for example, in the first chapter and the final chapter, which are practically the same but narrated differently. In those dialogues, in those encounters, the characters tend to forgive each other, insult each other, absolve themselves, to give themselves a little light with the saddest and poorest candle they can get their hands on.
Is saying “the darkest novel” granting that it is the most personal novel?
I don’t believe it. It has nothing of my material or personal biography, but nevertheless it is the most autobiographical from the point of emotions. It is said at the beginning that it is not based on real events, but on real characters. Perhaps the most biographical thing in this novel are the ghosts.
The book is about failure and love, and about beauty. The beauty of the people, of the landscape, which is that of the place they will return to many years later. Is it correct to say that the beauty that we see in what is narrated is also the background of terror?
There is a lot of beauty in two people falling in love. It is something absolutely miraculous. It is miraculous that something like this has been happening for millions of years and that we are here for that reason, precisely, because others have loved each other. Imagine that two people suddenly see each other, they meet in the world, in life, in any circumstance, and it turns out that they think and feel the same, and they say that they are made for each other… And they separate… I would never I have considered the separation a failure. The separation is the result of a previous victory. If you separate it is because you have fallen in love, I don’t think it can ever be considered a failure but rather the end of a kind of miracle that occurred at a certain moment and brought two people together. It’s a mystery.
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