2023-10-19 22:34:36
“Instructions for use: read the stories in order and no more than two in a row.” With this note Carlota Gurt accompanies the index of her book fire biography (Libros del Asteroid), a compendium of 15 stories that he has written – and ordered – with destruction and its possibilities of creation as the axis that resonates in all his texts. Birds parade through them, heroes of anxiety, slaves of love, incipient and late couples, absent mothers, terrified, enthusiastic, in love and euphoric characters who face the uncertainty of life as best they can, knowing that error is always there. waiting with open arms to apply as the best alternative. And the truth is that many times it is.
The rediscovered voice of Mercè Rodoreda
“People read stories wrong. Many people have a habit of picking up a book and reading five or six of them as if they were a novel. And if you do that, you don’t have time to process all the characters, you mix them up. Going to book clubs, I realized that people read voraciously and I added the instructions to see if they would listen to me,” the author explains to this newspaper. It is not his first volume of these characteristics. In 2019 she published Ride all night, for which he won the Mercè Rodoreda Prize. Two years later he released his so far only novel, Sola.
The Catalan translator also explores “the vital shipwreck” in her stories, which is linked to the title of the copy, fire biography, which could also have been We all have a pyromaniac inside. “In life there are some fires through which you are reborn,” he says about a constant situation in which “catastrophe is around the corner.”
Gurt defends it in one of his texts, and also during this interview: “Destroying is a way of creating. The uncertainty that comes after the catastrophe is terrifying and at the same time a world full of possibilities in which beautiful things can happen. “That is the grace of life.” And the author is in favor of knowing how to embrace the advantages of the great changes that occur in life despite the fact that, a priori, they threaten to dismantle it. “At the end of the day, why are things set up? To disassemble them, of course. “Ikea as a philosophy of life,” says the protagonist of the story. Hokkaido; name that belongs to a mountainous island in Japan whose populations are poorly communicated.
One of the first characters to appear in the book is a woman who, after abandoning her boyfriend, decides to hitchhike. Another couple picks her up and, during her conversation, she admits to them that when talking about her love life, her “theatrical streak” comes out. They ask her if she is an actress. “No no. I am just the playwright of my life. “I have enough with this: a premiere every day,” she replies.
The certainty that everything will be reproduced with the same rhythm, people and routines turns us into a type of robots, which is what we are programmed to do.
Carlota Gurt — Writer and translator
The author explains that this response responds to a purely human stimulus: “It is so distressing to consider that every day is a premiere that we prefer to think that we are representing the same work because it is reassuring. The certainty that everything will be reproduced with the same rhythm, people and routines turns us into a type of robots, which is what we are programmed to do. And by doing so, we lose the freedom that gives us the power to do whatever we want. The range of possibilities scares us, the routine gives us peace of mind.”
The writer values: “We tell ourselves stories so that life is more bearable, more peaceful, less threatening.” Aware that uncertainty is something that will constantly surround us, she advocates the need to “embrace it, in the good and the bad.” “If not, you stay in a prison that you put on yourself,” he says to justify at the same time why he has decided to include open endings to many of the stories that make up his book, aware that there are people who find this approach It bothers and bothers him.
We have this obsession of searching in literature for certainties that life does not have.
Carlota Gurt — Writer and translator
“We tend to have this obsession of looking in literature for certainties that life does not have,” he points out. In fact, he criticizes those who, for this reason, even choose to start by reading the endings. To explain it, he resorts to one of his most precious and praised resources, the metaphor: “It’s like people who eat very quickly. You taste food while you have it in your mouth, when you swallow you stop feeling the flavor. If you really like something, don’t be so eager: take advantage of every bite.”
Dismantle constructed stories
In the stories of fire biography A universe of male and female characters coexists, intertwining their reflections, opinions, concerns, interests and fears. When creating them, the writer recognizes that she has “hatred of convention,” from whose tentacles it is difficult to escape: “Sometimes I repeat it and I don’t realize it because the convention is so engraved that you have it stuck in your head like something.” “That rots inside you.”
“There is a certain stereotypical idea of what men and women are, which is based on the male and female characters we have read. “This bothers me a lot,” he explains, defending that there are actually numerous similarities between both sexes. Of course, he is aware of the reason that motivates him: having been “written mostly by men.”
A context with certain consequences: “The narrative about what women are like is a story constructed by men. And in the end, when women start writing, we are not like that. Even we, from reading ourselves like this so much, end up believing that we are like this. There is a perversion. It is good to try to write how the world is and not how we have been told the world is.”
It is okay to try to write how the world is and not how we have been told the world is.
Carlota Gurt — Writer and translator
An example of this is the description made in the volume about the feet: “That pair of villains who force us to be in contact with the world while the rest of the body evolves in the air.” The relationship that each person establishes with them is crossed by gender. “Women try to disguise them: painting their claws in bright colors, plucking their hair, filing their calluses. But when something is ugly, it is ugly. “Most men don’t even try: they are taught to live with their own ugliness and compensate for it by demanding beauty from others,” he writes.
love like dynamite
The couples that make up the different stories meet at very different times. There are those who share their New Year’s Eve, who meet again, find and even lose. Gurt dissects falling in love, arguing that far from being something fragile, “it takes tons of dynamite to destroy it.”
“When you are in love, it is something that takes you away, that is above you. Like a force that completely overwhelms you and you have no control over it. Falling in love is still a state of total intoxication. You advance blindly towards something that is an abyss,” she states.
And in this entire process, sex stands as a fundamental and omnipresent element; and that is why it is present in several of the stories. “Sex is very important for the free flow of hormones. Couples who don’t have anything end up coming to the conclusion that something isn’t flowing. They are as if stiff. Orgasm is still a kind of mental hygiene, it’s like brushing your teeth. Something physiological that goes beyond legends or love.”
In the event that the relationships end up ending, as happens to some of his protagonists, Gurt places the reader in front of the management of what a separation entails when one has children. Cases that he considers to be “delicate because they force you to continue seeing your ex-partner.” “It is an uncomfortable place, in any divorce, because there is no version that is valid,” she laments. And it highlights how sometimes, especially when children are young, there is the added difficulty of having to answer numerous questions from those who are discovering how a world works in which the fact that your parents separate is not necessarily ‘the norm’. ‘.
Orgasm is still a kind of mental hygiene, it’s like brushing your teeth. Something physiological that beyond legends or love
Carlota Gurt — Writer and translator
The writer, who has not impregnated her texts with drama, maintains that divorces are “traumatic” processes for all parties involved. “They are very trivialized,” he laments, about how by supporting their implementation, he sometimes forgets that no matter how much they may be the ‘best solution’, it does not mean that it is not complicated: “It is painful, as if a piece were amputated.” of you”.
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