Jorge Alacid (Logroño, 1962) admits that, when he began to write his first novel, ‘Los seres queridos’ (Pepitas), the first thing he thought was that his protagonist would be a journalist like the one from ‘Millennium’, the successful saga created by Stieg Larsson at the beginning of this century. «I wanted a Scandinavian editor, with a Nordic and icy mentality like Mikael Blomkvist’s, so I began to wonder what a Spanish clone of this character would be like, even if he was at the antipodes of our culture. However, he did not finish defining his identity very well or fully accepting his adventures, “he explains to ABC.
At that time, the author and also a journalist lived what he himself now describes as an “epiphany”: “One day I was invited to a meal with veterans of the trade and, by chance, I had to sit with the council of wise men. Then they began to tell, with incredible naturalness, anecdotes that seemed amazing to me from those years in which they had to live with censorship and the harsh embers of Francoism. It was there when I realized that my protagonist and everything that he had to live in the midst of his investigation fit perfectly with the years of the Transition ».
Alacid confirmed that he did not have to go that far to tell the story of Viberti, a director of a provincial newspaper who, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, tries to clarify a series of suicides that, in reality, he he thinks they were murders. And, while he investigates them to inform his readers, while clarifying other shady issues, he portrays the ins and outs of a profession that, as he defends, was lived to the limit in the Transition, in that somewhat wild Spain of which today there are no remains. many footprints.
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Jorge Alacid
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Editorial Nuggets
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336 pages
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Price: 24.90 euros
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«We always think that what happens to us today is the most transcendental –clarifies the writer–, but in that relaxed conversation with veteran journalists I realized that the novel had to be set in what is the most inhospitable moment of our recent trajectory . If we open the angle a bit, we realize that this was probably the great moment in our history, the same one in which everything conspired so that we Spaniards would have ended up clubbed again, as in Goya’s painting. That’s how it was, at least, for my generation. I saw a certain epic in that journalism, like a kind of epic in which it seems that they conspired so that things turned out reasonably well.
Lights and shadows
The plot takes place in this framework through suffocating moments, between suicides, murders, conspiracies, social confrontation and a political tension that current generations can barely imagine, in addition to news, a lot of news at that transcendental moment in our history. Because ‘Los seres queridas’ is a crime novel in which Alacid wanted to pay homage to the trade that he himself began to practice in ‘The mail‘, in 1989, and who continues to practice today in ‘The Provinces’but he wanted to do it by going back a few years to that time of continuous changes and full of lights and shadows.
«In fact, I think that fear is the word that best defines the time frame of the Spain of the Transition and the vicissitudes of Viberti, since it deals with a terrified society that came from the Franco years. We must not forget that the concept of fear is inherent to all dictatorships, whatever the era, and it was with this fear that our parents and predecessors in journalism were educated. That is the fear that the protagonist tries to get rid of precisely as the plot progresses, striving to adjust his own mentality to the new times of freedom that they have to live in, but in which some previous fear and uncertainty is still preserved. It is as if Viberti, as the novel progresses, was mapping the new territory that he treads on », he emphasizes.