Barcelona, (EFE).- Among the thousands of volumes in the emblematic Strand bookstore in New York, a few years ago Care Santos discovered a book on William Shakespeare in which he met the philanthropist Eugene Schieffelin for the first time, whom he converted into a protagonist of his new novel, “The crazy bird.”
In a meeting with journalists, the writer explained this Friday that it is a very different work from the ones she has put together up to now, because it moves away from Barcelona, with a strong presence in her stories, and settles in 19th-century New York. XIX to introduce readers to Schieffelin, a passionate ornithologist who had the “catastrophic” idea of introducing into Central Park all the species of birds that Shakespeare named in his works, some fifty.
The young son of a wealthy family that owned Schieffelin Industries, a pioneering company in the pharmaceutical industry, Eugene founded the American Acclimatization Society to “carry species of animals from one place to another, without any species he attempted to introduce prospering, except the European starlings”, after letting barely thirty pairs of these birds fly on March 6, 1901 in the city of skyscrapers.
“Today – Santos continued – it is the most invasive species of all those that fly through the American skies and millions of dollars are spent in the United States to exterminate them.”
Published by Destino y Columna in Catalan, whoever comes across these pages will learn about the life adventures of this man, of whom there was no novel, his friendships and his ideas, although he has warned that there is also a lot of fiction and that he has freely narrated aspects of their life.
All because of “a line from Henry IV”
Everything began to take shape when he read “How Shakespeare Changed Everything” (How Shakespeare changed everything), by journalist Stephen Marche, with curiosities about what the work of English has meant for future generations in all areas.
Among them, that of ornithology, since someone like Schieffelin, a great lover of his theater, wanted to introduce to the United States all the birds that appear in his numerous works, from crows and owls to starlings, although these “only appear in one line of ‘Enrique IV’”, with which “all this mess has been organized by a single line”.
Joining this man are his wife Catherine, his missing sister Martha, the Irish maid Edhit, New York World newspaper weather manager Daniel Rodríguez, and the ambitious New York World star editor Nellie Bly, famous for his denunciation reports and that he was a real character.
Care Santos has recalled that, since he discovered Schieffelin, he thought he had a novel “after verifying that there was none about him and it was very tempting.”
However, the pandemic arrived and his annual trip to New York – his favorite city – had to be cancelled, “but there was something good and that is that we all had more time and, then, I thought it was time to get on, with the luck of that the most important libraries in the United States are digitized, and from the New York World newspaper library I began to investigate».
BACK TO THE BIG APPLE
Subsequently, so they opened the Big Apple to tourists, he bought a ticket and went back to exploring the city, especially the area of Manhattan where the Schieffelin family lived, visiting the church that they helped found or the old family home, in 144th Street, “a very central place, but through which a river still passes and preserves the natural spirit that it must have had in the 19th century.”
«I never write -he specified- with Google maps because I like to step on the places I write about and smell them. I also document myself and in this case I saw how this New York social class is always reflected in Europe, in England, they wanted to be English, they had tea with English porcelain, they always received objects from the other side of the Atlantic ».
Regarding the time, Care Santos has not hidden the fact that in the 19th century he felt “at home, I think I am a chronological error”.
On the other hand, without revealing much, he has let it fall that William Shakespeare has the occasional appearance in the play, in which “there are very traveling characters, going up the Atlantic, down the Atlantic, as on one of the occasions, in which they go in search of the starlings that they want to introduce in America».
Asked about new projects, she has advanced that she is thinking of a historical novel set in the 20th century in Barcelona and continues with the youth saga that began with “Lie”.
