Carla Aliño | València (EFE).- The writer Alice Kellen creates in her new novel, “Where everything shines”, a choral puzzle of characters with whom to explore what it means to grow, mature and find your own path, and let yourself be infected by the brightness of intangible and everyday things.
This is stated by Kellen (València, 1989) in an interview with the EFE Agency on the occasion of the launch this Wednesday of the novel, edited by Planeta, and which adds to the twenty titles accumulated by this author, one of the most sold in Spain and with more than two million readers and more than 350,000 followers on Instagram.
Turned into a publishing phenomenon, Alice Kellen, the pseudonym with which this Valencian self-published her first novels on the internet when she was around 20 years old and which she still maintains, continues to live a bit oblivious to those large numbers.
“It still seems unreal to me,” he says, explaining that he feels as if he were two people: the one at home and the one who goes out on the day of the launch, does what he has to do and when he comes home he totally forgets. .
He experiences fame with a mixture of “vertigo and emotion”, but what he likes best is to think that there are people who get what he writes, and that a story can travel and move different people, even with different languages. “It seems to me the most magical thing that can exist,” she says.
The shine of the intangible
He defends that this is a novel to “enjoy, let go and accompany” the characters as one more of them, and, above all, to “let oneself be infected by the brightness of intangible things”, those that “we cannot touch and see ”.
It also intends to recover “the symbolism of little things”, because for Kellen “happiness is hidden in the simplest things”, and remembers that when we are little we pay close attention to the brightness of things and as we grow up we stop seeing it.
A daily choral novel
“Where everything shines” covers the lives of Nicki Aldrich and River Jackson, inseparable friends since they came into the world forty-seven minutes apart, in a small coastal town, but whom life will take different paths.
Is it possible to choose two different paths and, despite everything, find yourself at the end of the journey? That is what the reader will have to discover in this “messy” book where narrators, spaces and up to three different times are mixed.
“It is a very everyday novel”, which begins when Nicki and River are around 7 years old and ends when they are thirty-odd, so the reader follows the protagonists as they grow and mature, for many years and in which a lot of things happen.
But Kellen did not want to stop there and has made this novel a “more open and at the same time more comfortable” work, giving voice and allowing the reader to also meet the parents of the protagonists, their brothers, their friends, and even characters that come across their lives at one point and then disappear.
He has also opted for a messy structure, narrated in three times that are mixed, something that has been fun for him because of the game it has given him, although it has also been a challenge: he ran the risk of getting the reader confused.
“It’s as if we had all the pieces and we made a puzzle, we fit them together until at the end of the book we see everything completely,” explains this writer, who is convinced that she has achieved her goal.
Romantic novel, a genre that works
For Alice Kellen there is still not a good perception of the so-called romantic novel, although she perceives that there is less modesty when it comes to consuming it because it is a genre that works and for which publishers are committed, publishing, caring for and pampering these works as they deserve. .
She affirms that there have been times when they made you feel bad and think that you had to be ashamed for writing or reading a romantic novel, or as she prefers to call it, about feelings, something she does not understand.
“I don’t know why everything that revolves around feelings, and on top of that most of us who write about this are women, is seen as something minor,” she points out, and assures that she is a consumer of all kinds of genres and finds high quality novels and others that lack work everywhere.
New Kellen novel for 2024
The Valencian writer is already working on what will be her next book, which she hopes will come out in 2024, and in which she would like to incorporate some element of magical realism.
“I have a darker or gothic novel in mind but let’s see if it comes out. I like what I have in my head, but then you never know, ”she comments.
Regarding the possibility of one of his novels being brought to the screen, he points out that in his day the rights to two of his novels were bought, those that make up the bilogy “Let it happen”, but he has not yet received any proposal that would have excited
It is something that gives him “a lot of vertigo”. On the one hand, he is excited to think about what it would be like, but on the other, it also means “a leap”, letting go of the book and that “it is no longer yours”. “I suppose it would be an exercise in letting go,” she says.