By Jorge Gil Angel |
Bogotá (EFE).- Juan Villoro searched for documents and listened to many people for years to be able to tell a “very personal” and “very familiar” story: that of the philosopher Luis Villoro, his father. In this process, he revealed in an interview with EFE, he found that everyone builds the people with whom he relates.
“Part of what I have tried to correct through literature is to get closer to my father affectively, that is to say, to build an emotional relationship that I did not have in reality, but that I can have from the imagination. I believe that we build the people with whom we relate, ”says Villoro in Bogotá, during his participation in the International Book Fair (FilBo).
“The figure of the world” (Random House) is a work on which the writer and journalist worked for many years and with which, he says, he touches “different layers” not only of his father’s life and his own, but also also other topics.
“My father was born in Barcelona and went to live in Mexico in his youth, so it has to do with exile, with adopting another country and trying to integrate into that country. It is also the story of a time, because he was very interested in social struggles, he was an activist who was very involved with the left in Mexico”, he adds.
Immediately afterwards, he adds: “On the one hand, it is the description of an intellectual environment, of the social and political searches of that time, but it is also a very personal story, it is a very familiar story.”
Philosophy and discovery through Villoro’s father
Villoro reveals that it was very difficult for him to understand his father’s profession as a philosopher and tells an anecdote that when he was a child his father told him: “‘a philosopher investigates the meaning of life'”, something that contrasted with the trades of salesmen or aviators. that his friends had.
“When I told my friends that my father was inquiring into the meaning of life, they thought he was a partygoer who was in the canteens listening to songs by José Alfredo Jiménez, who is our popular philosopher on the meaning of life that only understands with a good tequila”, he expresses.
That, he adds, made it very difficult to relate to him and that is where the book appears, which he decided to write after his father died in 2014 because “as long as his life was open it was difficult to know how it ended.”
In that process of years, he listened to many people and closed the book with the testimony of his mother, who makes a “kind of final judgment” because “no one can judge you more severely or more fairly than the person with whom you have shared your life”.
“’The Figure of the World’ is a discovery book because there are many things that you think you know about your parents, but you don’t. And each of a person’s children has a different version of their father. I inquired what my brothers thought and each one of them had a father to their measure that they had built for themselves, ”he adds.
In this process, he managed to discover hidden parts of his father’s life that allowed him to write an account of a person he considers “extremely interesting” and who “was very productive in the intellectual life of Mexico and in philosophy in Spanish.”
“I did not want to write a celebration of a great man idolizing his father, nor a reckoning saying ‘he was miserable’ (…) I try to see his chiaroscuro, not the lights and shadows of a significant person,” he says .
merits and emotions
Villoro reveals that before his father died, he read “some parts of the book that seemed undeserved to him because he was not a person who saw the world through emotions.”
That, he considers, led him to title the book “The figure of the world”, whose discovery is what philosophy seeks through the decantation of ideas and reflection. It was what Luis Villoro was looking for.
“All this is very abstract, on the other hand, literature works with emotions, literature is stark, literature has passions. When I wrote the first texts about him and he read them, he was surprised that his life could provoke emotions because it was a totally alien field that was difficult for him to handle and that moved him and seemed undeserved to him, ”he adds.
And today, eight years after his death, Villoro misses many things about his father: “his way of understanding reality, the rectitude he had, he was an admirable figure, he had many students who remember him with great affection, so of course he It has left a very important void in my life.”