Torrelavega (EFE).- The writer Mariano Fernández Urresti returns to bookstores this summer with “Immortal”, a work with which he seeks to excite lovers of thrillers and gothic or historical novels, and which took shape definitively after the illness and subsequent death of his father, to whom he dedicates this book.
“Immortal” recounts what happened while Bram Stoker and James Matthew Barrie wrote their most famous works, so that the reader will travel back in time to the moment when “Dracula” came to life and discover the reasons that pushed the author of “Peter Bread” to Neverland.
In an interview with EFE, Fernández Urresti (Santander, 1962) explains that his wish with this novel is that the reader “believes in things that cannot be believed.”
the boldest mystery
Accustomed to posing literary mysteries such as “Verne’s tomb”, “Agatha wrote in blood”, “The Dickens enigma”, “The Edwin Drood mystery”, “Bécquer’s ghosts” or “The violets of the Sherlock Circle”, with “Immortal” (Almuzara editorial) warns that it proposes “the most daring of all”.
The search for immortality is presented as a game based on the mystery and meaning behind the intra-history of the two greatest works of literature written in the 19th century, which is why his novel is framed in two temporal planes, the period Victorian and the current 21st century.
Thus, an intricate plot leads the author to draw two ways of conceiving the path through which immortality can flow: a dark path, proposed by the author of the famous vampire; and another, kinder, the one suggested by the creator of the boy who never wanted to grow up.
And in transit between these two parallel scenarios, Fernández Urresti makes several soldiers who had fought in the Spanish Civil War appear with the same aspect, but with a difference of eighty years.
In addition, in “Immortal”, Cantabria and especially Santillana del Mar return to a subtle role as it did in previous novels such as “Agatha wrote with blood”, “The painter of red bison” or “The talisman of Raziel”
defeat death
It is a novel that began to take shape in his head almost five years ago, after reading several biographies of Bram Stoker and Mathew Barrie and studies on their works, and visiting places in London where they lived and set their stories, until the “push final” which led to the death of his father.
Fernández Urresti assures that “Immortal” talks about how legends and religions tell of human desires such as the Garden of Eden, the golden apples of the Garden of the Hesperides, the island of Avalon in the Arthurian myth or the Holy Grail.
Also about those solar gods to whom the resurrection is attributed, which, according to Fernández Urresti, is nothing more than the power to defeat death, to the point of posing the question: “Is the fear of death what has made the Does man yearn for immortality or is it an atavistic memory of what perhaps one day was?
As summarized, these and many other unknowns are mandatory in a book that leads to the secret of two famous authors who offered in their works the keys to achieve the ancestral desire for immortality.
Also noteworthy is the exhaustive documentation handled to shape the story, the same rigor that he applied in his previous work, “The Red Bison Painter”, a novel that reconstructs how daily life could have developed at the time the painting was painted. Altamira cave. EFE