Alfredo Valenzuela I Sevilla, (EFE) Barcelona sense, but I have not had the sensation of living in Catalonia”.
“I have never had the feeling of living in a history book. I don’t know how a Munich citizen will feel about living in Bavaria. The differential historical fact has been exaggerated, it has been abused and it has been used as a political weapon”, said the author. He was born in the province of Córdoba in 1957, lives in Madrid and came to Barcelona with his family when he was a teenager.
Regarding the ‘procés’, he pointed out that it was “a real tsunami, something very invasive that I found myself suddenly, an excessive event in every way, with demonstrations by two million people, which for many people could be a virtue but that for me it was something monstrous, something headless, terrible”.
“There is no other place in Europe that brings together such a number of people, and one would have to wonder what that means… (Elias) Canetti also wrote about this, terrified, in ‘Masa y poder'”, added Calderón, a professor on the Master’s Degree in Cultural Journalism of the San Pablo-CEU, literary critic and who was director of the book supplement “Caballo Verde”.
urban peeling
The author considers the urban wasteland as “a very common territory, not a space with identity. Something very typical of developmentalism”. And he has remembered that when he was writing “Descampados” two events coincided.
“The search for a national identity, the need to belong to a country. To a nation with a history -and the consequences that this had in 2017-. And on the other hand, the search for a personal identity, to belong to a group, which if they also considered themselves mistreated and humiliated, even better. Because that grants rights above those that are typical of citizenship -and this is something typical of the time, not only of our country-“.
The poetic evocation, the memorial, the reflection, the autobiographical story, the traveling chronicle. The devotion to a handful of authors come together in “Descampados”, which disobeys any literary genre and which its author defines as such.
“It was like a trash can into which I was throwing stories that had not quite found a place. And that they were forming a territory like the ‘trencadís’ of Gaudí. That ornamental system based on small pieces that ends up forming something that, even though it is irregular, ends up being beautiful, pretty. Something livable in front of the national tiling”.
“Descampados”, according to its author, was built in this way over the years “as a very large space of freedom. Without being subjected to the present or, like the novel, to an argument that would constrain it”.
It also included “readings that have left a true residue, always handled from memory.” And allusions to one of his teachers, such as José María Valverde, of whom he was a student.
Dropping out of the University
De Valverde recalls “one of the noblest gestures, when he left the chair, not in protest, but left the University sending a telegram in Latin that said ‘without aesthetics there is no ethics'” when García Calvo, Aranguren and Tierno Galván were retaliated .
It also includes quotes from Lowry and Engels that work like time bombs against the hegemonic conventions of what is considered progressive thought and, in his prose, he does not renounce poetic images, because he does not find meaning in literature “without poetic tension”, and why reply.
“I am interested in the purity of language and today it is increasingly bureaucratic, we speak like sociologists and we use strange words like ‘transversal’; I prefer the purity of the language that my mother maintained, an uncontaminated language”.
The title of his book obeys the idea of the open field as a “place of danger, where what you want to keep hidden is thrown; a place that has its own laws that you have to know if you want to travel, as happens with the great halls ”, while when dealing with emigration he has warned that he has “flatly rejected all compassion ”.
“I never heard anyone say ‘charnego’, as I suppose nobody says ‘pied noir’ in France, they are things that are said in private. The silences hid much more than the clear expressions”. EFE