León, May 17 (EFE).- Francisco Umbral spent some decisive years of his training in León, where he arrived in 1958 during a time that he recreated in “Days without a school”, a brief and unpublished story since 1965 when he won the Province of León and that scholars of his work place as his first novel, a post-war fresco in the provinces.
The León Institute of Culture (ILC), dependent on the Deputation of León, has recovered this story of Threshold (1932-2007), of barely 75 pages, never published as a book and whose only diffusion was the year after winning the prize, when it was included in number 6 of the magazine “Tierra de León”.
Discovery after decades of oblivion
The initiative came from literature professor Alfonso García, founder and director for almost thirty years of “El Filandón”, a literary supplement of Diario de León, who had “rediscovered” the novel after decades of oblivion.
He found out about the novel more than a decade ago when, during a conversation with a former president of the Provincial Council, he revealed to him that he had been a member of a jury that had awarded a prize for a work by Threshold.
“I kept the couplet and searched the entire Umbral bibliography for the novel that could correspond to the aforementioned award, but I found nothing and put the matter aside until about three years later I deduced that since he was the person who gave me the clue, Vice President of the Provincial Council, the award might have something to do with said institution”, he continued.
Hidden in “Tierras de León”
And that was how “digging” in the collection of the magazine “Tierras de León” he found the aforementioned work “very hidden” among other matters, which he transcribed and kept in his archive convinced that it should be published due to its quality and as a testimony of the training process that, over the years, would become a great writer.
In 2015, on the occasion of half a century since the prize was awarded, the professor wrote an extensive article on the novel and it was then that he began knocking on “various doors” in the hope that the novel would be published, until he moved the matter the director of ILC projects, Emilio Gancedo.
Emilio Gancedo signs the prologue of the novel, which will be presented tomorrow at the Ateneo de Madrid, in which Threshold recreates the adventures of a gang of children who explore the post-war León, finding games and adventures where adults only saw the shortcomings and desolation that the Civil War had left.
“About this book, absolutely Leonese in terms of characters and settings, it is necessary to highlight above all its high literary quality and the fact that, in it, Threshold already anticipates both his particular aesthetics and his unmistakable style, almost with all the brilliance of later stages in his professional career”, Gancedo explained to EFE.
the best threshold
It is a text that in his opinion “preludes the best Threshold and that also forms a whole with the first books he published (“Tamouré”, “Balada de hooligans” and “Larra, anatomy of a dandy”), thus inaugurating his called ‘Adolescence Novels’”.
It is an “inaugural, tender and street novel, elegant and lyrical, so ours,” he added.
The passage of Umbral through León also bear witness to the texts that in 2015 gave birth to “Diario de un noctámbulo”, a volume prefaced by Luis Mateo Diez with the nocturnal radio chronicles that Umbral prepared for the radio station “La Voz de León”.
This book brings together almost seven hundred texts written by a twenty-something Umbral between 1958 and 1961, when he still signed himself as Francisco Pérez Martínez, although before leaving León he had already adopted the name with which he would occupy in his own right one of the most prominent places in literature and journalism in the last decades of the 20th century.
Threshold 1958, Year Zero
The writer’s first contact with León, in the forties, dates from his adolescence when he arrived in the city to spend Christmas and stayed in the chalet where some relatives lived, but it was in 1958 when the young Threshold, once Leaving behind his time as a bellboy at the Central Bank of Valladolid, he returned to the city and actively participated in its cultural life.
The then twenty-something writer had been called by his cousin José Luis Pérez Perelétegui to occupy an administrative position at the state-owned radio station La Voz de León, which he directed at the time, but his great skills for creation and communication led him to take charge of the nocturnal chronicles, and on May 29, 1958 he signed for the first time as Francisco Umbral.
He lived in León for two and a half years, a fruitful time in which he immersed himself completely in the landscape and locals of the city and became friends with writers from León such as Antonio Gamoneda, Antonio González de Lama and Antonio Pereira.
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It was also in this city where he won, in 1961, his first literary award, which Diario de León had summoned, thanks to a story entitled “La paloma” and in that newspaper he published the texts he read on the station in the column titled ‘La city and days’.
Leon-Madrid
Finally, in February 1961, Threshold went to live in Madrid, but he continued to maintain contact with León and proof of this is that in 1965 he was presented for the short novel award organized by the Diputación on the occasion of the V Day of the Leonese Regions and of the XI Exaltation of Leonese Values Contest, which he won with his now recovered “Days without school”.
The presentation of the work scheduled for tomorrow at the Ateneo de Madrid will be attended by the writer’s widow and president of the Francisco Umbral Foundation, María España; the journalist and writer Ángel Antonio Herrera, and the poet and translator Jorge Urrutia, Umbral’s nephew, as well as Gancedo himself. EFE