“A father unleashes the rope with which his son has hanged,” this is how TESEO, his new life (Galaxy Galaxia Gutemberg), with a tiny U hides the brutality of suicide.
A suicide that is also that of a brother, the author’s own, Camille de Toledo, who unfolds into the teseau of mythical resonances of the title.
Essayist, historian and philosopher, of Toledo (literary pseudonym of Alexis Mital) has highlighted by works as’ El Hague and the birch.
Essay on European sadness’, ‘at the time of monsters and catastrophes’ or’ vertigo history ‘.
But with Teseus he faces his own life.
“Fiction allows you to protect the living and say the unspeakable, reveal without exposing a family history with a wider echo so that literature is at that junction between the unique and universal. TESEO is a double. But between the model and its double, as we know by Jorge Luis Borges and its map of the Empire, between the original and the copy, there is always a gap, “recognizes Camille de Toledo, who immerses himself in that gap to rescue the ruins of his Past, that of his family and that of a Europe devastated by wars. “TESEO is a response to the history of violence, power, force, with a history of fragility and forgiveness … I raise a question worthy of a police novel: Who is responsible for the murder of a man who is committed? TESEO seeks, does not understand, collapses and at the beginning it does not manage to survive his own people, then it opens widely the archives of his family to go back in time, to contemplate the monster, that minotaur of history “He explains De Toledo. In the labyrinth of the history of the twentieth century, the death of a soldier was intertwined in the front of World War, the despair of a father in the period of interwar, the discovery of suicide of an ancestor, the oil crisis, the Failure of the dream of a European Union …
“I always try to give an accurate image of where we are in European history. And it seems to me that this is our reality at the end of the twentieth century, both for Spanish society – which still carries the traces of civil war and after the dictatorship – As for the French, the German and the European: the wounds of the past wars are still there, they continue to act in our lives, chasing our lineages, our genealogies, “considers from Toledo. And the teseau of Greek mythology, which faces minotaur to free Athens of its punishment (every year sends Crete to 14 Ephebos and Maidens to be sacrificed), is the symbol of hope, of historical change: “TESEO is The person responsible for freeing the youth of the debts of the war. It is he who puts an end to the tribe, to the sacrifice paid to the minotaur, in the name of the past. So, in a way, it makes it possible to “release the future”. Remember Teseo is, therefore, to wait for this force that would come to end the ghosts, the persecutions … “.
TESEO, his new life is a wound, a duel, and an attempt to heal through the word.
The traumas of the past leave revealing on a trip-metaphor, a flight by train from the west (Paris) to the east (Berlin), a vital trajectory parallel to that of the writer himself, which rescues the family photos, the old letters,
The forgotten newspapers of the ancestors … and intermingle them with the text.
A text that oscillates between symbolism and the introspective, between the poetic and research.
“First TESEO runs, isolate himself from his family and his dead, beings to live in the east, Berlin. But the past reaches him and then he will begin to look for another dimension of existence: deeper, more archaic, to see what, in
The past, connects him with a longer time, with a sense … “, he says.
Beyond the classic psychoanalysis of Freud or Jung, De Toledo has studied the main writings of the so-called Transgenerational Psychology, from Jacob Levy Moreno -Psychiatrist who developed the psychodrama as therapy- to Anne-Ancelin Schützenberger, creator of psychogenaly.
In his novel he deepens the idea that a person’s problems or traumas are inherited from his ancestors, that there is a ‘body-memory’ that drags them: “If we call longer and ancestors we see how wounds and traumas that go back
A long time ago Generations can be found later. There are many enigmas around the transmission of traumas through the times, and how a body can be pursued by ghosts, spectra of history, “he defends.
In this sense, the key date of the book is 1973, when the brother who will be committed at the beginning of the 21st century is born, “but also the date on which European societies understand that infinite growth and free energy are over.”
Aim
“It is as if the energy and oil crisis of 1973, by ending the illusion of prosperity and growth, provoking the return of the ghosts of the two world wars: group of genealogical destruction and collective mourning. In the narrative, I tried to use the
Form of an investigation to identify these bridges between collective wounds and bodies … “, he adds.
The publication of TESEO, his new life has practically coincided with the launch of his new book in France: Le Fleuve Qui Voulait Écrire (the River I wanted to write).
The writer proposes an institutional utopia: and if the Loire was the first Rio de Europa in having a legal personality and could defend their rights?
“I am working on the rights of nature, lakes, rivers, forests … are not just the human dead of the twentieth century with which you have to learn to live, are also all non-human abuse: species
They are disappearing, the animals that were killed during the wars, the landscapes that were destroyed … “The wounds of nature are also those of the modern teseus.
