The spark that jumped the latest novel by Laura Fernández, the exuberant and Cathedral Mrs. Potter is not exactly Santa Claus, arose on a trip to Drobak, a tiny village of Postcard on the Norwegian coast that is advertised below
The claim to be the summer destiny of Santa Claus himself.
Who would want to spend your holiday in a place where the sun never shines?
That is precisely what happens in the always cold and unpackable Kimberly Clark Weymouth, a city whipped by endless frost where all orbit around a mysterious writer, the missing Louise Cassidy Feldman, whose only literary success was a novel set at Kimberly Clark Weymouth.
The city lives in rents since then: they only visit readers from that book who religiously come to the souvenir shop, dedicated exclusively to Feldman.
The sixth novel by Fernández, the author of Connerland and the Zombie girl, it is again a feast of fired frames, hundreds of characters, absurd humor, kind madness and fantasy non stop, only that this time the rhythm is different, more enveloping,
And the saddest tone, but of a welcoming sadness, not bitter.
“It’s a novel about how it marks your son,” says the author.
“For almost all the characters, their parents are a kind of slab.”
“There is a phrase that I read in a story by Joy Williams who says something like: I would go on, I would leave everything behind, and I would not miss anything, I’ve ever felt like this,” he confesses Fernandez, who in the novel deploy An endless stories about abandonment, literature as shelter, failure and flight to be built on oneself. Reality, in any case, is something merely instrumental. “It has always been fascinated by the idea of order in fiction, where everything has to make sense. Reality is not like that, it is much more chaotic and inconnected, things happen all the time without any sense,” explains Fernández, a voice Radically unique in the Spanish literature that writes 600-page novels where the fences have a life of their own, the birds write poetry and the pens are held not to freeze in full blizzard. “Of course I have asked myself many times what sense does what I write now that everyone makes self-confiction, but this is what I do, it does not come out otherwise.”
There are many themes in Mrs. Potter is not exactly Santa Claus: the end of the couple, assuming that one can not change or the idea of not daring to do something so that something remains a possibility.
But if something goes through the whole novel is the impulse of creation as a liberating and dark force at the same time that it swepts and absorb everything as if it were a vampire.
“When you think you’re not at all there, there will always be a part of you that it will be like the hidden part of the moon, that your children will never see. In a way, it is as if you have a part of you. If you write,
The literature gives it to everything because without you it would not exist. In the end, your creation is yourself and, well, there is a guilty area in all this, “explains Fernandez.
“It’s like when they ask you if you can have the two things: Of course you can, but one will always be losing,” she adds.
All the characters of the novel have something of tender losers: they are not given anything well the social interaction (they pass fatally in the appointments), they are some peaks in both practical and emotional, they fail all the time in the attempt to
Be sophisticated and suffer, ultimately, as children locked in an adult body.
“It’s my criticism of cynicism, a poison that bitters not only to the one who suffers it, but also to the one who inflicts it, it seems the worst of society. As an illusa and innocent person that I am, I hate it,” says Fernandez, who considers him
Key “Do not forget what child you were and take it with you all the time, to all the sites” to keep safe from him.
Everything that exists in the novels of Laura Fernandez is invented.
Brands of cars and refrigerators, breeds of dogs, types of beer.
A self-referential world that is sufficient and, in the end, aiming a way to conceive literature.
“As a child, when I read and did not understand some references that appeared in the books, it bothered me. By then there was no internet, you could not look for. For me the reading is something ludic and you have to enter it as who enters a cabinet of
Curiosities. All my readers are at the same level, from someone who has read Joy Williams or Joan Didion until someone who has not read anything. I explain what things are equally, “says Fernández.
Decide that the action would pass in Kimberly Clark Weymouth, an invented people who, as it could not be otherwise, has its own life and gets angry until it breaks (the only moment in which the sun’s rays manage to cross the sky Always gray) too It is a well-meditated maneuver that has something to do with the origins of the author, born in Terrassa. “I lived there, in nothing, in those neighborhoods that do not exist anywhere, I think that is why I like so much the cinema of the 80s. Where does the Gremlins go? Nowhere, in a stone cardboard neighborhood, which It’s something that we all equal out in the background. In my case, as I did not have a clear origin or rooting the Catalan, since I started writing I settled there. And I do not want to leave. My culture and my referents are sites that do not They exist, such as the island cloud of Jurassic Park or Stephen King’s books. Living in a decorage makes what you care what happens, people and feelings, not culture, I guess it’s a reaction to have always felt expelled of the cultural for being a daughter of immigrants “.
One last note: the paper of the press in the novel, seen almost like a broken toy that exaggerates and manipulates reality, in the hands of banks of Villanas and reporters who suffer what one of the characters describes as “the loneliness of the background editor
“.
“Everyone who has been working as journalists know what is to lose a wording, I also wanted to see that journalism takes the pulse of what happens, but to count is to distort. In the novel, the town newspaper works
like a castor because in the end the inhabitants do not have intimacy, everyone knows all the time what others are doing, it scares the unique thought, the marabuntas, the idea that we all have to think all the time the same as the
Other, “reflects Fernández referring, have guessed him, to social networks.
“In the end, write is psychoanalysis, pure and hard,” he concludes.
