On the afternoon of Saturday, November 11, coinciding with Bookstore Day, Mrs. Letizia dressed in a fuchsia pink knitted sweater and a matching leather jacket to attend a literary event at El Corte Inglés in Callao, in the center from Madrid. Upon arriving at the department store, she went up to the book floor and stood in line like the rest of the attendees so that the journalist and writer Sonsoles Ónega could sign a copy of The maid’s daughters, Planeta de Novela 2023 award. The Queen’s surprise appearance soon went viral. The reading of the gesture seemed quite clear. She was not only there to support an author, but also to support a friend and former colleague who a day before had received harsh criticism in Babelia, the cultural supplement of EL PAÍS. “My dear Let, the one you have messed up,” Ónega wrote in her dedication.
“There are no statements from the company,” they respond from Planeta, after being consulted by this newspaper about the impact that the royal endorsement has had on the promotion of the novel by Ónega, who was witness at the wedding of Don Felipe and Doña Letizia. The silence of the publisher is filled by others. Many have praised the gesture and others – a few – have criticized it. “Even if you are queen, can you go to El Corte Inglés to promote your friend’s book, which you know is going to go viral and that everyone is going to record it? “It’s actually that we are all paying for this promo,” said Bob Pop in Day by day some days ago. “Among the criticism of Babelia and the image of the Queen supporting her friend, what is going to make her sell or not sell more books?” said the comedian and writer during his weekly intervention on Cadena Ser.
Doña Letizia’s nod to the winner of the last Planeta Prize – reproduced and analyzed ad nauseum in newspapers, TV and gossip magazines – has once again highlighted the power of the Queen as a literary prescriber. Magazine Vanity Fair dedicates the cover of its December-January issue to its growing influence in the cultural world, receiving praise from figures of the stature of Ida Vitale, Elvira Lindo and Luis García Montero. “He is a cultured person,” stated the director of the Cervantes Institute. Letizia’s coronation as cultural queen It is the culmination of a personal project that began long before meeting Felipe de Borbón and entering the Spanish Royal Family. Already as a child, living in an area that was more industrial than residential in Oviedo, closer to a blacksmith shop and a long-distance bus station than to a library or a museum, Letizia Ortiz began to cultivate her passion for literature and art. culture.
As a child, she admired her father, journalist Jesús Ortiz’s love of writing. When she was a 13-year-old teenager and she attended La Gesta public school, she got high grades in Language and Literature. In the afternoons, she used to have a snack and do her homework at the station where her paternal grandmother, the popular announcer and actress María del Carmen Álvarez del Valle, worked. Grandma Menchu, as she called her, wrote aphorisms, essays and read poetry. She was one of her first cultural influences. The announcer also encouraged her to take her first steps in journalism. The girl Letizia even directed the radio program The swing, in which he spoke to a child audience. Her father, who as a young man had dreamed of studying Philosophy and Literature, helped her write her scripts.
When he was 15 years old, his family moved to Madrid for his father’s work reasons. Leaving Oviedo opened new horizons for him. Doña Letizia continued her studies at the Ramiro de Maeztu Institute, where she finished high school. There she met Professor Alonso Guerrero, who taught Spanish Literature. During free hours, the teacher and the student met in the school cafeteria to talk about books. “I discussed literature a lot with her,” Guerrero explained to Leonardo Faccio in Letizia, the impatient queen (Debate). After nine years of dating and one of marriage, Guerrero and Doña Letizia have never stopped seeing each other. According to what she told Faccio, from time to time the Queen avoids journalists and meets to talk with him in cafes.
Doña Letizia also stood out during her studies in Journalism at the Faculty of Information Sciences. “She was hungry to know,” recalled Fermín Bouza, her professor of Public Opinion at the Complutense University of Madrid. She “she walked among books, she did not read them all but she cited them. The enlightened world moved her. She is the world that she appreciates the most,” the sociologist and writer revealed to Faccio. Between 1992 and 1993, the young journalist interned at the newspaper The New Spain of Oviedo, dedicating itself mainly to the areas of Television and Entertainment. Her editors remember her as an insistent professional who quoted philosophers in the local news. She could mention Seneca’s diatribe against hedonism or Nero’s gastronomic orgies in a note about the decline in ice cream sales. She soon signed a book review section entitled The compass. At 21 years old, Letizia Ortiz was already telling Spaniards what they should read.
During his doctoral studies in Guadalajara (Mexico), where he was preparing a thesis on the press and power, he published an essay on the in-depth interview. He titled it Winks upon winks upon winksa paper inspired by the work of American anthropologist Clifford Geertz that impressed his professors. He also got a job at the newspaper 21st centurywhere he wrote clever pieces for the leisure supplement Temptations. As Leonardo Faccio says in Letizia, the impatient queen, the journalist cited Benito Pérez Galdós to recommend a bar that had, according to her, “more importance in politics than a ministry,” or evoked García Márquez to talk about another bar whose cocktails deserved to be drunk “well conversed.” She was so prolific that she had to adopt the pseudonym Ada in order to publish everything she wrote.
When the news of her engagement to Felipe de Borbón broke in November 2003, the journalist’s father, Jesús Ortiz, made a brief statement on the television program Pink sauce. “My daughter loves culture, literature, she is an inveterate reader,” she said of the future queen on prime time. A few days later, Letizia herself confirmed it in his request for her hand, giving the prince an 1850 edition of The young man of Don Enrique the mourner, by Mariano José de Larra. “It’s a chivalric story set in the 15th century, a book that I wanted for him,” she explained, somewhat shyly, in front of hundreds of cameras and reporters. The work became a bestseller.
David Rocasolano, cousin of the Queen, considers “a myth of the lackey press” that Doña Letizia is a voracious reader. “My cousin has never read anything other than newspapers, some best-seller Grisham type or the books that she was forced to read at school and college (…) If Letizia, a journalist, had given her fiancé a selection of Larra’s exquisite articles, she would have behaved coherently. But giving away a minor, literally dispensable and forgettable work by the most influential chronicler in the history of Spain seems to me an insult to Larra and to the entire journalistic caste. “There should have been better advice,” said Rocasolano in his book. Goodbye Princess (Akal), published in 2013. The cousins have not spoken for more than a decade.
But as Anna Caballé, author of Feminism in Spain, to Leonardo Faccio, “the educated woman has been stigmatized in a thousand ways in Spain by popular culture.” The writer and literary critic does not like the word “prescriber” because she considers that it has an imposing connotation that she deeply dislikes, but she has no doubts about the genuine cultural concerns of the Queen and the influence she exerts on ordinary Spanish. . “I love the interest that she shows in culture and how she exercises it in a transversal way, crossing different registers,” explains Caballé in conversation with EL PAÍS. “Her power to radiate her is indisputable, but, as I say, I like that she exercises it naturally, without imposing herself. I always missed a greater involvement of the Spanish elites and of course the political class in culture. “He was Ortega’s workhorse,” she continues.
Reality or mirage, Doña Letizia’s power in culture is visible. Her visit to the Madrid Book Fair is one of the most anticipated events for booksellers and publishers. “Thanks to it, the fair appears in media where it would not otherwise appear. It would be difficult for us to reach the gossip press or certain programs with our resources,” explained Eva Orúe, director of the Fair, to Vanity Fair. In 2015, the Queen took fossil angelsby Alan Moore, about the heroes of the occult society Golden Dawn. Your satanic Majesty?, this newspaper titled a chronicle that went viral. This year, she became interested in the collection queens consortwhich reviews the lives of the wives of medieval monarchs, and bought The use of the photoby Annie Ernaux; The city of God, by Pier Paolo Pasolini; and the literary essays by HP Lovecraft, among others. He also stopped by the booth of the Mary Read bookstore, specializing in LGTBI and transfeminism, where he purchased the book “anti-marriage.” The end of the love novel, by Vivian Gornick. The New York author, a key figure in the second wave of feminism, argues that the world has changed and that love and marriage “have ceased to be metaphors that adequately represent happiness and personal fulfillment.” While she paid with a 50 euro bill, the Queen acknowledged to the booksellers that she knows the writer and that she had already read fierce attachments (1987), a story in which a young Gornick narrates the complex relationship with her mother and is torn between the models of women that she longs and hates to embody and that will determine her relationship with men, work and other women.
No one knows better than Doña Letizia what it can cost a woman to find her place in the world. Since she came to the Spanish Royal Family, 20 years ago, she has had to face many prejudices. The fact of being divorced, working class, educated, with her own opinions and intellectual concerns has tested the conventions of the monarchy and Spanish society. But Anna Caballé considers that all these prejudices have already been left “far behind.” “We didn’t know everything about her personality. Now it is different and she has found the way, or ways, to make herself known,” concludes the literary critic. By the books of hers that she reads you will know her.
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