Robert Woodhouse, British writer and humorist repudiated by his people and used by the Nazis. José Bergamín, a wandering Spaniard who ended up in the Basque Country supporting Herri Batasuna. Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, never a prophet in his land, or Edith Warton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer, immersed in domestic captivity at the hands of a husband with a changeable and unstable mood. The four of them have in common, in addition to living in the 20th century, feeling out of place and that is why Jorge Freire tells his story in ‘The Strangers’ (Books of the Asteroid), a book of essays that goes on sale this week and that The writer will present with Mercedes Monmany on Thursday, October 24 at the Machado de las Salesas bookstore in Madrid. Freire speaks about the nature of this book and the tragedy of each of its protagonists in this interview. —In addition to bitterness, what else unites these characters?—Bitterness makes them uncomfortable and has caused them to be removed from the literary canon. How is it possible that we Spaniards do not read one of the four or five best poets of the 20th century in Spanish and perhaps the best aphorist of the century, who is Pepe Bergamín? How is it possible that we do not revere a great novelist like Vicente Blasco Ibáñez? Being successful is not tolerated. —Politics doesn’t help either. —In the case of Bergamín it is seen very clearly. He hates the right, but the left does not accept him either, because, after all, Bergamín has really reprehensible elections. A person who, being a well-off child, born in Madrid, but from a family from Malaga, without any type of connection with the Basque, already at 80 years old, in the leaden years, appears at Herri Batasuna’s rallies with his fist in tall and on top of that he puts himself in profile when asked about terrorism, is reprehensible.—But what makes them the object of literature?—We have all felt the estrangement and the sensation of not fitting into an environment. Only from a philosophical novel or a non-fiction essay could I do it. From a human perspective, how many people who have found themselves marginalized or misunderstood by their own people have in the end thrown themselves into the arms of an absolutely wrong ideology just because the sidekicks gave them a little warmth. It is a mistake to understand these stories based on big ideas. In the end, humans are moved by resentments and really prosaic and banal quarrels. —Why vindicate those who are missed in a world of victims and offended?—Strangement is not a question of being, but of being. They weren’t missed, they felt missed. They were untimely, they clashed with their time. And that seems really inspiring to me. There are some coincidences that I have not wanted to explain too much. Everyone experiences two or three events, for example, the Great War. Three of the four live through World War II. Blasco doesn’t arrive, but there is a shared context.—They all have something of a mess and a traitor. For example, Robert Woodhouse—Woodhouse tries to boost the morale of his countrymen, but ends up being a useful fool to the Nazis. There are those who think that he was a Nazi, I believe that the data shows that he was not. He was in a state of imbecility, in a state of innocence that allowed him to live oblivious to the great events of the Second World War. Woodhouse has one thing that must be vindicated in our time, which is marked not so much by black humor as by sarcasm. And yet, he defends a banal humor, which is not hurtful.—Everyone suffers a type of exile—I thought of making the title based on the idea of the exile. But my teacher and friend Javier Gomá told me: they can accuse you of trivializing exile, because they are not exiles in the strict sense. Wharton had a domestic exile. And isn’t that an exile too? Bergamín uses the concept of pilgrim in my country, Lope’s concept. Of course, it’s not exactly being banished, it doesn’t mean being outside your borders, because you can be in your own country and feel out of place. The character of these four people condemns them to wander indefinitely.—He does not attribute it to a national issue.—I do not believe that Spain is more ungrateful to its intellectuals than other countries. I am an enemy of this rhetoric of exceptionalism. The only exceptionality that exists in Spain is the exception that we Spaniards have stubbornly stubbornly looked at ourselves in the microscope stage. This book, among other things, is an attempt to disturb. Not to hurt or to poke the finger in the eye, but above all to surprise – Has intellectual discussion been completely supplanted by causes? – A hundred years ago, Orwell pointed out that the slogan is a product of war, which arises in time of war. Deliberative democracy requires deliberation. In ‘Politics and the English Language’, Orwell says that clichés are attempts to colonize parts of our brain. The causes are a kind of blazon that ennobles, but does not obligate you to anything. Political commitment and militancy have been trivialized to the point of becoming a kind of market value.—Is the current problem political, judicial or moral?—The problem is not that the political narrative has failed, but that citizens have given realize that beneath the story there is nothing. To argue, the truth must exist. And what has come to be called disaffection is due to the fact that citizens have realized, not so much that politicians lie, which is something that goes back to the mists of time, but that politicians have stopped believing in the truth.
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