“Xairu is silent for a moment before hanging up. He spends a few minutes with his cell phone in his hand, thinking about his father, how sad he seems, how he has never shown that sadness or the opposite. He also thinks that growing up is like a race to see who realizes first: you that your parents have never been happy, or they that you are never going to be happy.” In hanging clothes (Anagrama, 2024) sadness is an inheritance that passes from parents to children, a path that does not end and that transforms misery into small and large violence, a portrait of how hatred manifests itself in one’s life and towards the others. For Óscar García Sierra, it is also an x-ray of what he sees around him. A proof of the ease with which a life collapses without one being able to barely realize it.
The town of Llanos de Alba, in León, has an orange sky and the air thick with dust. These are the days after the demolition of the La Robla thermal power plant, the same one that closed the author’s first novel, Facendera (Anagrama, 2022), and that now gives continuity not to the story, but to the landscape in which it happens. Isidorín has retired early after a lifetime in the mine and that morning of fog and darkness he argues with apparent normality with his wife, Milagros, who is getting ready before going to the nursing home where she works as a geriatric assistant. “Like my mother,” the writer reveals in this interview.
The daughter, Tania Tamara, went to the city to escape the harmful dynamics of her family—the same ones that her parents may never be able to understand—and the other son, Xairu, is in trouble and is going to appear in the next elections. municipal elections with the extreme right. In this succession of life stories, in which sometimes nothing happens and other times everything happens at the same time, García Sierra explores the inside of the habits of a random working-class Spanish family to demonstrate that unhappiness is actually a hereditary artifact. , incalculable in time, transferable from one to another and, almost always, too difficult to reverse.
Rural literature
“Despite having been in this city for more than ten years, I feel unable to write about Madrid,” says Óscar García Sierra from a cafeteria in the capital where he meets with this newspaper. The Leonese writer fictionalizes again under the atmosphere of the mining basins, the deindustrialization and rural depopulation of his hometown and surroundings “because it comes naturally to me,” he alleges, “perhaps because of having lived there for so long, perhaps because of a feeling of debt.” for having left.” Of the ten or twelve friends he grew up with, “there are none left living in the town,” he says. Returning every so often allows him to see more clearly the things that have been changing: “I’m gone, but at least I can reclaim some issues from here with another perspective.”
For Óscar García Sierra, writing comes “from the Internet,” he explains. He began at a very young age reading and writing “single phrases and poorly worked texts,” and over the years he would end up collaborating in several anthologies and publishing the collection of poems Houston, I’m the problem (Espasa, 2016), whose verses Carolina Durante would later perform in one of her songs. hanging clothes He wrote it getting up very early in the morning, he confesses, very early before beginning his day of teleworking as a linguist—he studied Hispanic Philology—in an artificial intelligence company: “I don’t like sleeping,” García Sierra reveals, “and writing makes me feel good”. On its first page, it reads: “A Perla.” The book is dedicated to Perla Zúñiga, a multidisciplinary artist, poet and DJ also known as Jovendelaperla with whom the writer shared, above all, “conversations about writing and music,” he recalls, and who died a few months ago, leaving a notable void in the scene. queer of the country.
Talking about our parents’ generation is important to understand why their children are sad
Oscar Garcia Sierra
— Writer
hanging clothes Its title is a popular expression used to warn someone that others may be listening to something compromised, a circumstance that, in reality, metaphorically covers the atmosphere of all the stories that compose it. The beginning of the novel is touched by the end of Facendera: Milagros calls the Civil Guard to warn that some kids are partying in the school area, the same ones who were having fun in that book with which the poet debuted as a novelist. The author thought it was a good nod. Talking now about “our parents’ generation,” explains Óscar, who is 29, seems important to him “to understand why their children are sad,” as is the case with the character of Xairu, who is around 40 and whose story ends leading the plot of the novel from the middle of the book to the end.
As much as life in the town was different before, in reality everyone has ended up in the same place
Oscar Garcia Sierra
— Writer
“I didn’t just want to create a young character who is sad, but one whose parents are also sad, because even though life in the town was different before, they had more work and more things to do, in reality they have all ended up in the same place”, thinks the author. And that place is nothing more than the moment in life in which one realizes that too many things are wrong, that moment in which it is “impossible to distinguish old problems from new ones,” says the narrating voice in the novel; that moment when “every night is so similar that it is impossible to know when things happen.”
But sadness is also a bag of rage and hatred that one throws against the world as if attacking it could somehow solve things. Milagros takes on more work just so she can treat her colleagues badly and feel that something sets her apart from them, “behaviors that my mother told me happen constantly in these jobs,” adds García Sierra, “and that actually uncover “a life of frustration.”
My friends and I talk about how all our parents are emotionally inept.
Oscar Garcia Sierra
— Writer
Her husband is a man incapable of communicating with her or with her children, a portrait of a standardized masculinity that is drawn in the father figure of many families: “My friends from town and I talked a lot about how all our fathers are inept. emotional. So are grandparents, the parents of parents,” thinks the philologist. “I don’t know if I could have represented a father in a different way, influenced by books or movies instead of what I have seen in a real father,” he adds.
Drugs, sadness, hate
A complex way of relating that does not escape Xairu’s character, although in a different way: the young man takes parakeet —or cocaine—almost daily, he has no job, he wanders around the town’s bars and begins a relationship with Juli, whom he gradually leads into his world of addiction, delirium and violence. The idea that ideology “as something in the background,” he explains, “something that sometimes occurs in groups because each person arrives hating different things and, even if they don’t even share hatred, one is there because they have no other place to be,” he declares.
“I have focused on very depressed and very hopeless characters, but the atmosphere of the town is not that sad,” adds García Sierra, who sees it as quite likely that he will return to live in his land at some point, although he does not believe that he will be able to do so in his home. town of barely 300 inhabitants. He defends that what is at stake are problems that already exist in the city, but in rural areas the problems of work and depopulation are added “and people are trapped,” says the author, thinking especially of the towns of Asturias, León and the Mining Basins and in that middle-aged range, “a very common profile of people who tried to have another type of life and who are left hanging there,” he says.
García Sierra believes that, although the context of his town or any other may have an impact on the situation of the family he describes in the novel, the important thing is to understand that the dysfunctionality of the family “could occur in any other context,” he thinks. “for example in a large city, although with different peculiarities”, because what the writer explores is the way in which, intergenerationally, relationships within the family nucleus become increasingly uncomfortable, crossed by the individual problems that determine each one. but also collapsed due to problems that are, in reality, structural.
Problems from which sometimes one escapes fleetingly as if a worthwhile life were what you have when you are partying. In previous texts, García Sierra had already constructed scenes of partying, drugs and discord to delve into such important topics as the ways of dealing with reality, and in hanging clothes, “Going home is death,” the character narrates: “The feeling of extending the party is the closest thing we can experience to extending our life. […] But that doesn’t happen with real life. When I see my grandparents who are almost ninety years old, I think they are extending their life. after, “They must feel like they were in the morning, high and watching the sunrise, seeing that everything is ending and that there is no next weekend to hold on to when it is their turn to go home.”
People like Xairu, who wander through dead ends, who touch the limits, who feel fear; people who “the smell of their mother makes them want to cry”—he narrates in the book—but who, however, only have to take charge of their lives through violence, are, after all, everywhere. Maybe, in a certain way, in all of them. It’s just a matter of observing, suggests Óscar. hanging clothes It is an insinuation to look from another angle at the indestructible pieces that make up a life: the marriage that fades, work fatigue, disenchantment with oneself, thrown desires, the search for the impossible, silence, disorder, self-deception , pain, unhappiness. It is knowing that “not even the future is an escape” and, still, continuing to ask the endless question: “How different could life be if it were not so similar to that of our parents.”
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