Antonio Soler (Málaga, 1956) grew up among stories, but there is one that has haunted him all his life. His grandmother told him when he wanted to know. It was not a children’s story. It was a Civil War story. His grandmother and mother were among the thousands of people who left Malaga in February 1937 when the rebel side took the city. The civilians took the road to Almería fleeing death, but in their exodus they found more death because the Francoists bombed the road. The episode, outside of Andalusia, remains largely unknown. One day, when Soler told it during a conversation with his friends at the Espasa publishing house, they asked him: Have you never thought about writing a novel about this?
And thus was born ‘The Day of the Wolf’ (Espasa), the new novel by the Andalusian author. “An authentic work of literary art,” as defined this Thursday in the Culture Classroom Carlos Aganzodirector of the Vocento Foundation, during the talk they held at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. Being such a personal novel, does it change much when writing about family members? Aganzo asked. «The difficulty was working with people as if they were characters, although I do not invent and I stick to inherited memory. I was concerned about the issue of not having a sentimental spillover. “I had to have a certain distance from what I wanted to tell for the benefit of the narrative itself,” Soler responded.
In the book the author tells how his parents got married in 1936, when the war began, and how he had to go to Madrid as a soldier shortly after finding out that he was going to have a son. «What goes through the heads of those characters? There I become a novelist. Soler has approached these stories from his ear. «Characters are often built from what they say. That draws a character. If I have any virtue as a writer, it is having a little ear. I have appealed to my memory, to the way my grandmother, my mother, spoke, the little I remember of my father…». Another fundamental protagonist is fear: «What gives rise to this mass flight is fear of the threat of what is coming. But at the same time that I inherited awareness of fear, of the vital disruption that the road caused, I was lucky not to inherit resentment,” added the author.
«If I have any virtue as a writer, it is that of having a little ear. “I have appealed to the way my family spoke”
In ‘The Day of the Wolf’ Soler aspires to approach the episode without dogmatism. «Sometimes people who were ideologically on opposing sides risked their lives by not taking someone to the wall. Thanks to that, my father saved his life, because first he had that act of humanity that was returned to him. A historian told me that it was not a strange event. “If I had only dedicated myself to talking about the positive aspects of one of the sides, I would have been taking away the credibility of the story,” Soler reflected. «My mother saw a priest burned in red Málaga. Those things are documented. Those of us who admire the germ of the second republic would have loved if these things had not happened. Obviously we would have loved it if the Civil War had not come. Faced with the black and white that we want to establish today, it must be pointed out that the republic was not monolithic.
«And many of the people who can now go out into the streets waving a republican flag, their coreligionists at that time saw that flag as a procedure to reach a red flag. It seemed like something very obvious to me and omitting that seemed like a scam,” he added. A novelist, after all, must write about the human condition. “This is what differentiates the work of an essayist, or a historian, from someone who wants to make literature out of it,” Soler concluded.
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