Antonio Ortuño woke up that day in Bogotá with a terrible hangover. He had been in a cafe with his friend, the also writer Emiliano Monge. He arrived earlier. The hangover was terrible and while he was waiting the only thing he wanted was to listen to music, the kind that sounds like a hydraulic hammer drilling your ears, the kind they say tames the beasts. He had no choice but to put the thrash metal Pantera on your phone speakers and try to forget about the world. When Monge arrived at the bar he couldn’t see Ortuño, but he could make out the melody in the background and headed towards his partner’s table. “Knew it was you when I heard your Alaskan trucker music on meth,” he greeted her.
Ortuño (46 years old) —a regular contributor to this newspaper—, has just published his latest novel, The Spanish Armada (Six Barral2022), a book loaded with acid humor that delves into the lives of a group of forty-somethings from Guadalajara who try to resurrect the group of heavy metal where they played when they were teenagers. A work about the passage of time and loneliness, the decadence of the human being and resistance to an increasingly absurd world. And above all, a declaration of love for rock and roll and its bastard brothers: that extreme music only suitable for Alaskan truckers up to the ass of narcotics —which the Mexican author has adored since that day in the 80s when on his way he met he crossed a vinyl of The Clash and another of Van Halen.
Ask. The heavy metal backbone of the book Aren’t you worried that such a niche topic will do poorly commercially?
Response. No. Maybe if it was my first book I would have worried. I have a very good number of readers and I don’t think it’s a niche novel. If you like rock it can add a certain layer of enjoyment, but it’s a story about aging and personal relationships. It is also a reaction against the self-righteousness of certain contemporary literature that lives lodged in the trending topics and the easy applause. I’m a little tired of the mechanization of the denunciation, of the mechanization of the vindictive positions that in general do not marry with a literary search, but end up being tweets turned into novels. The way in which literature is linked to reality is much more complex than talking about fashionable topics from fashionable postures, words and expressions.
P. At one point in the play, he writes: “Being part of a minority builds character.” To which minority does Antonio Ortuño belong?
R. There is a distance between the characters and me. The narrator is actually reflecting on the marginal character of a certain type of music. The heavy It was never the fashion music in any part of the world. In Mexico it went from prohibition to oblivion without having achieved mass success. We are used to thinking of the minority as denunciation and as a certain oppression. The characters in the book also feel oppressed in some way: what interests them most in the world, a certain type of music and aesthetics, does not appear on television, does not appear on the radio or is viewed with open ridicule by people. young man. They feel cornered, forgotten. There is quite a bit of irony in comparing that to a persecuted minority. It is a book that revolves a lot around humor, a rather bitter one, but humor after all.
Honestly, I do not feel part of any minority, I go to Chivas, which means being part of the largest majority that can exist in this country. I don’t feel like a majority either. I don’t like to feel part of the neighborhood association. Large gatherings of people give me the creeps. When I think of large human groups, I think of the inevitable image of a mob with torches.
P. I thought the novel had a more autobiographical point.
R. It is a novel to some extent vital, but not confessional. Between the ages of 13 and 21 I went to a lot of band rehearsals, punk and metal gigs. But I started working very young in journalism and somehow it becomes a form of militancy, it abducts you. I inevitably changed friends and distanced myself from the previous ones. My relationship with music during many of those years consisted of going to a concert, buying band shirts and records. As a novelist you become a kind of magpie who steals shiny things from everywhere. And then, one day with that, you put together the paste from which the novel will end up coming out.
P. Defeat, in some way, surrounds all the characters. Is it a book about music or about failure?
R. The music is the backbone of everything and failure is a bit of the fate that the narrator tries to overcome. I think it is the first time that I have a certain affection for the characters I write about: they refuse to disappear, to be forgotten, to be crushed by time and they persist in being who they are.
P. A song to the resilience that exists in defeat.
R. A [Julio]Cortázar, a writer who has nothing to do with me, liked jazz, he tried to reflect its structures in what he wrote, a certain aesthetic and certain games that had to do with that music. In my case, I guess my brain has grown and is quite aesthetically conditioned by my liking for rock’n’roll, and the rock’n’roll aesthetic is the aesthetic of losers. Rock can’t win, the famous born to lose [Nacido para perder] by Motorhead it’s in the DNA.
P. The music that is most listened to now is the opposite: a cult of success, money and fame. You write about ordinary people, who work in jobs they don’t like to get ahead, and who decide to go back to playing marginal music. Why?
R. The original idea to write a novel about the newspaper requiem. My characters were going to be journalists who saw paper newspapers die, how clickbait was imposed, how journalism disappeared. What I discovered, I suppose that speaks very badly of us as a union, is that journalists are extremely boring. Writing about an essay seemed tedious to me. And yet this idea stayed with me like the twilight of the gods. What about the people who live in a world that is falling apart?
Our entire planet is falling apart. That idea of decadence married me very well, suddenly, with another appetite: to write something about music. Millions of people listen to Black Sabbath every day, they did not disappear from the face of the earth and they are not interested in yachts, or dancing, or threesome [tríos]. They keep singing things that have to do with the devil, with the crazy generals who are going to destroy the world and are a big enough slice of humanity.
P. One of the paradoxes of his characters is that they all believe in the punk idea of “there is no future”, but at the same time they are very melancholic.
R. They are terribly melancholy characters. They are in a kind of beach isolated from the waves of history. This melancholy is one of the few heroic deeds that I consider possible for a person today, clinging to the things that they have already lost and that only remain as the symbols of what their youth was or of the times in which they felt a little more free.
P. It has taken him four years to write it, but in between he has published other books, articles, columns…
R. I spent a year in Germany. I came back and it was the pandemic, which was catastrophic. The mother of my children, my brother and my mother’s sister, who was the last of my elders, passed away. The novel was worked out as consistently as I could in fairly complex circumstances. Also, I write all my novels with different procedures and never repeat the working methods. I dictated practically the entirety of this book in intelligent dictation programs, I wanted it to preserve an aftertaste very close to orality, much more natural. It ended up being something of an obsession. I discovered that some writing programs read aloud. I put the machine to read and tried to capture cacophonies, repetitions. I stopped, corrected, rewrote and came back. I enjoyed it because somehow the only thing that hasn’t gone wrong in all these years was The army, which was still slow but advancing. It was my salvation boat during the pandemic and all this disaster.
One thing that irritates me a lot is solemnity. We are culturally condemned, at least in Mexico, which is a terribly solemn country, to think that what is serious is these people who release speeches with half-philosophical scraps, but who in general terms are bad storytellers. They fail to convey what I think is the core of the narrative: what does the passage of time do to situations, to people. When the narrative lacks that and is limited to adding prestigious words and bronze phrases, it tends to bore me a lot. It was impossible to narrate a book like this from the solemnity. The language had to be much more insolent and irreverent, respecting those fillers, those interjections and that fundamental rudeness of colloquial speech, but without giving up the literary formulation.
P. All the characters in the novel go through some kind of life crisis. Is the novel also your response to that personal crisis?
R. It was in the sense that it was a bit like my enclosed garden, my little work garden. Apart from all the horrors of these years, the family, national and global tragedies, a lot of loved ones died. I was not interested in the pandemic as a topic, but I think that even though I started writing about these characters before, it ended up becoming something very organic, very natural, that they were in crisis. People who are happy don’t return to the band of their youth at 47 years old.
All the characters are broken people, broken in some way. It seems to me that he is coupled with the culture of rock and roll. It’s not just the aesthetics of losers, it’s also the music of broken people. It’s very difficult for happy people to like Black Sabbath, Motörhead or even more sordid things like Venom. I don’t think that people who enjoy their day to day and go out in the morning to do jogging.
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