Cristina Sánchez Andrade (Santiago de Compostela, 1968) is an open secret, a cult writer with a particular universe, both in form (narrative but lyrical) and in substance (rural Galician with touches of magical realism). His lyricism is sensorial and synesthetic, beautiful and terrible. A painting of stinking and crude brushstrokes, but also sensual and ardent, where strange women, bizarre characters, sinister old women, young girls who let themselves be carried away by sudden desire with a stranger at the gates of their own wedding abound. The enigmas. The atavistic nature of the origin as a fierce destiny and the untamed female characters who are not comfortable for their community. Time and space indefinite and misty.
“Under the moon, my grandmother Idalia and I ate onions. We liked them raw and crunchy, because eating them like that was like eating the frost of the night,” he writes in Oxen and roses slept (2001, Siruela). Or: “Here. I want to be far away, because I still have the gallop throbbing in my temples. I will never swing again; “My stomach is full of thistles.” Or “the women of the town at their doors with their rotten breaths washed with soap.”
Sánchez Andrade’s literature is usually related to that of Álvaro Cunqueiro and Valle-Inclán, but she maintains that her great inspiration has been southern American writers, from Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers to Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter. Granddaughter of Galicians on her father’s side and English on her mother’s side, she acknowledges that she has been influenced as much by the legends of the Costa da Morte as by the word games of the British oral tradition of her childhood.
Probably, if there were a ranking of the writers with the best titles in Spanish, she would occupy one of the first positions: Oxen and roses slept (2001, Siruela); Your king no longer steps on the earth (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award 2004), The Winters (Anagrama, 2014); The boy who ate wool (Anagrama, 2019); The nostalgia of the Amphibian Woman (Anagrama, 2022); and now, like a ritornello, Lizards smell like grass, his first novel, originally published in Lengua de Trapo in ’99, and which this year he rescued from oblivion The Swiss Army Knife.
What was your life like 20 years ago when you wrote Lizards smell like grass? What were the circumstances that accompanied it?
He already had two children and at the same time he studied Information Sciences at the Complutense University and Law at the UNED. At UNED you have to study a lot, you don’t go to class. I think that all those years of being alone with law books gave me a resilience that helped me with literature, because while writing a novel you can have many moments of weakness. To tell you, but where does this take me? What am I doing writing this? Who is going to publish it for me? Am I wasting my time? Which is the kind of questions you also ask yourself when you’re studying alone.
In the midst of growing up and studying, how did you find moments to write?
I have always written at times. If I had half an hour before going somewhere, I took advantage of it. I have almost never had continuity ahead of me: making food, going shopping, taking your child to the dentist are constant interruptions, but I got used to writing like that. In recent years, I have gone to artist residencies that offer you the chance to concentrate for a month. There I realized that this is what is ideal for writing, but you can’t wait for the perfect moment or you would never write.
Lizards smell like grass has a strong connection with the cruelty of traditional fairy tales. What were your favorite stories as a child?
I was always fascinated by witches when it came to stories. That is to say, what attracted me was the darkest part of the characters or what Jung called the shadow, which is that dark part that we all have, that we repress and find it so difficult to recognize.
In The lizards The protagonists are two women with a relationship of dependency, affection and cruelty, something that is repeated in Someone under the eyelids and in The winters. Why this fixation of yours on the duplicate female character?
I have always been interested in these love-hate relationships of two who cannot live without each other and at the same time need to separate. I think there are many couples like this in real life, duos who live in constant emotional blackmail, whether they are siblings, married couples, or people who have been very close for a while. What happens in the book is that the presence of the children makes that fusion between the old women end up breaking down… If I’m honest, at the time I wrote The lizards The reading of The big notebook by Agota Kristof, who a few years ago republished Asteroid Books as Claus and Lucas and it is a brutal story of two children who are left at their grandmother’s house. That is my starting point although later my book is much more flowery.
Yes, because Agota Kristof is dry and laconic, while her style is extremely lyrical.
I really, really admire those people who write with narrative economy, but you see that I don’t know how to do it.
Do you know what you want to say when you start writing?
Hmm. Vaguely. That is, I almost always have an initial idea with which I envision something, but it often changes. I get carried away, but sooner or later you have to be aware of what you are writing about and focus it. That is, ask yourself what the character’s desire is and where the conflict is. Answering these questions puts your mind in order, although during the process things continue to emerge that surprise you. I also believe a lot in the premonitory power of writing. A bit like what happened to Clarice Lispector, who after all that obsession she had with eggs and chickens in her stories ended up dying of ovarian cancer. Sometimes the body knows things before the head.
In that case, I suppose you also believe in Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicities by which there is “the simultaneity of two events linked by meaning but in an acausal manner.”
Totally, in fact synchronicity is one of my obsessions. And I’m not saying that I meet one every day, but almost.
Could you give me some example?
I have a lot, especially unexpected encounters with people I’m thinking about, but it would be too long to tell. For me, synchronicities are very important material for literature, which is why I always ask my creative writing students to write down dreams, to write down strange thoughts, to be open to external stimuli and attentive to unexpected coincidences. You always come across people who are unable to write anything down and don’t see it as useful and then others who are just the opposite.
In one of the sentences in the book he says: “It happens that sometimes hatred erupts suddenly. Then you hate yourself without meaning to. And you hate yourself without thinking.”
Hate is a very natural feeling that, sometimes, in very close relationships, has accumulated little by little and at a given moment, boom! It hatches and causes atrocious crimes to be committed. In any case, I think that hating, even if it is natural, or is very human, is also a very difficult feeling to achieve. In an exercise that I also do in class, I ask my students to write if they have ever hated and the majority say no, that they have never felt something so extreme.
It is revealing in that phrase that sometimes hate can be as ephemeral as a cannon shot. In other words, it is possible to hate one second and, the next, not hate.
Of course, and fortunately because if it were a feeling that lasted over time it would make you resentful and bitter. Continued hate blinds you and leaves no room for anything but hate.
Another feeling that often arises in his literature is that of nostalgia for what has not been experienced, especially in The amphibian woman.
Yes, that is something that Jung also said, that the unlived life is a disease from which one can die. Also that feeling, that unease, is very human. At some point we have all asked ourselves, what would have happened if I had gone here and not there? I think we all also have that unlived life in our heads.
Do you feel a outsider of the literary world?
Before more. Because I have always written from the rural world and when I started it was something that was not fashionable at all. Now there are many more books on this topic, and even a conference to which I was invited in December, but the truth is that I don’t consider these types of things. In other words, I have always written what my body asks of me. I am incapable of doing it any other way.
Fighting for readers is not your thing…
No! I prefer to fight with the text to stay happy, which is the most difficult. But hey, the other thing is also important.
In the end, success and recognition are something completely random.
That’s how it is. The reason why certain women are very successful and recognized by others is something you never quite understand. Success as writers, I mean. For example, the other day I was at the Atocha station with my little daughter and her boyfriend and they asked me: “Why is the Atocha station called Almudena Grandes?” And I replied: “I have no idea. Because before Almudena Grandes I would have preferred her to be called Carmen Laforet, Mercè Rodoreda or Rosa Chacel, who are writers who could have won the Nobel Prize, right?” I guess this kind of thing happens because it’s always been that way and it’s not worth thinking about too much.
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