“I can’t risk being accused of drug advocacy,” Marcos tells Julio in one of the most striking passages of Better than dead (Random House, 2024). The statement, which emerges in the middle of a discussion about an article that Julio intends to publish, captures one of the central issues of the novel: that of the social taboo regarding substance consumption. “But you are the first to take drugs,” Julio replies, showing the contradictions of a society trapped between moral discourse and the search for escape. Under this challenge towards unconventional thoughts and the everyday life that really surrounds them, Fidel Moreno (Huelva, 1976) throws himself headlong into the world of fiction.
Moreno is a journalist, writer and director of the magazine Cáñamo, one of the most important in the field of drugs not only in Spain, but also in Latin America, whose objective is to defend the possibility that all drugs can be used responsibly, seeking peaceful and oppositional alternatives to prohibitionist policies. This is why it is not at all surprising that, for his debut in fiction literature, Fidel Moreno has chosen to take Julio as the protagonist, a man who faces the crisis of his 40s by consuming marijuana and trying Cialis, a substance who hopes it will resurrect his sexual desire and help him conceive a child with his wife Casilda.
From the hand of Julio, Better than dead It is made up of characters who, like so many people in Spain, have normalized drug use and turn to them when they need to escape the apathy of pain or enhance pleasure. According to Fidel Moreno, “drug prohibition generates criminal states,” corrupting and threatening “democracy” and entailing an “absolute violation of consumer rights.” “What kills is not drugs, but ignorance regarding what you are taking,” the author tells elDiario.es. “And banning a substance does not make it disappear, it only changes access to it,” he points out.
Differentiating itself from other artistic works in which the theme of drugs is focused as a trigger for dramatic situations, Better than dead Treat the topic neutrally. “We must understand that drugs help us in our challenges and that the human experience includes drunkenness,” comments Fidel Moreno. “They are discoveries of civilization that make our existence happier, less traumatic and less complicated,” he adds. The author considers that we should “talk about it normally” to achieve a “transmission of knowledge” between those who know “the drugs” and those who are going to “start using them.”
The frankness and naturalness with which certain themes are explored in the novel allow the reader to distance themselves from those myths that, as the writer tells this newspaper, “every society creates” to “warn of certain dangers.” “From critical thinking we must question these myths, since they do not allow us to properly understand what we are or understand reality well,” Fidel Moreno emphasizes. To achieve this, the author of Better than dead He embraces humor, which he considers essential in “times of polarization.” “It allows us to face life and existence in a more dignified and comfortable way,” he says.
The work also travels through eroticism, essential in one of its main plots, which accompanies Julio in the infidelity he commits with the squatter Sara, who lives in one of the empty apartments in the block where he and Casilda live. “It is the engine that moves us and, although society is completely sexualized, the erotic is diluted when we start writing,” says Moreno, highlighting that “eroticism has to be in a realistic novel today.” “If you want to represent life, it is necessary to also represent sexuality,” he adds.
The truth is that Julio is a character marked by disappointment. “What a big mistake to aspire to a vocational job! What a mistake to want to make a living with artistic tasks! “What nonsense to try to achieve yourself through work!” he goes so far as to say in the work. After spending nine years as a clerk at FNAC and being in charge of recommending albums on the company’s website, his expectations are reduced to letting time pass smoothly, assuming his role as housewife and president of the community. “Job insecurity forces us to constantly reinvent ourselves, it turns us into perpetual adolescents,” comments the author. “What used to last until 25, today lasts almost beyond 40,” he says.
The crisis of the protagonist is, in reality, the crisis of a person who, after losing his previous job, sees how his dreamed life model collapses, ending aspirations that led him to not want to assume the responsibility that corresponds to him due to age. . “The crisis of 40 is today the crisis of the end of adolescence,” declares Fidel Moreno. “We are floating in the air, and that instability leads us to be constantly defenseless, not knowing what land we have under our feet,” he continues. Throughout the entire novel one perceives the nostalgia of the passion that is declining, of that being better than dead where one is neither alive nor dead, but in suspension.
We must guard the flags and try to build a fruitful dialogue that allows us to understand the world. Do we have to abandon the fight for change? No, we must continue fighting, but from another place, because the spaces of struggle that have been created have led us to a dead end.
Fidel Moreno
— Writer
The glorification of this nostalgia inevitably leads us to the pandemic, especially because it serves as a backdrop for Better than dead. The novel, which begins in 2019, punctually goes back to relevant events from the protagonist’s past, and ends coinciding with the start of the war in Ukraine, in 2022, offering a very interesting vision of our recent past. “The pandemic is inspiring because it makes a dystopia a reality, which is the possibility that a small molecule puts an entire political system in crisis,” confesses the author, lamenting that, although “crises rekindle hope for change,” the pandemic has not managed to make that change happen.
“We must save the flags and try to build a fruitful dialogue that allows us to understand the world,” says Fidel Moreno. “Do we have to abandon the fight for change? No, we must continue fighting, but from another place, because the spaces for struggle that have been created have led us to a dead end,” he comments regarding the country’s main problems. To address them, the author sets Better than dead in the Lavapiés neighborhood of Madrid, apart from because he lives there and knows it, because he considers it “a crossroads of all the past, present and future problems of Spain”, from “emigration” to the “housing issue”. “Lavapiés is a laboratory of life,” he says.
For this reason, real estate speculation and its consequences are also very present in the work. In fact, Julio meets Sara after the empty apartments owned by the Social Security Treasury are squatted by undocumented immigrants. When Julio tries to talk to them as president of the community, he sees the situation they are going through from a different perspective. “The housing problem portrays the whole of Spain to us because the virus of speculation has been inoculated in the population,” says the author, pointing out that there is still “no serious housing policy.” “People who are on the streets do not have a housing alternative. There are empty apartments and it is normal for them to be occupied,” he adds.
Today’s problem is not a visibility issue, it is a noise problem. All the problems are visible, but we are blinded by the many lights that demand our interest. We must return to the idea that the great human achievement is the cultivation of attention.
Fidel Moreno
— Writer
Fidel Moreno wanted Better than dead would “account for reality” and not falsify “the problems that may exist” in life. “If you make realistic fiction, you have to be able to show reality without tricks,” he says, referring to real estate speculation or drugs. “Today’s problem is not a visibility issue, it is a noise problem. All the problems are visible, but we are blinded by the many lights that demand our interest,” he declares. The author thinks that “we must return to the idea that the great human achievement is the cultivation of attention,” stating that, without this cultivation, society cannot face “life and the world in a dignified manner.”
The work leads its characters to seek answers to one of the great questions of human beings: what life really is. And, although what these characters are really looking for is escape, the world and all its contradictions pushes them to try to continue living the best they can. Although the temptation of many writers is, in the face of general chaos, to make books with very simple narrative structures reduced to the essential, Fidel Moreno proposes the opposite: to use noise, confusion and disorder to represent, in addition to the vital exuberance, the ridiculousness of waking up every day without knowing what the key is to finding an extraordinary life.
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