Somewhere between the ironic lyricism of an Álvaro Cunqueiro and the amazed respect for how human beings construct the world of a John Berger, Manuel Rivas could operate. The end of peasant Europe, animals that of course think, scars of historical violence, low voices and always a saying that ultimately refers to the poetic. The Galician author likes to talk about uncertain realism, perhaps because reality is blurry, he does not allow himself to be caught easily, he resists. “Imagination helps you see reality,” he explained a month and a half ago in an interview with elDiario.es after the departure of After the CEO (Behind the SkyXerais in Galician, Alfaguara in Spanish), his most recent novel.
This Tuesday, October 29, Manuel Rivas (A Coruña, 1957) became the first writer in the Galician language to receive the National Prize for Spanish Letters, awarded by the Ministry of Culture. The jury highlighted his “firm commitment to the language” and its “worldwide recognition,” and related his writing to the “agitation of consciences.” His books, the most translated in Galician literature, draw an extensive and multiform geography, in which practically all genres appear. And all with a high degree of brilliance: poetry, short stories, novels, journalism. But Manuel Rivas has not only created a deep-rooted and universal work that defends the right to be kind that Bertolt Brecht spoke of. His public figure has become an intellectual reference for environmental, social, and political struggles.
He was just a precocious journalist, he had only published the poems of Entroido Book (1980), when he embarked on the Xureloan activist ship that boycotted the repository of nuclear waste in the Atlantic Trench. Neither journalism, nor poetry, nor environmental activism would ever depart from his trajectory. Editor of Teimaa modernist weekly and pioneer of the Galician nationalist left, contributed to founding the magazine Lights in its two stages. The second already has 132 monthly issues. For The Country He wrote opinion articles, reports and manifestos, often later compiled in books admired in the profession. He has also collaborated with this newspaper.
His voice was that of Never Again in the massive demonstration on December 1 against the political management of the catastrophic accident of the Prestige. Then he had already won the National Fiction Prize for the stories of What do you want me love? (1996), which includes A lingua das bolboretastransformed into a famous film by José Luis Cuerda. But in the Galicia of Fraguism, getting involved in politics, in the case of Rivas from the nationalist left, was not harmless. His figure almost disappeared from the pages of the press most affecting the right, despite the international dimension that his literature was gaining. That has changed, judging by the pages and texts dedicated to this Tuesday’s award. Not so much the political: the current president of the Xunta de Galicia, Alfonso Rueda, did not find a minute to echo on his social networks, quick to pay tribute to the tennis player Rafa Nadal when he retired, the first time that the National of Spanish Letters distinguished an author in the Galician language.
And life nourishes the work. Maybe also the other way around, it’s not safe. Everything is, in one way or another, in his books. “Possibly the best tool that human beings have historically been equipped with is the libertarian condition,” he stated in the aforementioned conversation with elDiario.es, and added: “I believe that every writer has to be an anarchist at the moment in which writes”. Without borders, without masters, Rivas Geography. Here is a possible itinerary through it.
no swan (Sotelo Blanco, 1989)
At the core of everything Manuel Rivas writes is poetry. In the dialogues of his stories, in his intervention articles in the press, in his manifestos for various causes, in his literature aimed at the youngest readers. The first work he published, Entroido Bookit was about poems. The penultimate one, O que fica foraalso. But it was the clear and at times epigrammatic line of no swan which advanced through territories then little traveled in Galician poetry and years later frequented. “At that time / the tavern, / everyone looked like Samuel Beckett,” says the poem. Culture. “He was strong and feble / like an Yankee marine. / She, fragile and invincible / like a Vietcong guerrilla,” he says elsewhere. Do disconnected to o disconnected It includes everything he wrote in the genre between 1980 and 2003. He later published Snow disappears (2009), A boca da terra (2015) and the aforementioned O que fica fora.
Galicia, the Atlantic bonsai (Agular, 1989)
Journalism is a story (1997) was perhaps more celebrated outside of Galicia: its claim that there is no separation between the profession of journalist and literature captivated quite a few juntaletras. But Galicia, the Atlantic bonsai He revealed not only a major reporter, attentive to the rhythm of prose and the tiny details of reality, he also portrayed a Galician country foreign to exotic looks. The avant-garde cultural experiences, the rise and fall of the armed independence movement, smuggling just before it led to drug trafficking or the political upheavals during the establishment of autonomy after the dictatorship focused some of the journalistic inquiries contained in the volume. “It is a contradiction that when progress is made in European unity, that Berlin wall on the border with Portugal is maintained,” he claimed at the presentation of the book, according to Xosé Hermida’s chronicle in The Country. The years passed and Rivas continued to regularly publish volumes with his production for newspapers and magazines: Galicia, Galicia (1999), The Grouchos (2008), Against everything (2018) or Area to defend. To unruly hope (2020).
Your books burn badly (Xerais, 2006)
It’s your tour de force narrative, spherical narrative of more than 700 pages, one of the main Galician novels of the 21st century and not only of the 21st century. Your books burn badly crosses stories and genres – the author listed them in his day: chronicle, popular literature, historical essay, thriller– to recount the great wound of 1936, backwards and forwards. “The inexplicable. That will not change with the passage of time,” he wrote in one of his chapters and, however, the goal of the book is to find an explanation for the abyss. The looting of Casares Quiroga’s house in A Coruña, the walk of the Galician mayor of Santiago de Compostela Ánxel Casal or the connection of the famous Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt with Spain during the dark post-war period are episodes that coincide with the lives of imagined but real characters, or something like that is literature: the boxer Arturo da Silva, Vincent Curtis, HerculesLuís Terranova, who knew how to sing tangos. Everything revolves around an image, this one real, taken in 1936 in the A Coruña Dock: Falangists burning books. Before Your books burn badlyRivas had already addressed the Civil War from the perspective of the defeated in the story A lingua das bolboretas (1996) or in the novel The carpenter’s pencil (1998, Antón Reixa directed its film adaptation). Then he did it in Or last day of Newfoundland (2015).
As low voices (Xerais, 2012)
Before the label autofiction, its apology but also its furious criticism, was installed in the literary conversation, Rivas delivered a delicate and exciting work in which the personal intersected with the collective and the family itself, workers coming from the rural to the popular A Coruña neighborhood of Monte Alto, served to explain the world. Published in installments in the defunct Galician edition of The Countrythe resulting book is perfectly consistent with its author’s interest in the reverse of what is official and at the same time opened a path along which, for the moment, he did not continue. “If the low voices of history are to be heard, this will only be achieved by interrupting the thread of the dominant version, breaking its plot and entangling its plot,” wrote Ranahit Guha, the Indian Marxist historian who created the concept. As low voices by Rivas, a work that perhaps went more unnoticed than it deserves, confirms this.
After the CEO (Xerais, 2024)
The author calls it a “radical black novel” although in reality his literary game consists of overflowing that definition through all avenues and seams. Tras do Ceo is a transcript of Galicia and the work, the first piece of a writing project that exceeded 2,000 pages, seeks to blur the separation between the real and the imaginary. There is crime but also lyrical humor, and geography plays a central role. The ecological perspective to which Rivas, citizen and journalist, has dedicated many efforts, emerges in the book at every step. “It is a novel in which there is a lot of talk about extinctions: it would be a crime novel about nature,” he explained to elDiario.es last September. A group of hunters chases O Solitario, a legendary wild boar with the air of Moby Dick, this is how it starts After the CEOon a mountain flooded with fog. It is not Rivas’s only approach to some twists in tradition noir -he did it in Everything is silent (2010), which deals with drug trafficking, or in the stories of Living without permission and other stories from the West (2018) – but the most heterodox.
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