Moments before chatting with Alba Carballal (Lugo, 1992), the Xunta de Galicia awards the Castelao medal to Total Loss. The coincidence is curious because Carballal’s second novel is entitled ‘You will dance on my grave’ (Seix Barral) and, in addition to sounding like a Vigo scene, it smells of the sea and tar, since it narrates how the catastrophes of the Andros Patria, of the Aegean Sea and the Prestige mark the lives of the three protagonists, while telling the b-side of the recent history of Spain moving from the Galician coast to the Mediterranean. Carballal is an architect but, above all, and after her successful debut with ‘Three ways to induce a coma’, she is a writer; a writer who builds novels and screenplays lying on her bed, adopting postures so unorthodox that they are “almost a Kamasutra of writing.”
-To have a vermouth, better a novelist, a screenwriter or an architect?
-Phew! Don’t know. Can’t I choose another guild? With a firefighter, with a dog trainer, with an electrician, with someone who tells me something I don’t know. The other is very boring, all the time the same.
-The landscape is very present in your novels. Does his training as an architect influence?
-I have said many times no, but I suppose there will be something, because the part of architecture that interests me the most is related to urban studies. I don’t know if my way of writing is very architectural, but it is very spatial: I have to understand the space in which the events are taking place. For example, the village where they are from [se refiere a los protagonistas de ‘Bailaréis sobre mi tumba’] It’s invented, and I had to draw some plans to find out where the port was, where one’s house was, the other’s house, the square, if the streets went up or down… for me it’s so important that it almost determines the mood Of the characters.
-Your first novel was possible thanks to a grant from the Antonio Gala Foundation. What do you remember about him?
-He was very funny, very scathing and very intelligent; I dismantled any argument with three sentences. It is necessary to vindicate the figure of him as a patron, because there is practically no scholarship for such young people that resembles that of his foundation. That’s where Juan Gómez Bárcena, Cristina Morales, Aixa de la Cruz, Matías Candeira came from… people who are having some very good races. Pérez-Reverte has a very nice article on Antonio Gala, in which he says something like that he is the lay saint elected by direct popular suffrage. People went to see him like someone who goes to Fatima to have their foot healed, because there was something of reverence for his wisdom, for a very cultured way of expressing himself, of qualifying his thoughts.
-Didn’t you feel vertigo when writing your second novel? Respect, at least.
-Yes, I respect a lot: there are those who were in favor of publishing faster, of getting something simpler, because the second novel is usually tricky and they prefer to get it out of the way and go for the third, and that that be the ambitious one. I, from the beginning, wanted to make an ambitious novel; I don’t know if it turned out well, but that was the intention. In this sense, vertigo is, above all, trying to do something that you don’t know if you’re going to be able to do. What doesn’t scare me at all is going four years without publishing, or five, or ten. In that I am a great defender of slowness and calm, and of doing things with the times that the text itself sets for you, that you set for yourself and that the fact of having a job and having to do other things at the same time marks you. . It seems that, in this digital and fast world of networks, everything has to be now, and that if you don’t publish a bunch of books, one after the other, they’re going to forget about you. I don’t care about all that: if they forget, well, they’ll remember, and if they don’t remember, then nothing happens either. It’s more worthwhile for me to do it at my own pace and if I take time, then I take time. I spent five years writing this book; Well look, five years.
Crude Filled Animals
-When the Prestige sank you were ten years old. How do you remember it?
-I remember perfectly. I am from the interior, but being from the interior in Galicia is being a stone’s throw from the coast, that is, I have always had a lot of relationship with the sea since I was very little. When it happened with the Prestige, it’s the first time I remember that, around me, suddenly everyone was completely outraged, completely in agreement, and felt that what had happened was directly challenging them, you know? It was something personal, as if a relative of yours or something you owned had been attacked, I don’t know, like a feeling of belonging to something, and there was an absolute consensus that this could not be allowed, that it was a shame. For me it was very impressive to see the black sea, and the animals full of crude oil, and the boats completely covered, and the smell, which was a very acrid smell, very penetrating, that did not go away, that stayed with you around here [se toca la parte de atrás de la cabeza]. It was very impressive.
-In your book you talk about three shipwrecks. How many personal shipwrecks have you had?
-Any close death, something that you have tried and that has gone wrong, some bad love also, but surely few; There are people my age who have been shipwrecked more times. I tend to float in the water and in life [risas]but many shipwrecks can fit in a lifetime.
#tend #float #water #life
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