Interviewing Kiko Amat (Sant Boi de Llobregat, 1971) is like driving a kayak in a Pyrenean rapid in the middle of the thaw at the end of June. The risk is not crashing into some pebble of enormous proportions, or eating the rotten trunk of a tree defeated by snow; The real danger is to get carried away by one of the many side exits that his powerful and torrential speech has and end the interview in a blind spot from which it is difficult to resume it and ask the next question.
Thus, avoiding the canyon of ideas that flow from the mouth of this Catalan novelist and journalist, chronicler of the peripheral and working-class environment of the south of Barcelona, specifically of the Baix Llobregat region, where his new novel is also set, Dick or the sadness of sex (Anagrama, 2025), we manage to navigate the main channel of the conversation and thus let Amat tell us what he has been looking for with this new installment, a hilarious – and very well constructed but also deeply disturbing – story of initiation into sex and life.
What motivates you to write a teen novel in the era of analog porn that was the 80s?
In reality, the thing arose more by chance, because I was writing a book in the wake of the blows that the previous books were giving in my head. In that context I began to write a proletarian crime novel, somewhat in the same geography and in an environment similar to that of Rematch [su anterior novela, publicada en 2021]. In that novel there was an apparition, a kind of hairless hitman whose tear ducts were constantly crying. Furthermore, he had a mother who passed away from him and showed some attempt at bestiality.
And that’s where I started thinking about Franki [el protagonista] and his sexual awakening. I also thought that writing that story was much more pleasant than writing the book I was preparing. Additionally, it had many more possibilities for depth, entertainment, fun, and facing new topics and situations that it had not touched on until now. Then I changed: I canceled the first project and started another one that was tentatively called Semen.
Semen, very explicit…
Then I changed the title to Dick or the sadness of sex so that people would not confuse it with a family planning manual [risas]. Although, in fact, I have found out that there is a children’s comic called Semen explained to childrenwhich is something that I couldn’t even imagine in my wildest dreams anyone would have written.
The novel takes place in Sant Boi in the mid-80s of the last century. What have you taken from your biographical landscape to cement it?
My sentimental landscape is that of Baix Llobregat, that is very clear in this novel. Although almost all my novels are set there in one way or another, sometimes in a semi-veiled way, sometimes in a super graphic and obvious way, as is the case, using real street names and the name of my town, Sant Boi. Because, for example, in Rockbreaker (Anagrama, 2009) was called “El Pueblo”, but everyone recognized it.
My childhood and my adolescence are the parts that eminently nourish everything I do, both the traumatic part and the exotic, emotional or sentimental part.
Kiko Amat
I don’t remember who said that whoever managed to survive childhood and adolescence already had material for an entire literary career. I believe so. And in this sense, for me, my childhood and my adolescence are the parts that eminently nourish everything I do, both the traumatic part and the exotic, emotional or sentimental part. Everything is born a little from childhood and I imagine that Dick It is impregnated with my experiences. It was not premeditated, but when I began to set the plot in Sant Boi and created the new character who is Franki Prats, inevitably all my references jumped to the novel, because it also takes place in 1985, when I was the age of the teenager who is Franki.
It is a novel of sentimental education, but it also talks about abandonment and abuse…
The novel is clearly a novel of formation, but with a clearly anti-heroic motivation, rather tragicomic and fleeing from all kinds of sentimentalism or regrets, because that does not suit my style at all, it is something that I deeply detest. Franki is an antihero who goes through different trials and adventures to enter adulthood, and it is clear that the things that happen to him are a clear reflection of the shitty sexual situation he lives in, demanded by the expectations of delusional manhood that are imposed on him. imposed on a 14-year-old boy at the time.
Theirs is a trauma derived from the complete misinformation that existed then; Franki is completely ignorant about everything and no one has explained to him anything about what happens when he wakes up to sex, handjobs and desire. And all this also happens in Franki’s family world, which is an abusive and sordid, terrible world. And on top of that, all this sexual misery and this ignorance makes him feel inferior or, if you want, less of a man, because there exists, even today, a kind of grotesque and inaccessible caricature of what it means to be a heterosexual man.
The book is written in a humorous way, but it has a terrible background, as you yourself acknowledge. Was that key of humor essential so that the story did not become too harsh a story?
Definitely. I use humor a lot in my novels because it helps digest them. Franki’s story without humor is heartbreaking, a punch in the stomach. But humor also redeems it in a certain way. I come from a town with a lot of historical immigration, a lot of working class with serious difficulties; It is the environment where I grew up, where I made friends from childhood and adolescence, and in those environments where misfortune was frequent, the way to exorcise it was to tell others what had happened to you with humor, laughing at yourself, although The misfortune was terrible. The fact is that when you told it, it started to hurt less. From there I think I have taken this humor that I think is different from other things you can read.
For us men who were teenagers in the 80s, Franki’s character is quite recognizable. Do you think women can recognize themselves equally?
Some of the people who have read the drafts told me that the character seemed like a moron, with that fiery spirit that leads him to do the most grotesque things, but I think that is not the case. On the contrary, I think it reflects all the concerns of a repressed and ignorant sexuality that is exploiting. Okay, maybe the character is a lightning rod that brings together all the crazy things that can go through the head of a teenager who awakens to sex, but I’m sure that it crossed our minds at the time, I won’t say all of them, but yes. some of them.
As for women, I think they can identify; They also awaken to sex in adolescence and although their problem was not so much having access to boys, they did feel repression, even more than men, and they often ran the risk of being used or getting pregnant without sometimes even knowing how, because the prevailing misinformation was brutal.
Franki sublimates his impetus in a alter ego literary man who is a fornicating hero, Dick Loveman, a bit like a Don Quixote of sexual fantasies…
Of course, Dick Loveman, Franki’s invention, projects everything he would like to be, that is sexualized hypermasculinity at its maximum power. Dick embodies the masculinity and hypersexuality of porn movie actors and, therefore, he does everything he dreams of doing, which are delirious things. He believes that this is what a real man should do, truly absurd and excessive feats.
Dick embodies the masculinity and hypersexuality of porn film actors and. Therefore he does everything he dreams of doing, which are delusional things.
Kiko Amat
Isn’t that a bit what happens to kids today who access porn?
Yes, because the myth of the sexual supermale survives in that unfiltered access to porn. And this despite the fact that today there is much more training and information about sex. But they believe that story just like the kids of the 80s did with the VHS from the video store, the Lib or the Private [revistas de desnudos y consultorio sexual]. In the book I include advertisements that were advertised in them and that are totally hilarious: contacts or product sales. But if they were there it was because people believed them, they paid attention to them.
In one interview with elDiario.es in 2021 He charged against what you call “the progressive middle-class left.” Is Franki’s father a new example of that group?
It certainly is. The father is the classic man of letters with falsely progressive whims who, in reality, only seeks to achieve a certain power; situate oneself in a certain framework of cultural or political power. He is a pompous, vain and completely talentless being, a palanganero of a culture that pretends to be serious and solemn, but in reality is stale and boring. He is even worse than his brother Jesús, Franki’s uncle, who at the end of the day is the way he is because of mental health problems. I think he is the worst character of all.
I think I am the person who has put together the most synonyms for penis in a single novel in the history of literature.
Kiko Amat
Finally, there is a stylistic aspect that draws attention and is a certain supposedly archaic and hyperbolic language for the parts of the text that refer to sexual issues.
I think I am the person who has put together the most synonyms for penis in a single novel in the history of literature. [risas]…and when I’ve run out, I’ve had to use words that don’t really have that meaning. Seriously speaking, the use of the language you refer to attempts a certain distance from the story, as if it were narrated from the Golden Age, for example, with the intention, again, of distancing ourselves from Franki’s vicissitudes and accentuating the humor. The last thing I would like with Dick It’s that people took it, as I told you, to be a sentimental or pitiful novel.
#Kiko #Amat #writer #grotesque #caricature #means #heterosexual #man
