Manuel Jabois, journalist and writer: “I love all the people I have loved”

Manuel Jabois has a columnist inside. A columnist who helps the novelist inside him, in turn. The three together in co-production have just given birth to a new novel, Mirafiori (Alfaguara), which closes a kind of trilogy in which characters, moments and a theme as universal as it is particular have intersected: love. Jabois, EL PAÍS journalist, born in Sanxenxo (Pontevedra) in 1978, welcomes us to talk about all this. and as our Book of style forces to deal with you, we will deal with you.

Ask. His book talks about love, a love overwhelmed by a lot of crossroads in which the protagonist seems determined to always choose the worst option. How do you define it?

Answer. A very beautiful thing is happening and that is that readers define the book much better than I do. What you say had not occurred to me. For me it is a revolutionary story because it is about a girl who meets a boy, they fall in love and then fall out of love. And what is happening every second that we are here seemed original enough to write about it. It’s basically about that. Afterwards, each love and each biography are full of seams, ghosts and pain. And the beautiful thing is that, despite everything, many survive and manage to give much more light than darkness at the end of the road.

Q. Do you believe in possible, eternal love, as well as impossible love?

R. Yes, yes, of course, in fact this is the result of the frustration of not having it. It is written in a somewhat humorous way, quite light, I don’t like to overload the inks. If I am telling something that may be sad and hard, I need the vehicle with which to tell it to make people feel comfortable. That’s why there is love, a lot of tenderness and at the end of each chapter and of the book there is a flame. I like to think that there is more light and that, when you look back, the first thing you see is that it wasn’t a big deal, neither the joy nor the sadness; and secondly, it is always worth it.

Q. Mention humor. Do you dare to define your literature in any way?

R. Of course with humor. It is not the axis of my literature, but it is a fairly recognizable vehicle, a somewhat sui generis, own humor, which becomes recognizable thanks to my writing in the press. There are certain twists that are present in Malaherba, a novel in which it is the parents who love their children the least. In Miss Mars They talk about the convenience of lies over the truth, which as a journalist made me very horny to write because it is the most subversive thing you can say. And in Mirafiori There is talk of the dead mourning the living: What would happen if the dead never left? There is a lot of talk about the mourning of the living, but who thinks about the dead, their sadness, who they miss and why. I think there is a pattern in those three stories, plus there are characters that cross over from one to the other.

Q. Do you consider it a trilogy?

R. Vaguely yes. Not a typical trilogy, but time and space is the same in all three. It’s compatible. There are some recurring themes in all three.

Q. Do you think love or lack of love lasts longer?

R. Probably love, because after love comes heartbreak and after this, love becomes another form. There is a period of hostility, cooling, but when this ends, love returns in another of its forms, which is not the initial infatuation. I love all the people I have loved, all the people I have fallen out of love with. Not the first year or the first six months, because there has been a breakup and it is always very hard. But then yes. One of my best friends is the mother of my son. How much I love her! And what a different way to love her like she loved her before!

Q. So heartbreak is just an episode of love?

R. I think so. Damn, a long heartbreak is terrible. The narrator of this story is the result of a trauma of separation, mourning, heartbreak and not living that instead of six months lasts five years. He ends up with his head colonized by memory. That’s why time is so important in this novel and I play a lot with it, with three time axes. If time did not advance we would end up like the protagonist, crazy or deformed.

Q. The bride sees ghosts, the dead visit her. Does she believe in that type of communication?

R. No, but I greatly respect those who say they have it. I have spoken with people who sense presences, who talk to the dead, who receive messages, and they are people who have nothing to do with the paranormal business or with the usual scam that people make taking advantage of more naive people.

Q. Why did you choose this topic?

R. I wanted to experience as closely as possible the impact that the paranormal would have on me, a totally rational person. What would happen if one day you or I saw a ghost, who would we tell? I would wait to see it again to think that I am in my right mind, and even seeing it again I would doubt. I don’t know if I would share the secret with anyone. This novel talks about two lovers who think about who they would tell something that they would tell absolutely no one. She can tell him whatever she wants because he is completely in love with her. And that secret is bigger than the two of them, than the relationship itself, it is a kind of expression of their love.

Q. The protagonist dives into the networks in search of the trace of his love, but Jabois does not use WhatsApp. Because?

R. For eliminating a communication channel that needed to be removed at a time in my life when I used it too much. I wrote too much and read too much on WhatsApp. I am a guy who constantly wastes time and procrastinates with anything. I wasted many paragraphs writing on WhatsApp. At the end of the confinement I decided to end it, I had too many groups, there were like 300 unanswered from months and years and I have SMS. I thought there would be people who, when it comes to writing you a text message, if it costs 15 cents they might think better of it.

Q. He has put a price on communication with you.

R. I have put a price on my queries (laughs).

Q. How do you write? Is insecure? Do you correct a lot?

R. Yes, I have a problem with that and with my editor because I don’t show anything at all until I consider it to be perfect and presentable. I am very bad with deliveries, it takes a long time, and I am very insecure when showing it to someone. With the novel something happens to me that happened to me when I was 19 with journalism and it is very beautiful: insecurity. I am not telling you that I am absolutely sure when I write in the newspaper, but I can know if something is right or wrong, if this report or interview can give more of itself, if I have published this column because it is my day but it is not the column of my life… With the novel I have no idea. I have the same nerves, the same insecurity and the same excitement as when I started at a newspaper and I like that a lot. I am chaotic, disorganized, undisciplined. Of course I have no idea about the ending. If I knew, it is likely that I would no longer write it, I would stop writing. I find out as I go, it amuses me to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. It has sometimes happened to me that I have found a story, with the beginning and the end, and I have told it so much that it was already written, it has already had an audience and then I don’t want to write it. I can’t remember long periods of time in which I write, I never know how I manage to finish it, it’s been so strange with these crazy schedules. There has never been a linear week where I say: I have written 10,000 words. I have planned it a lot of times, but I finished it in August on the horn and in an almost miraculous way.

Q. Does the novelist help the columnist more or the other way around?

R. The columnist helps the novelist more. He helps him and sometimes trips him. When he had written 40 pages of Malaherba I realized that it had ten columns inside. I had the inertia to make my protagonist reflect instead of walk. Continually. The columnist came out and it weighed me down a lot. I collected those columns, I put them where I had to put them, in the newspaper column and I made the protagonists walk. Then I found a tone. The novelist does not help the columnist.

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