Literature is not only a reflection of what surrounds us, but it is also an invaluable tool to know ourselves better. Matías Candeira (Madrid, 1984), who knows this perfectly, presents in A god with an empty stomach a collection of stories that delve into the depths of the human being. Selected by the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation as one of the most outstanding young authors on the national scene, he explores through his work the sinister, the comic and the fantastic of being alive.
How do you end up making a living from literature?
Thanks to the vocation. When I was a teenager I read a lot of literature. It was my refuge and I spent a lot of time alone because they made me bullying at school. In the end, by dint of reading, I ended up writing; and, by dint of writing, I ended up discovering that this was what I wanted to do. But it was not something linear, it took me years to decide that I wanted to dedicate myself to this and another many years to publish and manage to start a career.
A god with an empty stomach It is a tragicomedy. There is a very pessimistic present reality surrounded by a very humorous atmosphere.
It was a book that I started writing at a fairly low point in my mental health. I was considering many things about my personal, spiritual and work life. The tragicomedy was the smartest way out because it was how I saw the world at that time. Although I don’t think it is as pessimistic a book as a book with a certain dark pessimism, which at the same time does not hesitate to embrace tenderness, humor and lightness without losing that trace of the tragedy of life, of existing and of being.
It represents a return to the short story. Do you feel more comfortable like this, or in novels like Fever?
I feel more comfortable with stories. It is a genre that I always end up returning to because of the freedom it leaves in writing. The short story is the genre in which you can innovate, try new things and break the structure. The novel too, but in a different way. In 200 pages it is more difficult to jump into the void; However, the story has the advantage of allowing you to raise the stakes a lot in a very short space.
In the work there are gods, invisible houses, fantastic elements… How much truth is there?
All the fantastic part of the book, all that broken reality full of cracks, actually serves to make the book talk about what is specifically human: family, parenthood, money, work, sex, the couple. So it is rather a counterpoint that makes it easier for the reader to enter into the analysis of what is human. In the end it is a literary aesthetic and a tradition. I like to play halfway between the fantastic, the ridiculous and the real.
Shouldn’t we lie in literature?
In literature you must lie to tell the truth. One has to dress up even as characters who are not morally perfect. It is part of the interesting thing about writing, that one can disguise oneself and propose other moralities, other aesthetics and other realities.
Because human beings are liars by nature.
It is certainly a book whose characters lie to themselves a lot, just like we all did. They are people who try to sustain a big lie so as not to fall apart, either because of their identity, because of their family, because of their authority or because their job is falling apart. Many times we try to deceive ourselves and maintain a great charade to feel that we still have control, but in most cases we haven’t had it for a long time.
It takes the reader down one path and then everything turns in another direction. Do you enjoy teasing the characters and, consequently, the reader?
When I started writing the book I was clear that I wanted to look at the characters from the most ridiculous and the most sublime. There are times when the abstract voice of the narrator looks at them with the utmost cruelty and other times when it looks at them with the greatest degree of tenderness possible. Irony comes into play, since if one is going to destroy a character, it is better to do it from there than from cynicism. Cynicism doesn’t interest me, it’s a satisfying way of writing. I prefer to combine irony and tenderness.
Was the poetic language that predominates in the work a priority over the plot?
Each book is a discourse about language, an ideology, a proposal of thought. To find meaning in this proposal of thought, for me it is necessary that language be something radically important. But you can’t eat everything else either, because then we would only be talking about an exercise in style, so I was interested in both things. It is a book with a language that often borders on the poetic, but does not abandon the stories. You have to try to find a balance between form, substance and language.
We do not need a plot, but to feel that there is a kind of thread, no matter how minimal, to live.
Matias Candeira
— Writer
The vignette with which the book opens says: “I urgently need a plot.”
It expresses very well from which place almost all the characters in the book speak. They have lost a notion of reality that gave them meaning and find themselves in a void in which they feel they need a plot to move forward. Apart from that, the vignette is very good for the work because there are some stories that break that canonical idea of what a plot is.
Do we all need a plot?
We don’t need a plot, but to feel that there is some kind of thread, no matter how minimal, to live. But many times that is not the case. It is absurd because neither life nor our knowledge works in a linear way. What happens is that we do this exercise of constructing stories and narrating ourselves, constructing stories of our life so that it makes sense. But, in reality, seen from a more critical point of view, we have no idea where the plot of our own life lies.
A god with an empty stomach highlights the magic of everyday life. Is life less normal than it seems?
The thing is, life is quite strange if you start to look at it from a distant prism. Relationships can be very strange, everyday life can be uncomfortable. The codes in which we operate, from family, parenthood to couples, can become very strange or even very violent. The book is not about everyday life, but it looks at it as something certainly uncomfortable and, at times, even certainly twisted. That is why it is a book more about the human than about the fantastic. The fantastic is a counterpoint that helps us look more radically at the strangeness of many things.
Many times we try to deceive ourselves and maintain a great charade to feel that we still have control, but in most cases we haven’t had it for a long time.
Matias Candeira
— Writer
And why do it through these types of characters? I get the impression that everyone is fed up: from the real estate man who wants to get rid of a house to death who gets on a bus because she’s tired of her job.
Because we all live in a world in which we are very crushed by certain things: by work, by money, by capitalism, by discourses about our bodies and how we live… These characters, who may seem familiar and even tender, at the same time they can be abject or monstrous. I’m interested in the characters taking a turn and making the readers confront behavior that is not exactly what they think these characters would have.
“Love has denied them their eyes. “Just like a hot-blooded, syrupy disease.” Is love what makes us humans most defenseless?
If I truly understood love, I wouldn’t write about it. I particularly like to focus on the twists of love, on couples that are not, on those miseries that allow us to put our finger on the sore spot. Furthermore, romantic love also allows for a lot of irony, to be acidic, not cynical. Being acidic in the analysis allows us to dig and extract a lot of literary material.
The work delves a lot into masculinity. Because?
Right now, and especially in the last ten years, it has become one of the great topics to explore. All men have had to think about this, think about where we have to place ourselves. Since it is a topic that raises many questions on a personal level, it also generates a lot of material to write about, and gives good results on a narrative level.
Literature is a way to say and communicate, to place ourselves in the world and better understand who we are.
Matias Candeira
— Writer
He says in the second story: “In my experience, it is inevitable to end up communicating without opening your mouth” and “Almost instantly, everything I should say to my firstborn comes to mind and I don’t tell him because I don’t dare.” Given the lack of words, are we forced to find other ways to say what we feel?
Completely. In one way or another, we all talk about ourselves in our books, even if we disguise ourselves as something else. The characters of A god with an empty stomach They have quite a few communication problems. They are men who do not know how to communicate, who lie to each other, who deceive themselves, who remain silent. Literature is a way to say and communicate, to place ourselves in the world and better understand who we are.
Don’t you think that the characters in the play would be happier if they accepted that time is running out?
The truth is that we all accept too late that time is running out. We spend our entire lives fighting against ourselves and our scary personalities. As you get older, you realize that you have less and less time for everything. It is better to accept it than to walk through existential terror.
in the story a tantrum writes the following: “The mother is now afraid to raise her head, because she knows that if she does she will see that, the crack, the final abyss.” What are the cracks that a writer faces?
Mainly, writing when you don’t want to write or know what you want to write. May you not run out of ideas, may your cracks be interesting enough to know how to work on them despite yourself. Because ego is much less important than the ability to reinvent yourself through new forms of writing. With this book, the crack was the crisis I was going through with literature, but I put myself to the test and placed myself in places from which I had never written before. I wanted my own writing to sound new and different, to feel like it was being born from another place.
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