Pol Guasch, writer: “What would be the point of loving each other if life lasted forever? None at all”

The poet Pol Guasch publishes a book. The first since, in 2021, the novel he had written as an experiment won the Llibres de Anagrama prize and was first published in Catalan, Napalm to the heart, then in Spanish, Napalm in the heart (Anagrama) and, more recently, into English, French, German and Italian. All countries have received it in a similar way: overwhelmingly praiseworthy reviews where the author is the new phenomenon in Spanish literature, one of the most sensitive and promising authors of the European generation Z.

Now, Guasch (Tarragona, 26 years old; pronounced guasc as in ayahuasca) returns with In the hands paradise burns, his second novel (and third book after the collection of poems) The fire part): as in Napalm in the heart, The story takes place in a rural setting on the brink of the apocalypse and focuses on reflecting, amidst the catastrophe, the most valuable thing in life, in this case, friendship. In the book, translated into Spanish by Carlos Mayor, Guasch turns the relationship between a city boy and a country girl into a cathedral-like display of observations about attachments, support and hope in the human soul.

Ask. The part of fire, Napalm in the heart, In the hands paradise burns. What’s wrong with the fire?

Answer. I guess I am obsessed with the idea of ​​destruction. I have come to experience it as something good. Perhaps what comes before destruction, what happens before the fire, more than the fire, that moment so sudden, so exciting, that is present in so many things we experience. Love, for example.

P. Here are several answers.

R. If I have written three works dealing with fire, how am I going to be able to answer it here?

P. In an important passage of the novel, a character becomes depressed at a party thinking about his imminent, premature death. Then he sees his friend, Rita, and returns to the party. “You come back because they are waiting for you.”

R. Things make sense because they end. What would be the point of loving each other if life lasted forever? What would be the point of having good friends if life lasted forever? I don’t think so. What happens when you get in touch with the limit, when you touch it? The image of fire is very physical. It burns, it smolders, you can’t touch it. It puts you before the limit, the limit is marking your experience and what you do when you see it will mark it too.

P. Beauty in the apocalypse is a constant in his work.

R. I have always experienced happiness as something that is sad and sadness as something that is happy. I have not stopped being sad in the happiest moments of my life, nor have I stopped feeling some happiness in the saddest moments. That permeates my work.

P. But he doesn’t make depressing literature.

R. People are surprised when they meet me. They say they didn’t expect me to be the way I am, that they find a darkness in my novels that they don’t find in my conversation, and they discover that there is actually a lot of hope in my novels too. The only thing that isn’t obvious is hope. You have to look for it, you have to find it, but it’s there.

P. You don’t spend much time in the media or in talks either.

R. I find the exhibition quite overwhelming because it takes me away from what interests me, which is literature. What’s more, it is totally against what literature offers me, which is precisely to enter into spaces of complexity.

“Expositions overwhelm me quite a bit because they take me away from what interests me, which is literature.”

P. Don’t you feel famous?

R. I don’t think I am. [Arquea las cejas] They love me a lot at home, which is no small thing.

P. Are you attracted to fame?

R. I didn’t even want to be a writer.

P. What happened?

R. When my father died, I was 15 years old. I had written little things before, my childhood stories, one paragraph long. When my father died, I started writing poems. I saw that it was a way of communicating, expressing myself, finding shelter, and also navigating silences. [Baja la mirada] I came to writing in a very obvious way, looking for solace. They are horrible poems, I have to say.

P. If you still thought they were good 10 years later…

R. Can you imagine? Before that arrival there was another one: when I wrote a poem to my mother, I don’t know, when I was 6, 7 years old. I was a child. heavy. Whiny, disobedient, contrary for the sake of it, that sport. My mother was angry with me, poor thing. After trying to ask for forgiveness in a thousand different ways and not getting it, I remember writing her a poem that she still has hanging in her room. She forgave me thanks to the poem. That is very powerful. Suddenly I had a power that no one had taught me at home.

P. Wasn’t it a cultural house?

R. At home, they weren’t readers, nobody wrote. But there was a very strong sensitivity that came through other channels. My father was a lawyer by trade, so he spoke very well. My mother was a guitar teacher, so she’s a musician and she had an extreme sensitivity that we silently inherited. Every Friday we went to the public library. She recorded stories for us on cassettes and played them to us before we went to sleep.

P. And its surroundings were not a capital either.

R. I grew up in a place where I felt that reality was too small, that I didn’t have the possibilities I needed to exist. It wasn’t a small town, it was a medium-sized city like Tarragona. And I went to a public high school with 1,400 students, there was everything there: there was no lack of diversity. But there was something that was suffocating me. I suppose it has to do with this desire I have to transcend my origins, and so do my characters. Fleeing from where I come from in order to later return calmer, more peaceful.

P. To come back later?

R. It is impossible not to think about going back. I often wonder what will happen to Tarragona the day that all the people I loved there are no longer there, my grandparents and my mother. Will I want to go back to that place? This question haunts me. One day I will return to Tarragona, I will walk through the streets and I will say to myself: “Oh, I grew up here and I was happy.” And that’s it, and then I will go back to my home, away, and so peaceful. Thinking about that now tears me apart with pain.

P. Are talent and youth a bad combination?

R. It has its difficult aspects. You enter a world designed by and for adults, who read you as if you were still in the making. There is a huge amount of paternalism, a very condescending view that sees a young writer as someone who is in formation, who is experimenting, who is playing at being something he is not. And obviously I am experimenting, but not because I am young but because I write and for me writing is experimentation. If I write 20 years from now I hope to maintain the way I relate to writing now. Many people, from my publishing house, readers, other writers, speak to me as an equal. But this does not mean tha
t there are not many people who look at me with condescension. For being young, for being Catalan, for being queer.

P. Maybe if it were vindictive and autobiographical queer, they would throw fewer things at him.

R. More than showing two gays who are alone, I am interested in asking myself why these two gays are alone, because it also helps me ask myself why many gays today are alone.

More than showing two gays who are alone, I am interested in asking myself why these two gays are alone, because it also helps me ask myself why many gays today are alone.

P. Do you get asked that a lot?

R. Man, loneliness queer? Don’t you think that this is something we all wonder about, even if we don’t say it or accept it?

P. Are you alone?

R. No. But I don’t know how I’ll feel in 30 years, in 40 years.

P. Do you have that fear?

R. I think it’s inevitable, it’s part of our way of being. Having that fear is almost constitutive of the queer experience.

P. Is that why you wrote a book about friendship?

R. I feel like my friends have saved me. That doesn’t mean that there are friends who have abandoned me, who have made me angry, who have been bad friends at times. Saying that friendship saves you is not romanticizing friendship.

P. Do we romanticize it?

R. We think that friendship is a free, disinterested, emotional bond. And no. Friendship can be that, but it is also a negotiation. It is born out of necessity and has something of calculation. I wanted to show all that. For me, the protagonist of this novel is neither Liton nor Rita, it is friendship, it is the thing that they look at together and build together. And from which they separate together. And which, therefore, they miss together.