‘Sur’ is the title of the most recent novel by the Spanish writer Antonio Soler, the object of multiple awards in Spain and translated into French by the Rivages publishing house. Guest of Escala en Paris, the author describes a south that “seems to be idyllic, but that also has a less friendly face”, he also talks about his polyphonic company in which he tells of a heated society capable of censoring and leading us to self-censorship.
Layover in Paris: ‘Sur’ is the most recent in a long list of novels he has written, this one is considered the most refined, the most complete. Why did you choose the title of ‘South’?
Antonio Soler: “It’s funny, I worked with several titles, as almost always happens, and finally it seemed to me something that defined what I wanted to do; a look at a south that seems to be idyllic, but that also has a less friendly face. I think that the literature that truly investigates the human being is not always complacent and sometimes the reader discovers himself. It seemed to me that that title could enclose all this a little”
EEP: Sur is a dense novel, a novel that includes several novels, a scenario that describes several intersecting lives and situations that extend over more than 600 pages, in which 207 characters take shape, and all of this takes place during one day . Was your purpose with so many and so diverse characters to reflect the various shades of society?
ACE: “Exactly, I wanted to give voice, as other writers have done, to an entire city, take a look at how a city moves with all that polyphony of voices that they contain. A polyphony that is reflected in different languages, depending on the social status of the novel’s heroes. Language often defines the character itself and defines us. We hear someone speak and we already know a lot from the way they express themselves. But also, in that polyphonic ambition, I wanted to cover different literary genres that are expressed, and also, as I say, the different levels that are expressed within a society, from the highest social level to the most humble, but also through advertising. , on the radio, on television, on WhatsApps, for all that magma of languages that exists in a city today”.
EEP: A constant accompanies the reading of ‘Sur’: an oppressive, permanent, dry heat… So much so that at one point one of the characters, Guillermo, says, “so hot that it would be enough to light a match and the air would all burn”. Further on one reads “it is a heat that dislocates thermometers”. Is it an image or a message?
ACE: “More than a political message, I would say it is a natural state that occurs at certain times and that distorts reality in some way. Reading a French classic like Albert Camus, in ‘The Foreigner’, if we remember there is a moment when the one that the protagonist of the novel shoots at an Arab that he finds on the beach, the heat is absolutely decisive at that moment.There is an exaggerated luminosity that upsets the character, and it has been shown that high temperatures upset and dislocate human behavior. What I wanted was to delve a little into the skin of the novel’s protagonists, it seemed to me that this dislocation, this disorder that heat produces could tell us a little more about who they really are, and who we are, that’s what the novel is about. It opens with an extensive quote from Octavio Paz, where, finally, what he urges us to do is find out who the others are, and I believe that when we know more about others, we know much more about ourselves.
EEP: From its first pages, ‘Sur’ plants the decorum of the novel for us. The image in a neighborhood where from a distance it is difficult to distinguish the figure of a man who is lying down, lying on the ground, asleep, dead? Nobody dares to go see what is happening to him, but his face, his body are invaded of ants
ACE: “This is a true story that a doctor friend told me. One day of extreme heat there was a call to the emergency hospital and they said that there was a man in a vacant lot practically dying, completely covered in ants, a terrible image, but even more terrible when this doctor friend tells me that a colleague who worked with her tells her ‘I think he’s going to be my husband’. That really happened. Then they receive him and that man dies a few hours later. What had really happened? that man led a double life, he was homosexual, but before society he had decided to hide his tendency, he marries, but he is suffering under that mask that has been imposed on him and that society has imposed on him. And the image seemed very clear to me, the ants as a social animal were devouring him because what really happened is that society ate this man, it ended with him, with his life, because of his intransigence, because of unhealthy precautions, and because of the censorship that often leads us to censor ourselves. These things happen.”
EEP: There is a part of the novel in which he describes the moment in which Dionisio –who is the character invaded by the ants- and what would be his wife, Dr. Galán, meet. That happens in 1975, a year that you describe as “oppressive and liberating.” Is it a reference to the year of the death of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and the end of Francoism?
ACE: “Yes, exactly, you have said it very well. For the Spaniards, 1975 is a key year in history, like 1936, the start of the civil war. And the year 1975 was still under the dictatorship, still in September that year there were death sentences that were carried out, but at the same time there was a halo of hope at the death of the dictator, of Franco. It seemed to me that a good definition could be an oppressive, painful year, but also full of hope ”
EEP: The reading of his new opus is accompanied by a constant, the obsession of his characters with sex, experienced, imagined… repressed.
ACE: “At some point when I began to write ‘Sur’, I remembered a Spanish picaresque novel called ‘El Diablo Cojuelo’, in which at the beginning of the story, the devil takes the protagonist to the sky of Madrid and makes him raise the roofs to to know what is happening inside, to really know who these people are, and in a certain way that is what I have tried to do, lift the cape from the head and look at what is inside: what is not openly manifested, what is inside , the desire that is sometimes satisfied, other times not, but that is hovering many times in a perverse way, sometimes in a very naive way, very innocent like some characters in the novel. And it seemed unavoidable to me because, as we said, if we talk about truth of the most recondite of the human being sexuality is there latent”.
EEP: A novel written in such detail is a greater challenge, a patient, long-term work. How long did it take you to conceive her? New ideas to write another novel?
ACE: “It is difficult to answer how long it takes to write a novel because we could measure the time it takes to put the first word to the final period, but really one is working on the creation of novels from before, one is uniting and connecting ideas, memories, sensations, things that one has heard, and from all that flow the idea is formed, the body –first, in my case mentally- before putting the first word, but to answer succinctly, from the moment I put the first word until the final point of the corrections, approximately a year. And yes, if there is another novel in the head, of course”.
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