Between the ironic lyricism of Álvaro Cunqueiro and the astonished respect for the way in which human beings construct the world of John Berger, Manuel Rivas could operate. The end of peasant Europe, animals that think of course, scars of historical violence, low voices and always a saying that ultimately refers to the poetic. The Galician author likes to speak of uncertain realism, perhaps because reality is vague, he does not let himself be easily taken in, he resists. “Imagination helps you see reality,” he explained a month and a half ago in an interview with elDiario.es after the departure of After the CEO (Behind the skyXerais in Galician, Alfaguara in Spanish), his most recent novel.
This Tuesday, October 29, Manuel Rivas (A Coruña, 1957) became the first Galician-speaking writer to receive the National Prize for Spanish Letters, awarded by the Ministry of Culture. The jury highlighted his “firm attachment to the language” and his “worldwide recognition” and associated his writings with “the agitation of consciences”. His books, the most translated of Galician literature, outline an extensive and multifaceted geography, in which practically all genres appear. And all with a lot of genius: poetry, short stories, novels, journalism. But Manuel Rivas not only created a profound and universal work that defends the right to kindness that Bertolt Brecht spoke of. His public personality has become an intellectual reference for environmental, social and political struggles.
He was only an early journalist, he had only published the poems of Entroido Book (1980), when he launched into Xureloan activist ship that boycotted the dumping of nuclear waste in the Atlantic Trench. Neither journalism, nor poetry, nor environmental activism will ever deviate from its trajectory. Editor of Teimamodernist weekly and pioneer of the Galician nationalist left, contributed to the founding of the magazine Lights in its two stages. The second already has 132 monthly issues. For The country He wrote opinion pieces, reports, and manifestos, often later compiled into books admired in the profession. He also collaborated with this newspaper.
His voice was that of Never Again during the massive demonstration on December 1st against the political management of the catastrophic Prestige accident. He had then already won the National Fiction Prize for the stories of What do you want from me, my love? (1996), which includes The language of the bolboretasmade into a famous film by José Luis Cuerda. But in the Galicia of Fraguism, getting involved in politics, in the case of Rivas, from the nationalist left, was not trivial. His figure has almost disappeared from the pages of the most right-wing press, despite the international dimension that his literature was gaining. That has changed, judging by the pages and texts devoted to this Tuesday’s price. Not so much political: the current president of the Xunta de Galicia, Alfonso Rueda, did not find a minute to echo on his social networks, quick to pay tribute to the tennis player Rafa Nadal at the time of his retirement, the first time that the National Society of Spanish Letters has distinguished an author in the Galician language.
Life nourishes the work. Maybe the opposite too, that’s not sure. It’s all, one way or another, in his books. “Perhaps the best tool that human beings have been endowed with historically is the libertarian condition,” he said in the aforementioned conversation with elDiario.es, and added: “I believe that every writer must be anarchist at the time he wrote. “. Without borders, without masters, Rivas Geography. Here is a possible route through it.
no swan (Sotelo Blanco, 1989)
At the heart of everything Manuel Rivas writes is poetry. In the dialogues of his stories, in his intervention articles in the press, in his manifestos for various causes, in his literature intended for the youngest readers. The first work he published, Entroido Bookthey were poems. The penultimate, O que fica forumAlso. But it was the clear and sometimes epigrammatic line of no swan which progressed through territories then little explored in Galician poetry and frequented years later. “In those days / at the tavern / everyone looked like Samuel Beckett,” the poem says. Culture. “He was strong and weak / like a Yankee marine.” / She, fragile and invincible / like a Vietcong guerrilla,” he says elsewhere. Make offline to o disconnected It includes everything he wrote in the genre between 1980 and 2003. He subsequently published The snow disappears (2009), A pot of earth (2015) and above O que fica forum.
Galicia, the Atlantic bonsai (Agulaire, 1989)
Journalism is a story (1997) was perhaps more famous outside Galicia: his assertion that there is no separation between the profession of journalism and literature captivated many juntaletras. But Galicia, the Atlantic bonsai He revealed himself not only to be a great reporter, attentive to the rhythm of prose and the smallest details of reality, but he also painted the portrait of a foreign Galician country with exotic views. Avant-garde cultural experiences, the rise and fall of the armed independence movement, smuggling just before it led to drug trafficking or the political upheavals during the establishment of autonomy after the dictatorship have focused some of the journalistic investigations contained in the volume. “It is a contradiction that when progress is made in European unity, the Berlin Wall on the border with Portugal is maintained,” he said during the presentation of the book, according to the Xosé column Hermida in The country. The years passed and Rivas continued to regularly publish volumes with his production for newspapers and magazines: Galicia, Galicia (1999), The Grouchos (2008), Against everything (2018) or Area to defend. For undisciplined hope (2020).
Your books burn badly (Xérais, 2006)
It’s your feat of strength narrative, spherical story of more than 700 pages, one of the main Galician novels of the 21st century and not only of the 21st century. Your books burn badly crosses stories and genres – the author listed them in his time: chronicle, popular literature, historical essay, thriller– recount the great wound of 1936, backwards and forwards. “The inexplicable. This will not change with time,” he writes in one of his chapters and, however, the aim of the book is to find an explanation for the abyss. The looting of the house of Casares Quiroga in La Coruña, the to walk of the Galician mayor of Santiago de Compostela Ánxel Casal or the link of the famous Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt with Spain during the dark post-war period are episodes that coincide with the lives of imaginary but real characters, or something like that is literature: the boxer Arturo da Silva, Vincent Curtis, HerculesLuís Terranova, who knew how to sing tangos. Everything revolves around an image, this one real, taken in 1936 in the quays of La Coruña: Falangists burning books. Before Your books burn badlyRivas had already approached the civil war from the point of view of the vanquished in history The language of the bolboretas (1996) or in the novel The carpenter’s pencil (1998, Antón Reixa directed its film adaptation). Then he did it in Or the last day of Newfoundland (2015).
Like low voices (Xérais, 2012)
Before the label autofiction, its apologies but also its furious criticism, established itself in the literary conversation, Rivas delivered a delicate and fascinating work in which the personal intersected with the collective and the family itself, workers who came from the rural to the popular of La Coruña. Monte Alto district, served to explain the world. Published in several episodes in the late Galician edition of The countrythe resulting book fits perfectly with its author’s interest in the other side of the official and at the same time opens a path in which, for the moment, he has not pursued. “If one wants to hear the quiet voices of history, this will be possible only by interrupting the thread of the dominant version, breaking its plot and entangling its plot,” wrote Ranahit Guha, the Marxist historian Indian who created the concept. Like low voices by Rivas, a work that has perhaps gone more unnoticed than it deserves, confirms this.
After the CEO (Xérais, 2024)
The author calls it a “radical noir novel” when in reality his literary game consists of going beyond this definition in every way and seam. Tras do Ceo is a transcription of Galicia and the work, the first piece of a writing project of more than 2,000 pages, seeks to blur the separation between the real and the imaginary. There is crime but also lyrical humor, and geography plays a central role. The ecological perspective to which Rivas, a citizen and journalist, has devoted much effort, emerges at every stage of the book. “It’s a novel in which we talk a lot about extinctions: it would be a detective novel about nature,” he explained to elDiario.es last September. A group of hunters pursue O Solitario, a legendary wild boar that looks like Moby Dick, this is how it begins After the CEOon a mountain flooded with fog. This is not Rivas’s only approach to certain twists in the tradition black -he did it in Everything is silent (2010), which deals with drug trafficking, or in the stories of Living without authorization and other stories from the West (2018) – but the most heterodox.
