It was said to be the summer read, the book of the year, the new great American novel. Biography of XCatherine Lacey’s latest work ―published by Alfaguara with a translation by Núria Molines Galarza―, has received praise from a large part of literary criticism, which has also shown that its influence has not diminished as much as is claimed. We must also take into account the boost given to it by readers on social networks, where the cover photo in a summer setting rivaled in popularity that of Cookie Mueller’s book. Walking in crystal clear waters in a black painted pool (Les Trois Editeurs). Its relevance persists months after its launch, even if the journalistic claim that today’s news will concern tomorrow’s fish almost makes more sense in the publishing industry.
Lacey has been compared to Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, Enrique Vila-Matas and Nabokov, among other greats of the canon, for having invented the biography she would have liked to read and its author, the journalist CM Lucca o CM It is clear that the effort to give meaning to her novel was enormous, but also playful. The writer chose all the historical and pop culture references she wanted and arranged them to structure an uchronia that sometimes seems too close to reality: the American Civil War, the Berlin Wall, Tom Waits, Susan Sontag, the two Koreas, Emma Goldman and David Bowie are just a few.
But among all the ingredients in this crazy salad, which one inspired the novel? “The short answer is that I have always been fascinated by biographies and I wanted to write one, but the one I wanted couldn’t really be written, so I decided to channel that energy into making it a fiction,” he explains to elDiario. .es by email. “The long answer has something to do with the fact that, although I think I know why I write a novel at the time, I discovered that in the years after it was finished and published, I found other inspirations that I was. I wasn’t aware of it when I was writing it,” he explains.
All the real people who appear in the book fit the interests of the writer, who uses them to weave the story of X, a multidisciplinary artist whose past is a mystery even to his wife. “Most of the real people in the book are artists and writers I already knew a little bit about, and it was easy to include them. “One of the things I love about real biographies is that when other people from the time period appear, as a reader you get a sense of a shared reality that is insinuating itself into the story of that person’s life,” Lacey says. “I needed to set the plot in a recognizable period, one that had been dramatized in film, fiction, and music.”
In the book, Lacey imagines an America divided into two parts. The South is dominated by a terrifying theocracy in which all free thought is forbidden and the North is governed by a liberal democracy. X was born in the ultra-conservative territory, from which he escaped to lead an acceptable life according to his thoughts. This reality of the South collides with the absence of prejudice in the North, where even homophobia has disappeared. In the fact that CM leaves her husband for another woman, only the breakup of the couple matters, and not the sex of the third person. This difference between the two territories has a certain resemblance to the American reality, which the writer knows well. He now lives in Mexico, but he is originally from Tupelo, a city in the state of Mississippi where Elvis Presley was also born and raised in a family belonging to the Methodist community, so he knows the theme of religion closely.
“I knew the book had to be set in the 20th century, and I knew I didn’t want to be burdened with writing about the kind of discrimination and marginalization that a lesbian couple or a lesbian artist would have faced in the 20th century. I had to rewrite history so that being gay wasn’t really a ‘political’ issue,” he explains. The process of researching American history was exhaustive, though Lacey then pieced together the facts as she saw fit. In her book, Emma Goldman was a right-wing woman and chief of staff in the Roosevelt administration who was assassinated in 1945, the same year a great wall was built separating the north and south of the country, which was torn down in 1945. November 1996, the date of X’s death.
the whole truth
CM has started its Biography of X with the intention of discovering details about his late wife’s past and publishing them in the form of a column or article. He could thus discredit Theodore Smith, the author of A woman without a storyan unauthorized biography that was a real bestseller despite being riddled with lies. The widow was a journalist, although during her coexistence with X, her profession, like so many other facets of her personality, had been relegated to the background or not at all. In fact, one of his main occupations was the administrative tasks of his wife’s career, to which he referred all his secretaries (many wives of artists and writers would identify with this detail).
When CM started to pull the thread, he discovered that he knew even less than he thought about the deceased. Not only because performance in which she constantly changed her name and personality but because she had also been a toy. This Pandora’s box contained strategies of gaslighting, psychological violence and manipulation that were difficult to assume. “When I decided that the book would be in the form of a biography, I also wanted the biographer to be a character in the book and also a little misguided in his attempt to write,” Lacey explains.
I knew the book was going to be set in the 20th century, but I didn’t want the burden of writing about the kind of discrimination a lesbian couple would have faced in the 20th century. I had to rewrite history so that being gay wasn’t really a “political” issue.
Catherine Lacey
— Writer
The book also includes photographs – of fake characters, of X herself in her many invented personas, handwritten notes – whose sources are cited at the end of the book. They are fictitious, like the minibiography of CM as an author and that of the translator, Marion Saralegui Lanz: “Editor and translator of English and German. Her translations are distinguished by an anthology of philosophers of the Beat generation and of the theatre of Blixa Bargeld, which earned her the National Translation Prize in 1998.” It was Núria Molines Galarza, the translator of Lacey’s novel (and therefore of CM Lucca) who invented this excerpt as well as her signature, which she took from an anagram of her own name.
Translating Lacey’s book was not an easy task due to its multiple narrative layers but also the references. Most of the authors or creators he cites are real but the works attributed to them are invented, so Molines decided to play the same game. “To transmit it in the best possible way, I had to design an alternative Spanish literary polysystem, mixing real names with false ones, with more or less clear references to other translators and editors,” he explains in a text published in the ACE magazine Traductores Vasos communicadores. For experts in the sector, it will be easy – and fun – to identify the real person who corresponds to Julia Lobuna, who translates for Quinto Piso; Mario Enguix, a regular at Capitán Blues, or Laura Aguilano, from Consonnante, a micro-publishing house in Bilbao. This is of course not the only obstacle the translator has encountered, but she states in her article that: “The most difficult (and the most beautiful) part of this journey with Biography of X “We had to blindly trust the truth of the fiction so that the meta-literary game did not stop at the translation, so that the latter did not become a hindrance to the text, in the same way that we do not like to go over the style again.”
For her part, Lacey says she tends to ignore how difficult the writing process might have been once the novel is published. “Everything is hard, everything is easy. I tend to forget about it all.” “I know I wrote a lot of stuff in 2019 that got thrown in the trash,” she says. “It can be really hard to accept that 100 or more pages of prose that you worked really hard on aren’t useful at all, but when you finally delete it, it’s a really simple act. Click, delete.”
