Cristina Sánchez Andrade (Santiago de Compostela, 1968) is an open secret, a cult writer with a particular universe, both in form (narrative but lyrical) and in content (rural Galician with touches of realism magic). His lyricism is sensory and synesthetic, beautiful and terrible. A painting with stinking and crude brushstrokes, but also sensual and ardent, where strange women abound, bizarre characters, sinister old women, young girls who let themselves be carried away by a sudden desire with a stranger at the gates of their own marriage . The puzzles. The atavistic character of the origin like a fierce destiny and indomitable female characters who are uncomfortable in their community. Indefinite and foggy time and space.
“Under the moon, my grandmother Idalia and I were eating onions. We loved them raw and crunchy, because eating them like that was like eating the frost of the night,” he wrote in The oxen and the roses were sleeping (2001, Siruela). Or: “Here.” I want to be far away, because I still have the gallop throbbing in my temples. I will never swing again; “My stomach is full of thistles. ” Or “the women of the city at their doorstep with their rotten breath washed with soap.”
Sánchez Andrade’s literature is generally linked to that of Álvaro Cunqueiro and Valle-Inclán, but she maintains that her great inspiration was South American writers, from Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers to Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter . Granddaughter of Galicians on her father’s side and English on her mother’s side, she admits to having been influenced as much by the legends of the Costa da Morte as by the puns of the British oral tradition of her childhood.
Probably, if there were a ranking of writers with the best titles in Spanish, she would occupy one of the first positions: The oxen and the roses were sleeping (2001, Siruela); Your king no longer walks on earth (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize 2004), Winters (Anagram, 2014); The boy who ate wool (Anagram, 2019); The nostalgia of the amphibious woman (Anagram, 2022); and now, like a refrain, lizards smell like grass, his first novel, initially published in Lengua de Trapo in 1999, and that this year he saved The Swiss Army Knife from oblivion.
What was your life like 20 years ago when you were writing? Lizards smell like grass? What were the circumstances that accompanied it?
He already had two children and was studying information sciences at Complutense University and law at UNED at the same time. At UNED you have to study a lot, you don’t go to class. I think all those years spent alone with law books gave me a resilience that helped me with literature, because when writing a novel you can have many moments of weakness. To tell you, but where does that leave me? What am I doing writing this? Who will publish it for me? Am I wasting my time? These are the kinds of questions we also ask ourselves when we study alone.
Amidst your childhood and studies, how did you find moments to write?
I have always written sometimes. If I had half an hour before going somewhere, I took advantage of it. I almost never had any continuity in front of me: preparing food, going shopping, taking your child to the dentist are constant interruptions, but I got used to writing like that. In recent years, I have participated in artist residencies which allow me to concentrate for a month. There, I realized that this is what is ideal for writing, but you can’t wait for the perfect moment otherwise you will never write.
Lizards smell like grass has a strong connection with the cruelty of traditional fairy tales. What were your favorite stories when you were a child?
I was always fascinated by witches when it came to stories. That is to say, what attracted me was the darkest part of the characters or what Jung called the shadow, which is this dark part that we all have, that we repress and that we we have such a hard time recognizing.
In Lizards The protagonists are two women in a relationship of dependence, affection and cruelty, which is repeated in Someone under the eyelids and in Winters. Why this fixation on the female double character?
I have always been interested in these love-hate relationships of two who cannot live without each other and who at the same time need to separate. I think there are many couples like this in real life, duos who live in constant emotional blackmail, whether they are siblings, married couples or people who have been very close for a long time. moment. What happens in the book is that the presence of the children causes this fusion between the old women to end up breaking down… If I’m honest, at the time when I was writing Lizards Reading of The big notebook by Agota Kristof, who reissued Asteroid Books a few years ago under the title Claus and Lucas and it is the brutal story of two children left with their grandmother. This is my starting point, even if my book subsequently becomes much more flowery.
Yes, because Agota Kristof is dry and laconic, while his style is extremely lyrical.
I really, really admire these people who write with narrative economy, but you see that I don’t know how to do it.
Do you know what you want to say when you start writing?
Hmm. Vaguely. That is, I almost always have an initial idea with which I envision something, but it often changes. I get carried away, but sooner or later you have to be aware of what you write and concentrate on it. In other words, ask yourself what the character wants and where the conflict lies. Answering these questions puts your mind in order, even if in the process things continue to emerge and surprise you. I also believe a lot in the premonitory power of writing. A bit like what happened to Clarice Lispector, who after all this obsession she had with eggs and chickens in her stories ended up dying of ovarian cancer. Sometimes the body knows things before the head does.
In this case, I assume you also believe in Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicities that there is “the simultaneity of two events related in meaning but acausally.”
In fact, synchronicity is one of my obsessions. And I’m not saying I meet one every day, but almost.
Could you give me an example?
I have a lot of meetings, especially unexpected ones, with people I think about, but it would take too long to tell. For me, synchronicities are very important material for literature, that’s why I always ask my creative writing students to write down dreams, to write down strange thoughts, to be open to external stimuli and attentive to unexpected coincidences. We always meet people who are incapable of writing anything and who don’t see it as useful, and then others who are just the opposite.
In one of the sentences in the book he says: “Sometimes hatred breaks out suddenly. Then you unintentionally hate yourself. And you hate yourself without thinking.
Hatred is a very natural feeling that sometimes, in very intimate relationships, builds up little by little and at a given moment, boom! It hatches and causes the commission of atrocious crimes. In any case, I think that hatred, even if it is natural, or very human, is also a very difficult feeling to achieve. In an exercise I also do in class, I ask my students to write down if they have ever hated it and the majority say no, that they have never felt something so extreme.
It is telling in this sentence that sometimes hatred can be as fleeting as a cannon shot. In other words, it is possible to hate one second and, the next moment, not hate.
Of course, and fortunately because if it was a feeling that lasted over time, it would make you irritated and bitter. Continuous hatred blinds you and leaves no room for anything other than hatred.
Another feeling that often arises in his literature is that of nostalgia for what has not been experienced, particularly in The amphibious woman.
Yes, this is something Jung also said, that the unlived life is a disease from which one can die. And then this feeling, this discomfort, is very human. At some point we have all asked ourselves: what would have happened if I had gone here and not there? I think we all have this unlived life in our heads too.
Do you feel a outsider of the literary world?
Before more. Because I have always written from the rural world and when I started, it was not at all fashionable. There are now many other books on this subject, and even a conference I was invited to in December, but the truth is that I don’t consider this stuff. In other words, I have always written what my body asks of me. I am unable to do otherwise.
Fighting for readers is not your thing…
No! I prefer to struggle with the text to stay happy, which is the hardest part. But hey, the other thing is also important.
Ultimately, success and recognition are something completely random.
That’s how it is. The reason why some women are very successful and recognized by others is something we never really understand. Success as writers, I mean. For example, the other day I was at the Atocha station with my little daughter and her boyfriend and they asked me: “Why is the Atocha station called Almudena Grandes?” And I said, “I have no idea.” Because before Almudena Grandes, I would have preferred her name to be Carmen Laforet, Mercè Rodoreda or Rosa Chacel, who are writers who could have won the Nobel Prize, right? I guess this kind of thing happens because it’s always been like this and it’s not worth thinking about it too much.
