The novel that the Orense writer Juan Tallón published in 2022, Masterpiece, It was a mirror that Spanish culture had long avoided looking at. Who says “culture” says Spain. With a clever mix of reality and fiction, Tallón shouted to the country: how could you lose a 38-ton sculpture by a very famous artist in your great museum of contemporary art? The courage to agree to look at oneself in this reflection was, to a certain extent, the success of the novel.
The appearance of a new book after Masterpiece It is a novella in itself. And one of the most anticipated publications of Spanish literature of this new course. It is titled The best in the world (Anagrama, 2024) and has the complex mission of coming out of a masterpiece. It is a book about mistakes, about attachments, about the unknown, about what is expected of us, about what the good life is, about what is really the best thing in the world and about pickle sandwiches.
He track down It is already a literary style that oscillates between the possible and the probable, the complete and the wild. In this novel, in addition, a fantastic element is introduced with the naturalness of Ray Bradbury who carries the track down towards uncharted territory.
Are you very concerned about the Juan Tallón who could have been and who is not? For example, you could have been a journalist.
I was a journalist. I was in a newsroom and I managed to get away from it, one of the great achievements of my life! No, I’m joking. But it’s obvious that there will be more Tallones. Life is also a constant change in your identity. We change our ideas, our character and our work changes. Circumstances change and circumstances change you because you have to adapt to them. There is no problem, it is inevitable.
Is this a topic that interests you now for this book or before?
I’ve always been interested in a type of story that evolves a lot between the beginning and the end. That’s the essence of a character, right? Let things change because something happens that is not aggressive, but obvious. It happened in Rewind with the explosion that changes the lives of the boys who live in the apartment and their families. Pass Masterpiece when suddenly a sculpture disappears and passes by The best in the world when the protagonist starts to realize that he is someone else and he doesn’t know who he is. Changing the world and his story, his family, his city. Your personal story is different and you have to know it. So of course, there is work there. I am interested in this change of the climax, of the brutality and to see where it leads and to see how I manage the conduct.
The topic of what is lost in elections is an interesting one.
The main character, Antonio Hitler, is clear about what he wants: the life he has always had. It doesn’t matter if it is a more infamous life than the one he currently leads. As a result, he is a respected, seemingly upright person in a comfortable family situation. It seems that his wife loves him. It could also be that he loves his wife. But having it all is not what he needs. He wants less. Life has subjected him to intense adversity and he has come out on top. He wants it, no matter what you offer him. For him, it is better to have a little than everything.
Among the attributes of this other possible Antonio Hitler, the one who could have been and who is not, there is culture, he is a cultivated man who runs an art center.
But notice that this enrichment, this cultural baggage, does not serve to make him a beautiful person. And that is really the case.
Culture doesn’t make you a better person.
It takes more than culture to be a worthy person with exemplary ethical credentials. That’s all well and good, but perhaps something more would be needed. And that’s what I wanted to say in the novel, we have an individual who dedicates himself to this, who one might be tempted to say is admirable for what he knows, for the responsibilities he has, but he is miserable. I wanted to generate a contrast. It doesn’t mean that I think that way, but this contrast serves to warn that evil follows very different paths, some do not even have the appearance of evil, until it really manifests itself and we all see it.
They made me understand that the title of the novel “Hitler” was a mistake. It took me a while to come to my senses, I admit, but they explained to me that it generated an unfulfilled expectation.
You choose the titles of the books very carefully. The best of all would have been titled Hitler but in the end it wasn’t like that, it can’t be called Hitler a novel?
They made me understand that it was a mistake. It took me a while to come to my senses, I admit, because there were several months of work during which I opened a document called Hitler on the computer. I had wanted to write a book for a long time whose title would be the name of the protagonist. I wanted it and I thought I finally had it. And he was also Hitler. But they explained to me that it was a mistake of this type because it generated an unfulfilled expectation. We all know who Hitler was and we only know one Hitler. When you read it in the title of a novel, without having to open it, you get an idea, a prejudice. And when you read the novel, it turns out that it doesn’t go there, so it’s not satisfactory. On the other hand, if you title it like that, you shed all the light on an element that for me is not the main one, although it is relevant.
And once that first title was out of the way, was it easy or difficult to find this other one?
There were some terrible alternatives. I found the worst titles in the world and what I did was take my time, not despair and think about the emblematic moments of the novel or something that someone says that is brief and can be elevated. It talks about the excessive ambition of the protagonist, to do something great that others have not done and that his father would never have let him do, because the paternal-filial conflict is an important element here.
I wanted to do something light, very crazy. And I went back to a dream I had in the early 2000s in which I came home, lived alone in my apartment and when I opened the door, I found two strangers who were my wife and my daughter. The worst thing was not having a family all of a sudden, but that I couldn’t rebel
It took him 10 years to construct his previous novel, Masterpiece. Was this one less complicated?
I started from the desire not to complicate my life and to make a transition that would free me a little from the weight of Masterpiece. And do something that does not easily admit comparison so that they do not say to me “what you have written is clearly inferior to that”. I tried to do something that would excuse even those who think that from expressing it, because it is obvious that one thing cannot be compared to another.
I wanted to do something light, very crazy. And I went back to a dream I had in the early 2000s in which I came home, lived alone in my apartment and when I opened the door I found two strangers who were my wife and daughter. The worst thing was suddenly not having a family, but not being able to rebel. In the dream I had to accept it. This thought I had was very naive, given the epistemological and ontological dimensions that arose from that episode. Until then I had not worked with fantastic elements. It was necessary to generate the emotional states that the character goes through when he begins to realize that the world has changed: shock, disbelief, total anguish in the face of loss, grief. And then manage the reconstruction, the assimilation, to try to find the lucidity from which to look for a way out. In the end, it was only complications. I feel that completing this project required intense ambition, but perhaps on a different scale than Masterpiece.
Your novels play with reality and fiction, at what point in your book do you expect the reader to give up and surrender?
I don’t realize that I have the formula, but I do realize that in working on the mixture of real and fictional events, I know that I am first subjecting the reader to the effort of wanting to separate, to discern. There is a moment when it is so overwhelming that there is no point in playing at pounding and we give up. The reader arrives at the turning point a little disoriented, because he does not know what the book is about. And if you have read anything else of mine, it is even more disconcerting because this man has never worked with that. The effort must concentrate on the conversion of the fantastic, on its return to realism. Act as if what happened did not matter. The novel must continue to move forward.
The novel captures the clash of generations. Those who are there do not understand each other with those who come the first time. In the novel, family resentment is also important. The father does not like the son and the son has no choice but to end up hating the father for the way he behaves towards him.
One of the important themes of the book seems to be the fear of being our parents. Is this a topic of interest to you as a son or father?
I think both obviously work. The novel captures the clash of generations. Those who are there don’t understand each other with those who come the first time. In the novel, family resentment is also important. The father doesn’t like the son and the son has no choice but to end up hating the father for the way he behaves towards him. I’ve never written a novel about family and I don’t think I know how to write one, but it seemed to me that this was a vision that could be interesting to develop.
And would it be a novel to reflect on mistakes? Or would that not be its main theme either?
I didn’t seek this express reflection, but it doesn’t matter that I didn’t seek it, the reflection is perhaps there. About mistakes, about the scope of mistakes, about the durability of mistakes, whether they can be traced or not, whether the mistake is eternal or not. If the mistake helps you live better or improve your life… perhaps all of that is there.
