About me
I was born in a conservative Castilian city and literally abducted by its bishopric, ever since a French warrior bishop took it from the Arabs.
The sandstone of different shades is the essence of the old Castilian character of the city. In its most glorious times it had an active Jewish community, which, as is the tradition of this people, were dedicated to finance, commerce, manufacturing and art. What distanced them from their rude neighbors, busy with farming, raising sheep and bullfights at local festivals.
Except for themselves, the numerous clergy and the administrators and officials of the City Council, the vast majority were illiterate. We all received our first communion in the most feverish of possible religious environments, in which the population turned all its repressed senses into spectacular processions and a vast offer of religious-recreational shows.
We high school graduates had to attend bishopric schools and the public schools were for those from the poor neighborhoods, generally atheists from their early childhood, judging by their horrible blasphemies and their vicious and brutal acts. The city lay dormant in a sleep of hibernation for centuries, coined by religious chants and did not wake up until democracy invaded us, despite the many barriers and levees we put in place to contain it.
Due to its proximity to the capital, someone from the Paradores de España came up with the idea of converting the ruins of his castle, former headquarters of the Civil Guard, and previously temporary prison of Doña Blanca de Borbón, Pedro's wife for two days. el Cruel, turning it into a Parador de Turismo, and thanks to this initiative, plus the roast lamb and the delicious egg yolks invented by the cloistered nuns, he was able to get rid of his old clothes and begin to behave like everyone else in civilization.
I grew up in this environment and could never get rid of the solemnity of the theatrical religious rite, the Castilian austerity and the naivety of the believers. It can be said that I did not discover the magical world of the senses until the end of my adolescence, and I had my first sexual relationship with a crazy British tourist (God save the Queen), as almost all of us started, because the nationals were not around the corner. work.
My family belonged to a very lower middle class and most of its members were educated by correspondence courses, including my own mother, with a dressmaker. Naturally, my claims to pursue higher education were discarded. Like all misunderstood and lonely teenagers, I recounted my frustrated wishes and desires on the lined notebook pages, the way in which the literary vocations of most writers have been forged, and the best example is that of Carmen Laforet and her novel “ Nothing ”, converted into a Spanish manual in numerous North American universities.
My parents put me on the track of what would be my particular "higher studies": knowing the world from within and not from the classroom of a college, because they took me with them when they were forced to emigrate to the tolerant and enterprising Germany of Willy Brandt. When my parents returned I was of legal age and I decided to stay in that country, because my study plan consisted of getting to know the European nations, their people, their cultures, their customs, their habits, their literature, their history and their languages.
My luggage consisted of underwear, two or three novels of European classics, and my faithful Italian companion, an Olivetti, Pluma 22, sky blue. From Germany I crossed the Baltic Sea to settle in the “Wonderfull” Nordic city of Copenhagen, where I discovered the causes that motivated the fantastic stories of Andersen and the pornographic magazines. My second course was the post-revolutionary Paris of the 70s, still with the hangover of May 68.
There I discovered, following in their footsteps through streets and gardens, Voltaire, Racine, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Proust, Dumas, Maupassant, and an inexhaustible list of magnificent writers, poets and playwrights, who captivated the imagination of Europe from the Carpathians to the Pyrenees, because in Spain reading foreign novels, and especially French ones, was little less than a betrayal of the fatherland that chose the chains that Ferdinand VII brought from his exile, after the departure from the national territory of the “Grande Armée ”The third year of my private career it was my turn to bewildering London, where everything works wonderfully well, but in reverse.
Until you have lived six months in London it is not possible to understand the reasons for the overwhelming dominance of Anglo-Saxon culture in the world, but it can be summed up in just two words: freedom and pragmatism, protected and promoted by a discreet aristocracy who combat their boredom by riding on horseback chasing innocent foxes and playing cricket, taking advantage of the breaks to make three or four cell phone calls to his agents in the City and Wall Street, and to the manager of his vineyards in the south of France, to find out how the grape harvest. I am not a great admirer of British literature, because, as a good Castilian, I cannot help being an idealist, which is why I live in Berlin. I have only read with enthusiasm George Orwell, who cannot be said to be very British,
A few years later I finished my literary career with a "doctorate" obtained in New York, with a chapter written in Los Angeles and another in San Francisco. It was no longer necessary to travel, with what I saw and experienced in all these countries I already had a well-formed idea of who governs the world, including the publishing world. To survive without leaving the letters I had to invent some journalist credentials, and I climbed links in my career until I got the credentials of correspondent in everyone's house of the United Nations in New York. There I was able to enjoy their excellent menu for the discerning palate of diplomats for a third of what it cost in a modest Manhattan restaurant, with stunning views over the Hudson River and Brooklyn. The rest was of no interest to me.
I crossed the country twice from coast to coast, once by train from Chicago to San Francisco, where there was still some embers of the hippy scene in the cafes near Aswury Park, and once with a huge van bought from a Jew, who promised me not doing more business with Spaniards, because they lowered it to half the initial price. I did the historic Route 66, the one followed by the colonizers of the violent West and returned to the South, to descend through the Florida peninsula to Miami, passing through the same places that Ponce de León traveled, but without dangerous marshes infected by voracious alligators crocodiles and snakes.
As for its novelists, one can understand the motivation for Scott Fitzgerald to write "The Great Gatsby" and John Steinbeck, "The Grapes of Wrath", for the practice of savage capitalism in a country without history or traditions, which makes a version of the principles of the Enlightenment based on a subjective reading of the psalms of the Bible.
How not to admire Hemingway, Walt Whitman, Bukowski, Truman Capote, Henry Miller, among many other surplus writers, much more committed than their British cousins? I spent two passionate (maybe I should use the popular, but less literary, expression “mind-blowing”) years in New York. I lived this experience with a feeling found difficult to harmonize, impressions extendable throughout this great and contradictory country.
On the one hand I knew that in their universities the most enlightened and creative minds in the field of our Western culture gave master classes, but also in New York, and in all the great and rich cities, thousands of destitute survive in subhuman conditions, without any opportunity. to rehabilitate, who spend the freezing nights of New York winter huddled inside cardboard boxes on manhole covers overheated by heaters.How was it possible that the richest country in our area of developed countries, on the planet, also has the community of people in the most abject poverty, by being surrounded by the most extravagant wealth? I did not have the answer until I met a great person and dear professor of philosophy,
I had a negative assessment of pragmatism, because I considered it a form of social selfishness, but the respect that my good friend inspired me made me reflect and reach other more positive conclusions. It is true that pragmatism can fall into selfishness and do business with everything that can be profitable, but it can also be a social and creative pragmatism, a reflection of the natural world and inspiration of the new social networks and the digital world in its majority, with a sufficient dose of idealism not to fall into that nauseating swamp of contempt for the human condition, whose lack that makes them worthy of their poverty is their inability to face the demands of an increasingly complex and competitive world.
The United States has for years fallen into that quagmire of dehumanized and antisocial pragmatism, where, if not rectified, it will end up drowning. Americans have invented the perfect formula for unhappiness: inordinate ambition, fierce individualism, mutual distrust, and tolerance of social inequalities and their effects. In New York, and in this country, no one is happy, they can only aspire to be satisfied, because to be happy you have to be able to dream, and someone who is always awake cannot dream.
But in my mundane upbringing as a writer there were still some fundamental spaces unexplored: the homeland of my favorite writer Alexander Puschkin, as well as my admired Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol or Anton Chekhov.
Through the inscrutable mysteries of destiny, in New York I met an extraordinary Hungarian woman, named after a princess, and two months later we shared a small studio on 72nd Street in Manhattan.
Together with her I resided for some time in Budapest and with this exceptional guide, I visited the enigmatic Romania, with its castles and fortresses intact as left by its last inhabitants, two or three centuries ago, including that of Dracula, and Catholic Poland, where the population queues to attend Sunday mass, and a good part follows it from the street, because no one else fits in the churches.
But these countries were, culturally speaking, still far from my favorites, and two years later, thanks to incredible social media, another extraordinary woman, music teacher and delicate mandolin soloist, got me a one-week visa in Belarus and I immediately flew to Minsk, of which hardly a building was left standing after the Second World War.
That pleasant trip was only an approximation to the stage of my idols. One summer I plucked up my courage and, thanks to the relative success of a history book, I was able to make my dream come true and embarked on the adventure of traveling by car to the historic city of Kiev. Among the many landscapes that these writers evoke, I believe that there are still the “mujics”, who every day take their cow to graze on the meadows near their villages.
On the way back, I passed through my longed-for city of Berlin, where I ended up settling down. I have lived in the same apartment for 14 years, and I have not traveled fifty kilometers in all this time, where. I was finally able to start my literary career in earnest, writing 15 works, including novels, short stories, short stories, poetry, philosophy and essays.
About my work of fiction
It would not be ethical for me to say that my work is great, but it would not be correct for me to leave it to the reader's opinion, because each reader has a different literary sensibility, and their opinions would be subjective. Nobody better than the author himself to value his own work; its flaws as well as its successes, but of course I will not make my opinion public.
At least I can say that, not only have I written novels, but I have lived them, because all the fundamental characters in my novels have been inspired by extraordinary people that I have been lucky enough to know personally, such as "Tania", from "The strange "based on an extraordinary woman I met in Belarus. Or Noemi, a young Moldovan that I met here in Berlin.
I can also say that I have taken great care with the narrative technique and the cleanliness and conciseness of the language, eliminating the superfluous and unnecessary, a correct syntax and the veracity and naturalness of the dialogues.
Finally, to say that I have never written thinking about what readers want to read, but rather that my wish is that readers want to read what I write. The only novel in which I did not respect this principle, Roland de Saracusa; a story that takes place in the 19th century, I abandoned it when I had already written a third part.
About my work of philosophy
Philosophy has a history and multiple schools. I believe that although many are obsolete, they must be known and understood, the work of teachers, but I am not an academic, but a free thinker with no other limitation than my natural reasoning capacity, common to all humans, as Descarte assures in his prologue of the Method. Not only have I not read philosophers who do not contribute anything new or original, but I have ignored them in order not to be influenced by their ideas and systems to develop my own without influence from any of them. Of course, at first I made many mistakes and false deductions, but after long and laborious reviews, I have so polished my own systems that I have finally connected with the philosophers I had scorned. In other words,
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