"Manuel, I want to be with you, I'm not going to let you go through this alone," read an actress, first serious and then embarrassed. The interpreter knows by heart that phrase that the secretary Mei says on page 70 of All this to you I will give, the novel with which Dolores Redondo won the Planeta prize in 2016. She repeats it over and over again from the A Ponte studio, located a few minutes from the Santiago de Compostela cathedral."Later we will choose the most appropriate one, but here we seek perfection”, encourages the filmmaker Paula Cons, who has been entrusted with the task of directing the audio dramatization of this book.
While this is happening, the producer Daniel Higueras arrives, who has just captured the sound of the rain with his microphones. “Essential to set the scene for a novel that takes place in Galicia”. He also has in mind to capture the noise of the chestnuts falling in the next few days. A peculiar sound that Dolores herself only admits to having heard in the forests of the Ribeira Sacra and in the Baztán valley.
In the next room, Anna Soler-Pont, founder of Pontas Agency and Dolores Redondo's literary agent, traces with her finger the script that the actress and director are reading and that she herself has written. “One day Marcel Ventura called me, formerly the editorial director of Planeta and who is now part of the Audible team [a company that belongs to Amazon], to ask if he thought that Dolores would be interested in giving up the rights to make an audiodrama. I didn't quite know what he was referring to. He explained to me that it had nothing to do with the audiobook, that it was something else entirely. Narrated in several voices and with sounds and even its own soundtrack. The idea captivated me and I applied to do the script.”
The project, which recalls, in modern terms, the radio soap operas that were so popular, was a major challenge for several reasons. “The first of all is that All this I will give you is one of the most beloved novels by readers and I knew that there were many red lines that could not be crossed. The second, the absence of the narrator, which is why it is essential to provide all kinds of details to the scenes. The word and the silences are fundamental here. There is no vision. It is like going to the cinema and not seeing the screen”, says Soler-Pont.
Dolores Redondo always had blind faith in Anna's work. They have been working together for eleven years, since the writer sent the manuscript of The Invisible Guardian, the first book of the Baztán trilogy. “He is, together with my husband, the person who knows all my secrets: what I am working on, the projects I have for the future. But also how I feel emotionally. Sometimes I think that she knows more about me than I do myself, ”Dolores herself admits during a later talk at the Vía Romana winery, which appears in the novel under the name of La Heroica.
It is not the first time that the writer gives up the rights to adapt any of her novels. Throughout her career, readers have seen her works make the leap to film, audiobooks, or comics. Never before to audio dramatization. “I am usually open to everything. I feel honored that there are professionals from other fields who among all the huge market decide that they want to work with my work in particular. And more in such a little explored format. But of course I like to be around while it is being worked on, ”she insists.
It is for this reason that the author has made time in her busy schedule of presentations of Waiting for the Deluge (Destiny), her latest book, and has traveled with part of the Audible team to see first-hand how her work is transformed into a sound fiction. A visit that has led him to revisit some of the iconic settings of the novel, such as Chantada, Belesar or Lalín. "Places that my sister discovered and that are ideal for setting a novel," she says.
Redondo does not believe that sound fiction is incompatible with reading the book afterwards. “I like the idea that the plot can reach other people who might not have approached my work. I believe that all the ways of consuming literature are good and equally valid and also represent a new opportunity to contribute new perspectives. In 2016, for example, there was not so much talk about the new masculinities. Today, on the other hand, this is a very current debate, which is why in this project the braid between the three leading men, all of them very different, has been greatly reinforced. There is nothing like an idea whose time has come," concludes the author.
