In May 1995, Sopa de Cabra offered three acoustic concerts at the La Planeta hall in Girona in collaboration with a young Cuban poet, Antoine López León, a fleeting appearance in the cultural world of Girona who was talked about a lot for a few months, as well He participated in poetry recitals and prepared a theatrical monologue. “He was brilliant, dynamic and powerful, he dazzled everyone and we were like curtains for his performances,” explains Gerard Quintana (Girona, 1964) to show the fascination aroused by the character, which abruptly disappeared when it was learned that the texts that he recited were not his and he had inflated his resume to leave the island. “He left the shoes that I had given him at the door and nothing more was known,” he continues, adding that the poet and theater director Antonio Sariego, one of those affected and who fulfilled some of the commitments made by López, “it was disappointing.” ”.
The story stuck so deep in Quintana's mind that he needed to explain it, but he had to write it three times to get to the novel La puresa de l'engany (Column), which goes far beyond the anecdote. “It was a relationship of fraud and no one wants to be deceived, and although we assume that we collaborated, I feel proud, he was my hero, it seems like a legitimate lie to get out of the prison on the island where he was.” He had been in Cuba a few years before, in 1992, and “what had previously seemed like a feat” then “was paradise turned into a prison” because, in the words of its protagonist, Claudi Careta, “each revolution is the seed of the next tyranny.”
In the novel, Careta is a second-rate film director who arrives with a girl on the Caribbean island and meets a series of characters, among whom is a certain Antoine, also fascinating, who also gives concerts with the Sopa and also He is an imposter who leaves his shoes at the door, but “I only keep his name and little else,” says the author. The plot becomes much more tangled and delves into the personalities of the characters and especially into Careta's darkness, “without judging him.”
He does so by pulling several threads, one of which is sexuality – “Claudi is a voyeur and she is an exhibitionist,” he says –, very important in the book and which also serves the writer and musician to denounce a failed sexual education: “ Many men of my generation discovered sex by going whoring with their father, and in some places it is still like that and contributes to the objectification of women", a fact that "is changing shape but is not resolved, since many children now They have porn as an initiation.” For Quintana, “we still learn sex and love separately, it is a big problem. The day we get them to go together the world will be better.”
In any case, the author insists that he wanted to avoid the “exemplary novel, because there are already many,” and has tried “to mold someone who is not me, to put myself inside this character who deceives himself to get ahead, and to do it without judge”, alluding to the current cancel culture.
For him, literature also has to serve to question the world, one of the reasons why it deals with “the crisis of the family, which today is in doubt. I am attracted to blowing up this social nucleus”, among others by bringing up incest, a theme that has appeared in his previous novels, as did Girona and the 1990s. “I think it will be the last book with these references, the next one will perhaps be science fiction,” he concludes. At the moment, he feels “uninhibited and liberated, more comfortable and daring,” once he has “given up on satisfying everyone, and if they throw tomatoes at me, I will eat them.”
Catalan version, here
