Living in a house that will have a demolition date. Very on the horizon, but it will have it. Is it possible that this house ends up becoming a home? Can its tenants bring out all their feelings there with complete peace of mind knowing that any day the bulldozers could arrive to knock down their four walls? Under this premise, Jesús Carrasco (Olivenza, 1972) wrote In Praise of the Hands (Seix Barral), a novel with which this Monday he won the Biblioteca Breve 2024 award and which will hit bookstores on March 6.
“I am very grateful to receive this award, I am in glory,” he confessed after receiving the award for this story that, he acknowledges, “parts from a personal experience. I saw a metaphor for life, which is how we give ourselves to it, even though it ends." And he has expressed it through "a singular point of view," which are the hands. "In my house, to support six children, my parents have always used their hands and, among many other things, they bound books. And I do it too, writing."
The plot begins in 2010, with a narrator who encounters an unexpected situation. Ignacio, a real estate developer and friend of the family, explains that he had acquired a plot of land and a house in a town on the Andalusian coast with the idea of demolishing it and building apartments. But the real estate crisis and the bankruptcy of the American bank Lehman Brothers leave his plan up in the air. It will come true, but he doesn't know exactly when, so he encourages everyone to stop by, to prevent it from being empty and ending up being occupied. They don't have to make this his first home if they don't want to. It is enough to visit it on a weekend or during the holidays.
Less than a year after the proposal was put on the table, the narrator, his wife Anaïs, who was then pregnant with their second daughter, and little Marie go to this town in emptied Spain to see the house and meet with a desolate panorama: a front yard overtaken by weeds, broken flagstones and an army of ants that welcomed them. That initial strangeness had nothing to do with the special relationship that the family would establish with the house.
And the thing is that hands are there for something. To build, repair, sand, shore up, weld... And also to cook, comb, dress or care for. The novel is, above all, a praise to the hands, to which the writer recognizes that he could dedicate a dozen books, since they are the part of the body that allows us to operate on the world. The editorial director and secretary of the jury, Elena Ramírez, announced when announcing the name of the winner that “when we told him by phone, we caught him painting the bathroom wall. Carrasco practices the thing with his hands both in fiction and in reality.”
The jury has chosen the work for naturalness. Rosario Villajos, winner of the last edition of the award, assures that “the novel arrives at an appropriate time, since we are full of everything. It teaches us the good in the small and is in itself a gratitude to the present time, even knowing that everything is perishable.”
