As a young man, towards the end of the nineties, Lluís Valerio (Barcelona, 1965) went to Africa, first to Ghana, to work as a doctor, and beyond the enriching experiences he received many that he did not know how to overcome: “Many small tragedies occurred. "They accumulate and consume you, until I started writing stories to give them a narrative thread and an internal logic that would make them digestible, because I don't want what I have seen in Africa to take its toll on me." After he was 50, some friends encouraged him to publish some: he went to the Raig Verd publishing house, rang the bell and without saying anything left the manuscript at the entrance, with a note and his information, which helped the editor Laura Huerga to contact him. . He signed Stalker, a pseudonym to prevent his two worlds from colliding excessively, a name that at the same time protects the author even now that he is leaving anonymity, this Saturday at Festival 42 in an interview with his editor.
Thus, in 2016 he published Motorsoul, which gives its name to the series and which includes four short novels that take place in Namibia, Congo, Senegal and Rwanda; In 2018, En quell cel brillen estels discoeguts came out, set in South Sudan and introducing the fantastic element, and now comes La chrònica diamant, which takes place in Sierra Leone. There will still be a seventh installment to put an end to the African cycle, and the author assures that he has more about other places, but he does not know if he will publish them.
Valerio began writing to “survive the abyss, the stories were consolation and distraction,” but “they do not want to be instructive,” nor an attempt to explain the African continent or its idiosyncrasies. “I do not intend to vindicate the traditional African way of thinking,” he insists, but rather the objective is linked to entertainment, inspired by the adventure novels he read when he was young: Robert L. Stevenson, Emilio Salgari, Jules Verne or the brothers Arkadi and Boris. Strugatski, authors of the novel from which the pseudonym comes: Stalker. Extraterrestrial picnic. “What I want is to move forward and be stable, and if when you leave work overwhelmed and start reading books you get distracted, I'll pay myself fifty thousand times over.” As paid as the money from copyrights goes to solidarity projects in Africa, without having done any advertising until now.
La chrònica diamant, says Valerio, is a book of fear that aims to have an emotional impact on the reader. It sets the action around a diamond mine in Sierra Leone, with child soldiers, girl prostitutes, an evil man “of extreme rapacity” inspired by Charles Taylor and a tribe facing cultural disintegration, people who “have lived the collapse of a country, an event that is not African heritage, can happen in the most civilized country.” He wants to make, however, a “small contribution to the hope of reconstruction, because in the worst circumstances there are people who get ahead.” In any case, he cannot tell everything: “There are stories of such great cruelty that I will not tell them, because doing so would be pure morbidity.”
It does not want to be a direct reflection of the reality he has experienced, although it filters into some of the stories, such as the time he was robbed during the night with an ease that he attributes to magic: “Whoever believes that magic does not exist, who go to Africa. Black magic has a very gloomy dark side, it is scary and conveys hatred", something that for him does not contradict its scientific aspect, on the one hand because "you can be born in Mali, be a nuclear engineer and believe in magic ", but also, even though it is a pseudonym, "I am Stalker and it protects me like armor."
Why are you leaving anonymity now? “Raig Verd's bet is an unusual adventure and deserves to have better sales,” says Valerio. Huerga explains that leaving anonymity “will allow them to follow the book much more.”
Catalan version, here
