Miqui Otero (Barcelona, 1980) has always been related to music. You just have to search for his name on Google so that, sooner rather than later, an article ends up defining him as a music lover. It is difficult to get rid of that label when a large part of his novels are full of melodies, including the latest one, Orquesta (Alfaguara), which has just arrived in bookstores and which precisely has music as one of the main narrators.
“I don't have any special romance. I just like it,” confesses the author in a bar in Eixample, where he goes many afternoons to disconnect from his writing confinement. It is outside the home where he finds inspiration and where his instinct as a plot hunter awakens. “Now, for example, I'm trying to find out what that little group back there is talking about.” He can't hear the whispers from the next table, but that doesn't bother him. Deep down, he knows that “it's more fun to imagine.”
To write his latest book, he has let his genius fly over Barcelona and travel a little further, to Galicia, to a town that has many similarities with his parents' town, Valadouro, on the Cantabrian coast of Lugo, but that "is in "actually a mixture of many." The author has been visiting this place for as long as he can remember and his visits have multiplied in recent years due to the death of several family members. “They are rare circumstances that make you think and force you to revisit the past, which always encourages you to write, for better and for worse.”
He says that his “long-time” beach is Las Catedrales, but “now that it has become famous, you have to ask for a ticket. I have spent many years there, so I did not intend for this to be the typical rural novel of the Barcelonan with horn-rimmed glasses.” Everything happens in Valdeplata, “an invented place” where a great summer festival is held where all the neighbors get together. There, an orchestra plays all night and children, young and old, dance to the same songs, keeping different secrets.
“Intermingling generations and their respective problems was something that interested me a lot, and one of the places where I could make them coincide without causing surprise was precisely at a town festival, since popular music allowed me to put them under the same cover of songs. Necessary if music is what tells things, because it only narrates what it sees.”
Although no one will take Barcelona away from Otero – in fact he assures that, “it is more than likely that my next novel will be set here again” – it feels good for him to “air out from time to time. When you stay in one place for a long time you feel like going out and exploring other territories. It gave me a certain respect that they celebrated Rayos or especially Simón as the great novels of Barcelona. A label that leaves you speechless but that is so big that it can cover up other possible themes that pulsate and are latent in the plot.” Therefore, the idea this time was to “do the reverse route. Both Simón, Rayos and Hilo musical started in Galicia and came to my city, and now I am retracing the route.” And he does it by moving away from the I and putting the focus for the first time on a we.
Despite his efforts to move from time to time to other territories, he recognizes that “the return to the town is not always as bucolic as it seems” and that “it is the traps of nostalgia that lead us to that thought, based not on the return in itself, but in the necessity of return. The places are not waiting frozen for us to return, and when you return, they are performing another play. Therefore, it is not strange that we feel out of place, although it is not always easy to accept and cope with it.”
The passage of time and how to accept it is something that is very present in the author's imagination. “Not only in mine, but that of an entire generation and, surely, those to come. We go very fast and we can't quite catch the present since it is hyper-speed and overwhelms us. The physical and natural reaction is to think of an Edenic place, where the rhythm thickens and where life could be wonderful collecting things from the field. We idealize those places and, when they come into contact with reality, they fade away.”
That idea of returning to places of peace was fully developed by Otero during the pandemic. “There I really began to feel part of us in an almost cartoonish way. My house was full of toys and, even so, I started making my own cardboard toys with my son. I made dragons out of egg cups while the next door neighbor was making bread. One day, while he was painting with tempera, I said to myself: 'What the hell are we doing? Two more weeks of confinement and I would have made the Sagrada Familia in cardboard, word. A dystopia was installed in our reality. For once. history in capital letters crept into our intimacy and a denial of the future was consolidated because everything looked very dark. I then needed to return to the town,” he concludes.
