"The stories always arise from obsessions and from a series of circumstances that come together," Susana Fortes assures La Vanguardia. The author thus defines the reason why she began to write her latest novel, Nothing to lose (Planet), which has just hit the bookstores. In this case, her fixation comes from the stories that occurred in the area of the mouth of the Miño that her grandmother told her when she was a child.
“He always told the little ones that this was an area as beautiful as it was dangerous, where many drowned people and also crimes and where children disappeared. He didn't do it to scare us, but for pure prevention and to warn us of danger, but I grew up with those stories and they stayed with me. Two summers ago, I decided to take a trip there with my family and everything came back to life,” he recounts.
With this “Galician par excellence” scenario, the author acknowledges that “images began to assail me. A forest track, a lantern among the pines… All my novels start from images and then little by little they weave a text and this time has not been an exception”, she admits. Thus was born the novel whose protagonist is Blanca Suances, a woman who seeks to meet the ghosts of her past.
In 1979, Blanca disappeared for a few hours with the brothers Nicolás and Hugo in As Covas, a fictional town in Baixo Miño. The then girl is found by the agents, but her friends are never heard from again until twenty-five years later, when some bone remains are found in an archaeological site. It is then that Blanca and the journalist Lois Lobo begin a complex search that will force the protagonist to go through the deceitful paths of her memory.
“We tend to erase traumas from our memory. Close pending chapters as a defense mechanism. Memory becomes a mixture of memories and imagination. A kind of fog with punctual bursts of lucidity that allow us to unravel what is really happening. It seemed to me that dealing with this issue gave the book a psychological intrigue that could give a lot of play”, acknowledges the author.
In this sense, he reflects on childhood, “our mythical territory par excellence. Sometimes we all tend to that still photo of happy childhood. And there we are all, with bikes and chocolate bread going for a swim. We tend to an epic of that period that, indeed, is wonderful, but we forget that childhood also has weak flanks. The fears, the terrors, the monsters… and this is something I wanted to explore. My intention was to reflect the world of children in a complex way without falling into that infantilization”.
Regarding the novel, the author anticipates that there is a project for a series. “I am surprised as well as happy. It is the first time that one of my books has become a series here in Spain. I had another very exciting project in the past with Waiting for Robert Capa, but it was frustrated. Screenwriter Michael Mann was interested. But in Hollywood it is already known, or at the moment all the planets align or, as the slightest stumble arises, things do not go ahead. But the mini series that I mentioned will be a reality, since a very powerful Spanish production company has bought the rights and is now in the process of dividing the story into chapters. Things are coming out little by little, ”she concludes.
