“It is timeless, from now and forever, it resists everything, even the cultural cancellation policy, it remains in force and speaks of nothing and everything”. This is how Luz Gabás, winner of the last Planeta prize, defines the play Waiting for Godot by the Irishman Samuel Beckett, which she has decided to share on the podcast Los libros secretos de La Vanguardia. The work, which she marked for him when she was a student at the university, "is an existentialist text and I have always had an existentialist point," she reveals.
The work par excellence of the theater of the absurd, a classic of the 20th century, continues to be the subject of different interpretations. The big question is who is this Godot that the two protagonists are waiting for so much. “It can be what each one wants or thinks it is, and this is the great merit of the work”, affirms the novelist. "It is, for example, what one expects from life," she continues.
For Gabás, his Godot perhaps came the day he decided to change his life, leave the city, university education and settle in the Benasque valley to dedicate himself fully to writing. "At 40 I took a risk," he confesses. In 2012 he made his debut with Palmeras en la nieve, which was immediately well received. Then came Return to Your Skin (2014), Like Fire on Ice (2017) and The Heartbeat of the Earth (2019). With Lejos de Luisiana, a historical novel about the Spanish colonial past, he reached the Planet last October.
"Deep down I wanted to be an actress," she confesses before explaining that she was part of two professional theater companies. "I didn't have enough to eat and I was practical, I stayed at the University as a teacher." Even so, she considers that her theatrical background helped her to know how to put herself in the shoes of the characters, something that she applies in the creation of the characters in her novels.
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