Her saga was baptized 'the female Harry Potter' and went around the world in 29 translations and 27 countries. With more than a million copies sold, it exceeded all expectations, becoming one of the best-selling works of youth literature in Catalan. Now, almost twenty years after the publication of El clan de la loba (Edebé, 2005), the first installment of the trilogy The war of the witches, the author Maite Carranza (Barcelona, 1958) returns to the mystical and magical environments of her chosen ones to explain where and how it all began, what was the origin of her lineage of Mediterranean witches. A prequel titled The Gray Wolf, which appears alongside an eight-episode series project that will bring The Witch War to television.
“It was a closed trilogy and I had no intention of writing more titles,” Maite Carranza said convinced. In 2007, he had delivered the last and decisive episode of a fantastic story of confrontation between the witches known as Odish, immortal and bloodthirsty, and the Omar, earthly and peaceful, and “literary ethics advised me not to continue a story with a good ending.” .
But the beginning, the origins and a character in whom “many readers showed interest” were around, like a constant reminder that not everything had been said. It was Demeter, the matriarch, Selene's mother and grandmother of the main character of the entire trilogy, Anaïd. Demeter appeared dead in the first volume of the series, The Clan of the Wolf, but had a decisive weight in the narrative of the second installment, The Ice Desert (in the third and final book, The Curse of Odi, there was barely a symbolic cameo). “She was a great reference in the three generations of women who star in this story, but I couldn't address it until I distanced myself.”
The distance has been given almost 20 years during which a legend has been woven around Deméter Tsinouli that The Gray Wolf unravels. The trilogy focused on the story of Anaíd, a shy young woman living in a small town in the Pyrenees, who after the disappearance of her eccentric mother, Selene, began her journey towards the world of magic, to which she belonged without knowing it. . Spells, conclaves, necromancy and, above all, the ancestral fight between the Omar and the Odish, center her entire world while Anaíd tries to unravel all the mysteries that surround her own past and that of the family. her.
Precisely the origins of the Tsinoulis lineage focus the prequel. Starting from the childhood of Demeter, the wolf, the novel delves into the ins and outs of this family lineage from the Peloponnese. Set the plot on the Greek islands, more specifically on the island of Amorgos, where Demeter, the oracle girl, as she begins to be known, draws the attention of the Odish Ate with her strong character and unsuspected powers. She has the power of healing and life, and helps her mother Jocasta (disowned by her family and forced into exile) in her task as a midwife. At first she is mistaken for the chosen one, the one who will destroy the Odish, but her task is much more intricate: she must unite the Omar witch clans, who live in fear, dispersed and sometimes in conflict, into a single one. struggle.
Living with an abusive, drunken, and ultimately murderous father forges much of his nature and temperament, which will give him his legendary fame. The rest will be provided by books, his desire to learn and a monastery. “I am fascinated by this character, tough as iron, that she has created for herself; a character who has suffered a lot but who has managed to get ahead in very adverse situations,” says her creator.
Although the fantasy is still present, this is perhaps the most earthly, most Mediterranean and most current book of the entire saga, despite being set in a hypothetical 50s-60s of the last century.
Misogyny runs through the entire novel, while it pays tribute to classicism and Hellenic culture, borrowing many mythological references. She “she wanted to explain the difficulty of being a woman in a very patriarchal world. In the other books she had very tiptoed over the relationship of men and her fear of the wise woman, the powerful woman or the mysterious one, who is ultimately the catalyst for all the hatred towards witches.
In The Gray Wolf, a catastrophic storm will unleash all the fears of the inhabitants of the small island of Amorgos, a fear that, transformed into hatred, ends with the lynching of Demeter's mentor, Madelia. A character inspired by the healers, healers and herbalists who have been linked to the rural world all their lives, who worked as doctors, psychologists or apothecaries and who have often been the scapegoats for countless evils. “If there are no Jews, then there are witches. They are women who are in a spiral of violence or simply denial of their rights and do not ask anyone for help, because they would not receive it either," says Carranza, who is "very surprised that young and not so young people forget the situation of women just 50 years ago. “The collective lack of memory shocks me, as if we had always had all the rights.”
Demeter manages, however, to take revenge on her abusive father. It is one of the great consolations that Carranza offers to the reader of these pages also loaded with sorority. “I thought: what torture is better? And it is certainly not death.” And he remembered a story that he wrote years ago that started from the idea of fear about a pirate whose finger was cut off every day by a ghost in revenge for a wrong. He never knew when he was going to appear, so when he only had one finger left, the pirate decided to cut it off himself because he couldn't continue suffering any longer. “That is fear, not knowing when or how or why, living with constant anxiety. And that's what abusers do. So I turned the tables,” he says.
The Gray Wolf has been a piece of cake for the Barcelona author: writing without revealing what will happen and assembling all the pieces so that they do not squeak with what was already written. In her desire to continue investigating this Mediterranean fantasy world, Carranza has found a very personal recreation of the myth of Medusa. Ate, Odish's witch and Demeter's opponent, is actually a revisitation by the author of the figure of Athena, whom she molds for her prequel from her perspective as an anthropologist. “All current fantasy stories look for classic Scandinavian myths. "I also did it myself, but on this occasion I wanted to explore some myth from classical antiquity that attracted me," says Carranza, fascinated by the intricate relationship between Athena and Medusa, "tragic and morbid," as she defines it, and with so many questions to be answered: “Why does a goddess throw a priestess who has been raped from her temple?”
And with this recreation of the myth of Medusa, Maite Carranza makes her “small contribution” from youth literature to “our Greco-Latin legacy, to balance the balance of the ‘official fantasy’ fed in excess of icy Scandinavian mythologies and misty Anglo-Saxon references.” Welcome back, Mediterranean witches. Let the war begin.
