“It is a book that I am tired of recommending, it marked me.” This is how Máximo Huerta talks about his favorite novel that he has decided to share on the podcast The Secret Books of La Vanguardia. This is In the Café of Lost Youth, by the French Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano, a work that “indicates what the literature of this author, an archaeologist of memory, is like.” The story contains “all its ingredients”, from the incessant search for memory, absence or identity to the French walker, that flaneur of which Huerta feels heir.
“I consider myself a flaneur,” he confesses. “I have a feeling of joy when I walk and I let myself go. The true flaneur lets himself go completely and does not follow the same routes, and that is what I do.” Some uncertain routes that he travels especially through Paris but also through Madrid, casually noticing any detail that crosses his gaze at that moment.
In In the Café of Lost Youth, Modiano focuses on a young woman, Louki, who embodies the prototype of the femme fatale. “He has a hedonistic outlook, he does not hide his sexual or literary fetishes,” says Huerta. "Surely Louki was not as femme fatale nor was she as powerful as she tells her, but she hides a halo of mystery and elevates her."
The writer, who has just published the novel Paris woke up late (Planeta), also shares with Modiano his fixation on Paris. “It inspires me, it's almost an obsession that is cured by writing,” he admits. And his latest story focuses on Paris in the 1920s, which also features a femme fatale, in his case, the historical Kiki de Montparnasse.
Currently, Huerta is dedicated to caring for his sick mother. “That's literary,” he says. In fact, as a result of “the look at that mother who is fading”, he published Adiós, niño in 2022, which won the Fernando Lara award.
In his native Buñol, he continues to collect memories and details of her while enjoying the success of the Doña Leo bookstore that opened a year ago “as a thank you to the town where I was born and where there was never a bookstore,” he explains after acknowledging that “Having a bookstore is for romantics.” And that is precisely what he seeks with her, to share and spread her love for books.
