When he finished his distinguished work in a fashion magazine, Xavi Puig stayed in the editorial office and continued honing his genius and ingenuity. Tricks with words, crazy ideas, what artists have always done: turn reality upside down in what would be the germ of that viral madness called El Mundo Today. Now he has written a devastating novel, The Best Person (Planet of Books) with shocking and amazing humor, to say the least.
Was that cheating on his bosses?
My sin was using the company computer for some specific emails that had nothing to do with Marie Claire, where I started in 2007 and El Mundo Today (EMT) was born in 2009. When I had little left in the magazine we began to explore, I in Madrid and my partner in Barcelona. He was born remotely in a kind of pre-pandemic, pre-zoom airlift. We both came from Philosophy and before we had had a humorous philosophical magazine, but the new project wanted to be more commercial. We wanted to make a little living doing something we liked. The truth is that EMT took off right away because it was the time of Facebook, when the viral concept was created and suddenly all our headlines went viral. Two years later we were doing an anthology.
Los bullfighters' first album was titled Thirty Years of Success.
(Laughs) It was a bit like that, yes, we created the website, content to test. But I did my job at the magazine, for the record! It happens to me that I do something also looking at the horizon. I adapt very well to the situations they offer me. I wasn't particularly interested in fashion, nor was I a journalist, but I adapted, I became passionate about it and I managed to do very well. And when it happens to me, I'm afraid of being very good and I get a nervous feeling that I'll start to get bored. There was a good atmosphere, but I thought… “I'm too well.” I left the magazine and went to a semi-internship position in the Muchachada Nui program. I was a big fan of La hora chanante and it had to do with humor and writing. I worked in the afternoons, earning 400 euros and a chance to not get bored, and at Marie Claire they paid me very well. I'm not saying it was a suicidal move, but it was working on TV, not in a bank.
But your project took off... Does the novel arise from that fear of being bored?
Yes, and it's happened to me before. And I have the dream job with my friend and at my house and with people congratulating you because they are crazy about what you write. In 2014 a friend told me 'Would you like to write the script for José Mota's New Year's Eve program on TVE?' and I said 'okay'.
Did he say it without thinking?
Yes, indeed. I met very good scriptwriters, some of whom collaborated with us later. But I must admit that I saw myself in an industrial estate in Pozuelo de Alarcón one midnight under fluorescent lights and said 'what am I doing here?'. And I went back home.
And the novel?
It didn't come so much from a crisis, but from realizing that I had been writing satire for 14 years, four paragraphs a day in 15 minutes. When I finished it, after time, I began to understand why I had written it, because I was very sad, because I had anguish, because I am an extremely controlling, very analytical person. I started writing it because the control I had over my emotions began to break. When I finished it, I was in shit, destroyed.
He's asking me all the questions.
I just have a lot of film (laughs). I became restless, I wanted to get away from everything.
Have you managed to free yourself from those anxieties or ghosts that passed through you like a deranged Voldemort through Harry Potter? Sorry for the un-boomer image.
(Laughs) That's it, let's go with that. I have practiced humor since I was a child and I have been understanding that everything he was doing had a meaning. At school they didn't mistreat me or anything, but I just looked at the clock hand. That it was five. I wasn't interested in anything, I was lost. Humor connected me with my colleagues without being the funny one. I was quiet all the time, but I had those outlets and I saw that humor was a way to gain confidence. The shield of my childhood became my job. The novel broke my mask of having everything under control. It's been a blast, the ghosts have manifested and I'm learning to live with them.
Is part of you in the protagonist, Antonio? Is he very disguised?
What we shared was sadness and a defensive, self-induced isolation. They leave him alone, he has a broken family. I have always been well surrounded and I have had pillars. But we are very fragile. He is an exaggerated version of some of my frailties.
The book leaves an aftertaste…
The magic of the novel is that, the epidermal sensation of a loser who has one good thing: he perseveres, he does not stop trying, he does not fall into cynicism, where one takes refuge when one is afraid of others.
The idea of labels is to reduce everything to nothing, but how do you define the humor of the novel?
You could say that Larry David (co-creator of Seinfeld) is using caricatured humor, but I wanted to look for humor that awakens tenderness.
“The chocolate palm machine is my best friend in the office.” What a nice image of the world of work. How real.
Yes, of course, whoever has to defend themselves in the basics, has to face a context that is aggressive for everyone. Hence the novel begins with a team building activity so that one has more friends than the vending machine. They say: 'Let's get them together to form a team.' And what happens in paintball happens. He leaves there with a nickname...
The Volao.
No one approaches him to ask if he is okay. It is a very difficult world for those who do not have resources.
Do you write to not alienate yourself or to not align yourself?
I write so that they love me, just like everyone else who goes on stage. I realized very soon that she had a sense of humor and was my vending machine, my friend. Yes, that they love me without falling into the idea that everyone loves you.
Natalya is very present in the novel. And she is the great absentee.
Natalya doesn't exist. And it's good to be clear. It seems like an epistolary genre, but in reality it is a monologue, a guy talking to the wall. The story of a communicative failure only saved by the plot itself. Is the ending happy? I think he is as happy as Antonio Camuñas can be, because he achieves a connection, because he has nothing else. A grip point for a better life.
Are you happy with the result?
Yes. When I started writing it I didn't think it would be published. And when I finished it, I thought: it can be taught, and with that I was happy. And I have had many conversations with people who have seen that I show a side that they did not know about me. This novel has triggered a series of changes in me.
Disconnect?
On the weekend I don't consume comedy. It's usually drama. Sometimes I wonder if I like comedy or if I do it because I'm good at it. And it's enough to get to work to know that yes, I like it, but I can't turn my life into that.
What does it mean?
Comedy can become a drama if it serves to defend oneself and not go to the root of things. It has a very clear subversive power, but sometimes it's no use making a joke.
It seems that having studied Philosophy has served him well.
There are many connections with humor, they activate the same brain circuits. With Kike, my partner, we fell in love in a class with García Calvo because we were shocked by what he said and the rest of the students had a veneration…. He made some crosses and some stripes, what if reality, what if the other... he was wearing three shirts one on top of the other, it was hilarious... he was very Jim Carrey, but what was alarming was the lack of criticism from the rest... That's when we connected. You had to see those speeches from humor. It's not that Philosophy was useful to me, it's that there I learned how to face the world.
What's next?
With the good that this novel has done for me, I have to continue writing. Before this one I did one that I didn't teach and then I did two that I didn't finish because I couldn't teach them to myself. Now I have fallen in love with an idea, without pressure to publish...
How long did it take you to write it?
Two months.
How little…
But when I finished it I couldn't even get close to it. Doing the things you're ashamed of is part of the job. That 'everything I touch turns to gold' thing is total nonsense.
And his ego? Is it like a birthday balloon or like the Montgolfier brothers?
(Laughs) I have it, but I control it. And you have to know that growing is not always good, just doing the work you like.
What profession would you have on your old identity cards?
That question is very problematic… I am ashamed of everything I could say. I can't stand being called a comedian, at most a comedian. I'm not an actor.
Don't get bored.
Yes, I get angry, because they call me a comedian all the time and no, no. I have no problem with comedy. Writer is a word that writers have written off by putting a capital E on it, because it is a job. In the end it is a job, if we are panolis, that is not glamorous. The word writer is more glamorous than the job itself.
