Aura Reyes has entered prison. She has left her daughters in the care of Mari Paz, a friend of hers, a former legionary. Aura fears for the girls because she has a very powerful enemy. But she trusts that after serving her sentence everything will be resolved. It had not even crossed her mind that they would hold her and take her to a secret prison where her life is in danger every second. Nor had it occurred to her that in a desperate escape she would add new, equally powerful members to her list of enemies.
Reyes is the protagonist of Everything Returns (Ediciones B), the latest novel by Juan Gómez-Jurado, a fast-paced thriller that can be read in one sitting without giving the reader any respite.
How do you keep the reader intrigued for 600 pages?
Don't know. It's a question I ask myself and I'm afraid to answer it because when I write I drink from an unknown well and sometimes I fear it will dry up. The only thing I'm trying to do is generate the same sensations that I had when I discovered the pleasure of reading.
How was that discovery?
I would go to bed and my parents would turn off the light. I turned on a flashlight and read Emilio Salgari, Alexandre Dumas or Mark Twain and I told myself 'this is incredible, it's wonderful, it's the best thing that has happened to me in my life.'
I have suffered for Aura, for her daughters and for her friends. I get the feeling that she makes her characters suffer a lot...
All happy families are alike, but the unhappy ones are each in their own way and that explains everything there is to know about suffering in literature.
Do your characters recover from blows the way Quixote and Sancho or the Simpsons did, as in episodic novels?
So far we were going very well. But I don't agree with that. Absolutely. What I do is precisely the opposite, because the easy thing when the characters don't work well is for the clouds and the letters to appear again on the sky and the Springfield statue. On the other hand, when my characters suffer, the scars stay. Aura, who already appeared in Todo Arde (Ediciones B), has changed a lot, as has her way of seeing the world.
In your novels there are some very rich characters who tend to be the villains, what's behind that?
People are more interesting when they have something to lose. Scarlet O'Hara loses the plantation and has to get her hands dirty. Princess Leia becomes important when she is kidnapped. And evil millionaires are more exciting than poor villains because they have much more capacity to do harm. I've never tried to make a social commentary.
Maybe the bad girl from Everything Comes Back would have been happier being poor...
I had not thought of it. But I hear it and I think so. Because the book is written half with the reader. Now we are lucky to be able to receive feedback from readers and that completes the writing circle.
Its protagonists are usually women. And very strong. Because?
A very angry reader once told me that I had put three women starring in a novel. Which were too many. In Everything Comes Back we have five female protagonists and three female antagonists. So I'm looking forward to knowing that reader's opinion on the matter.
Aura Reyes had already appeared in other novels, are we facing a spin-off?
My novels are interconnected. Each one of them tells a story. But together they tell a different story. This had not happened before in the thriller. I have done something new that, as far as I know, no one has ever done before. You can read one of my books and have fun. You don't need to read another one from the same universe ever again, but if you do you will realize that the meaning of the first one has changed.
