Luis Mateo Díez is one of those writers who draws with miniaturist precision a perfectly detailed world that does not actually exist. Or, rather, that it only exists in his Leonese fabulist's head. Everyone believed that he had gone to live in Madrid to work as a municipal official, but in reality he opened a mythical territory in his skull that resembles León seen in the sleeplessness of the remembered and the imagined, and he stayed to live in he. That world is very similar to the gray Spain of the 1950s of his childhood, with those sleepy populations that form the landscape of the territories of his Celama trilogy, with that “equality of days that leads people to be happy with the most insubstantial.”
Those editorial offices of local newspapers where the clocks stop due to pure drowsiness, as happens in The Provincial Stations, where Marcos Parra wants to rebel against the impossible. That crazy brotherhood from his most ironic and award-winning novel, The Fountain of Age, where a group of neighbors from one of those inland cities where nothing ever happens sets out to search for the fountain of eternal youth, not so much to be immortal as to give some meaning to their lives. And that desire to unravel reality with extravagant characters, with real names but that sound bizarre to today's reader (Aphrodisio, Inicio, Gabilo, Eloína...). And that feisty fatalism so Cervantes: his characters have the word defeat tattooed on their foreheads, but they do what they can so that their lives are not vulgar. If you are only going to read one of his novels, I would tell you to read The Castaway File but all books are doors to his world. In his literature there is a brilliance of language – the most polished Spanish that you can read today – and a haze of drowsiness. He warns us at the beginning of The Spirit of the Páramo: “What I could tell is almost the same as what I could remember from a dream.” I think that Cervantes, who sponsors this award even though no one has asked his permission, would have liked it to have been given to Luis Mateo Díez, a specialist in castaways from the dustiest dryland.
