What happens when your life sinks? Good and bad things happen, because destroying is also a way of creating, and from the catastrophe there can be a reconstruction that is better than before.” This is the idea behind Biografía del foc (Proa / Libros del Asteroide), the new book of stories by Carlota Gurt (Barcelona, 1976), which she presents tomorrow at Setmana, during which she also participates in other events. For the writer, her new title tries to “talk a little about how the catastrophe is born and how you take it.”
A couple traveling by car and getting on a hitchhiker, a divorced father who rebuilds his relationship with his daughter, a girl who decides to live in a tank or a man who barricades himself at home, or a story within a story... The fourteen stories in the book are part of the same universe with elements that are found, whether birds or vehicles, and some characters that are resumed. But the feeling of uncertainty and abyss that its protagonists face floats, with a point of unreality that is amplified by often open endings. “It is a book that raises more questions than answers. Do we have to worry about where things are going? It's just that endings don't interest me, as I write in one of the stories," explains Gurt.
The catastrophe from which they come, he says, is divorce, added to public exposure after starting to publish books and articles, but also having a mother with Alzheimer's, and the consequences of the decisions made and those that life makes for you. “Divorce is a very traumatic thing, even if both parties want to divorce, and it is a great source of anguish, because suddenly the identity is shaken. "I was a married person who translated, and suddenly I started to have a different life, to have a job that I don't have." And the fact is that, although as a translator she has been very recognized, she “had a feeling of excessive responsibility and I have left it.”
In the book he reveals a good part of his fears: “There is the fear of not knowing where I am going, with which we have to reconcile, perhaps it is not so important. Added to this is the fear of failing in your relationship, in life, in what you want, and the fear of Alzheimer's, with a mother who suffers from it you think you already have half a foot there. And the fear of the relationship with your children, of the responsibility it entails, and how you try to look at yourself from the outside, has an influence on your children that you cannot gauge. You never know what consequences the things he decides will have. Everything has a price and you don't know it, you have to make a decision without knowing what it will cost you,” he explains. But, as he writes in one of the stories, “we all have an arsonist inside,” a phrase that links to the consequence: “Sometimes destroying is a way of creating.”
For her, “literature and life cannot be separated, they go together and in the end writing is talking to myself.” For this reason, “I believe that what I write produces a certain sensation of truth, that it is not an artifice, but that there is an underlying emotion that is real, but the story is not.”
After the previous book, she returns to the short genre, where she feels more comfortable: “Writing long is difficult for me and my natural genre is the short story. A novel comes to convince you, while a story seduces you and abandons you, and I like that. "You have to fight against what we already know how to do and improve the things we don't, and the novel requires more effort because it is difficult for me to master the tempo, the rhythm...", he says, before explaining that he has been working on a novel, but also in a children's book.
Catalan version, here
