There are books that mark to such an extent that they can be decisive in a person's life. This is precisely what happened to the Zaragoza writer Ignacio Martínez de Pisón. When he was a teenager, he accidentally fell into his hands a volume "with which I discovered what literature was and he made me a writer," as he explains in the podcast Los libros secretos de La Vanguardia.
Although in reality, it is more like three books, the well-known Carlist trilogy by Ramón María del Valle-Inclán made up of Los cruzados de la Causa (1908), The glow of the bonfire (1909) and Gyrfalcons of yesteryear (1909). "My great-great-grandfather was a Carlist general who even participated in some of the important battles", he begins by recounting it. For this reason, "the maternal family with which I grew up after my father's death, at the age of nine, had a small Carlist library," he continues.
"When I was a boy of about 12, 13 or 14 years old, still a reader of Enid Blyton and this type of book, I took a book from this library called the Carlist Trilogy, by Valle-Inclán. I started reading it and it was like something brilliant That was different from what I had read until then. I was not just telling a story, but I was making art," he recalls.
The writer of hits like Secondary roads, made into a movie; El tiempo de las mujeres or El día de mañana then came to a conclusion: "If Valle-Inclán, with those words, which are everyday words, is capable of creating beauty, why not me?"
Thus, the winner of the 2015 National Narrative Award for the novel La buena reputación concludes that "the vocation of being a writer comes to me from that foolish afternoon that I picked up that book as I could have picked up another". In fact, Valle-Inclán is not the member of the generation of '98 with whom he feels most identified. "The one who corresponds to me by affinity is Baroja," he confesses.
Martínez de Pisón, who has recently published Castillos de fuego, focused on post-war Madrid, also speaks in the podcast about the role of the last Spanish wars in literature, the policy of cancellation and future projects.
