Year 2035. Nine strangers flee in balloons from bombings. They are the only survivors of a world war and must decide who is thrown into the sea so that the rest can arrive safely on a deserted island and start a new civilization.
It may seem catastrophic, but it is really a group dynamic to get a job as a salesman in a department store and is part of the plot of El desierto blanco (Múrcia, 1981), the work that yesterday won the Herralde de novel, endowed with 25,000 euros. This 41st edition also had a finalist, the Argentine Camila Fabbri (Buenos Aires, 1989), with La reina del baile. On November 22 both novels will go on sale.
“This is what the job search was like in 2011. I myself participated in a similar experience when I was looking for a job as a bookseller. That year I began to think about this novel, as it is when the crudity of the crisis was most marked. I live in Madrid and I remember that back then it was common for friends to spend a night at my house because they had to catch a plane the next day to migrate to other countries, where they were supposed to make a better living. This marked me and I thought how I could give brushstrokes to this idea", explained the writer and filmmaker in a press conference at the Condes hotel in Barcelona.
In the pages, less than 200, López Carrasco finds "a way to connect both with my generation and with potential emigrations that will arrive", as he speaks from an uncertain future, from where he tries to rescue the world he lived in . "During the process I also asked myself what is the place of imagination today and how difficult it is to imagine alternatives to a world that seems unchanging". He explains it from five independent, but connected stories.
The Argentinian Camila Fabbri, the other protagonist with La reina del baile, admits that she would never have thought that she would write a novel: “Until now I was a writer of short stories, the genre with which I feel most identified. In 2019 I started a story that ended up being the book it is today and with a title that responds to Abba's Dancing Queen. I always work a lot with music. There is something about the melodies that helps me write and that later ends up being a fundamental axis".
Fabbri, who presented himself at the award under the pseudonym of Sarah Connor, the heroine of Terminator that has her "fascinated", proposes a narrative "full of traumas, realities and desires". The action begins with a car accident suffered by Paulina, the narrator, of which she remembers nothing. "I don't know where my obsession with crashes comes from. My first book of stories was precisely called Los accidents, and the second, Estamos a salvo. The agent asked me if I had ever been involved in an accident and the truth is that I had not, but there is something about the accident and the collision that attracts me and makes me think and write ", he concludes.
