What happens when you screw up your life? 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 Biografia 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. According to the writer, her new title is about "talking a little about how catastrophe is born and how you deal with it".
A couple who travel by car and pick up 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 in a house 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 repeated. But there is a sense of uncertainty and abyss that its protagonists face, with a point of unreality that is amplified by often open endings. "It is a book that raises more questions than answers. Should we worry about where things are going? It's just that the endings don't interest me, as I write in one of the stories", explains Gurt.
The catastrophe from which they emerge, he says, is the divorce, added to the public exposure after starting to publish books and articles, but also having a mother with alzheimer's, and the consequences of the decisions taken and the ones life takes for you "Divorce is a very traumatic thing, even if both want to divorce, and it is a great source of anxiety, because suddenly the identity is shaken. I was a married person who translated, and suddenly I have a different life, to have a job that I don't have". And it is that, despite the fact that she has been well recognized as a translator, "I had a feeling of excessive responsibility and I have left it".
In the book, he shares much of his fears: "There is the fear of not knowing where I'm going, with which you have to reconcile, maybe it's not that important. Add to that the fear of failing in your partner, in life, in what you want, and the fear of Alzheimer's, with a mother who has it you think you already have one foot there. And the fear of the relationship with the children, of the responsibility it is, and how you try to look at yourself from the outside, you have an ascendant over your children that you cannot calibrate. You never know what consequences the things you decide will have. Everything has a price and you don't know it, you have to buy a decision without knowing what it will cost you", he explains. But, as he writes in one of the stories, "we all have a pyromaniac inside", a phrase that links to the consequence, that "sometimes destroying is a way of creating".
For her, "you can't separate literature and life, they go together and in the end writing is talking to myself", she says. For this reason, "I think that what I write produces a certain feeling 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 comes to seduce you and leaves you, and I like that. It happens that you have to fight against what you already know how to do and improve the things you don't, and the novel requires more effort from me because it is difficult for me to master the tempo, the rhythm...", he assures, before explaining who has been working on a novel for some time, but also on a children's book.
