As a young man, at the end of the nineties, Lluís Valerio (Barcelona, 1965) went to Africa, first to Ghana, to work as a doctor, and beyond the enriching experiences he received many that he did not know how to deal with: "Many small tragedies accumulate and consume you, until I started writing stories to give them a narrative thread and an internal logic that would make them digestible, because I don't want what I've seen in Africa to take its toll on me ". After 50 years, some friends encouraged him to publish some of them: he went to the Raig Verd publishing house, rang the doorbell and without saying anything left the manuscript at the entrance, with a note and his details, which helped the publisher Laura Huerga to get in touch. He signed Stalker, a pseudonym to prevent his two worlds from colliding excessively, a name that at the same time protects the author even now that he is emerging from anonymity, this Saturday at Festival 42 in an interview with the publisher.
Thus, in 2016 he published Motorsoul, which gives its name to the series and which includes four short novels that take place in Namibia, the Congo, Senegal and Rwanda; in 2018 came out In that sky unknown stars shine, located in South Sudan and which introduces the fantastic element, and now comes La crónica diamant, which takes place in Sierra Leone. There will still be a seventh installment to put an end to the African cycle, and the author assures that he has more about other places, but he does not know if he will publish them.
Valerio started writing to "survive the abyss, the stories were consolation and distraction", but "they don't want to be a lesson", nor an attempt to explain the African continent or its idiosyncrasies. "I don't intend to claim the traditional African way of thinking", he insists, but the goal is linked to entertainment, inspired by the adventure novels he read when he was young: Robert L. Stevenson, Emilio Salgari, Jules Verne or the brothers Arkadi and Borís Strugatski, authors of the novel from which the pseudonym comes: Stalker. Picnic on the side of the road. "What I want is to move forward and be stable, and if when you leave work overwhelmed and start reading books you distract yourself, I'll pay fifty thousand times over." So much paid that the money from the copyright is allocated to charity projects in Africa, without having been advertised until now.
The diamant chronicle, says Valerio, is a scary book that aims to have an emotional impact on the reader. Set around a diamond mine in Sierra Leone, with child soldiers, girl prostitutes, a Charles Taylor-inspired "extremely rapacious" villain, and a tribe facing cultural disintegration, people who "they have experienced the collapse of a country, a fact that is not African heritage, it can happen in the most civilized country". He wants to contribute, yes, a "small contribution to the hope of reconstruction, because in the worst circumstances there are people who get away". In any case, he cannot explain everything: "There are stories of such great cruelty that I will not tell them, because to do so would be pure morbid".
It does not want to be a direct reflection of the reality he has lived, although it is learned in some of the stories, such as when he was robbed during the night with an ease that he attributes to magic: "Whoever believes that magic it does not exist, let him go to Africa and find it. Black magic has a very dark side, it scares and conveys hatred", which for him does not contradict its scientific side, on the one hand because "you can be born in Mali, be a nuclear engineer and believe in magic", but also, even if it is a pseudonym, "I am Stalker and it protects me like a suit of armor".
Why is he now anonymous? "For Raig Verd to bet on it is an unusual adventure, and it deserves to have better sales", says Valerio. Huerga explains that the departure from anonymity "will allow them to accompany the book much more".
