When on October 15, the writer (Madrid, 36 years old) went up to collect her award as a Planeta finalist (which Paloma Sánchez-Garnica won) and, in the presence of the Kings of Spain, began to talk about the influence of , murderer, of the dark post-punk band and of a girl protagonist who uses her supernatural powers to kill a classmate, some skeptical guest with the prize stopped chewing the dessert, raised his eyebrow and said: “But, who is that guy? We have to read that!”
In effect, the countercultural references (and school sadism) did not agree with the usual lines of an award focused on the most mainstreamusually focused on police, love or historical themes to be consumed and given away en masse.
is the path of initiation of a gothic girl who grows up in Valencia, although a good part of the plot takes place in an internet chat: the writer Juan Eslava Galán, member of the jury, highlighted the modernity of this intersection between literature and technology, although it is increasingly common. For example, a good part of the monumental (Lumen), by Sara Barquinero, takes place in internet forums. Here Sandra faces with her digital friends the adventures of growing up when your mother has abandoned you and when, it seems, you can work “miracles” by feeling a powerful burning sensation that rises up your neck.
Part of the novel takes place in Vallecas, so Serrano, a journalist from EL PAÍS now on leave, stays there for the interview. He had chosen a bar called El Chascarrillo (“They run some very nice punks”) but it is closed, so he opts for another one with a solemn name, La Catedral de León; a name that deceives about its minimum dimensions. Serrano asks for a glass of water, having already had a lot of coffee, and it is served to him with ice and a lemon: luxuries of a working-class neighborhood.
“My life has been meaningless since October 15,” he says with the first drink. “I’m fine, I’ve stopped having one worry: the economic issue.” The finalist takes 200,000 euros, the winner one million. Serrano presented herself financially, although at the time of the interview she had not yet been paid: for now she is only mentally rich.
She blurts out: “I’ve gone from having a normal life to having everything blow up.” And with his previous novel, (Temas de Hoy), he had already achieved notable success by delving into the absurdities and unpleasantness of work, riding the shit jobs who theorized, between sessions of team building y afterwork. But the Planeta promotional machine has another dimension, and is now embarked on a long tour of presentations everywhere. And up to 12 interviews daily.
“How have we arrived at such a lonely time, seemingly hyperconnected, but where people are so isolated in their own homes? How have we come to allow the internet to consume us in this way?” are the questions that Serrano asked himself after publishing The discontent and that led him to his new novel. And so he decided to dive into the beginnings of the popularization of the Internet at the end of the nineties and at the beginning of this century. And, in parallel, to explore those moments that go from childhood to adulthood, what in literature is usually called coming of age o bildungsromangenre in which the first part of Fire in the throat.
The action takes place at the turn of the century, due to the author’s interest in reflecting historical events such as the one (which threatened to collapse the global computer system and which in the end did not take place) or the one, which the protagonists witness on TV. from a VIPS chain cafeteria. “But, above all, reflect that Internet of discovery that came to our homes, before YouTube or social networks, a more innocent Internet, without so much hostility, which was always the refuge of lonely people,” says Serrano. “Time was slower, now everything happens faster,” she adds, recalling how, for example, the impact of the crisis lasted for several years and influenced the adolescence of many women when it came to nightlife in Valencia. Today we might forget it in a couple of days.
The present is very unpleasant
Is it an exercise in nostalgia? “I don’t know if I’m nostalgic, but the times are, perhaps because the present is more unpleasant. But I think that all generations have felt nostalgia for the past, it is easy to feel nostalgia for childhood, when you are protected. But now we see nostalgia even for Francoism,” says the writer. What he says he is nostalgic for is the community social fabric of the neighborhoods: although his parents are from Madrid, his childhood was spent in Parque Alcosa, a working-class area belonging to Alfafar (by the way, ), which also made him want to explore in his writing those moments when children perceive inequality with surprise, the fact inexplicable to the child’s mind that some have more and others have less. “These are things that children from the Barrio de Salamanca do not experience until they go to a summer camp,” says Serrano.
There is also the nostalgia for that feeling of community, among housing blocks for working families, which he has not known in his adult stage “living for rent everywhere: Shouldn’t city centers be habitable for their inhabitants?” By the way, Serrano has known the catastrophe of the dana almost first-hand: his mother lives on that street that was full of cars piled up in one of the first and most notorious photos of the dana, an image that many judged to be the work of intelligence artificial, but it was real. She was saved because she was warned of the chaos by her neighbors, who sent her videos, and she spent the night at work. No one else had alerted him.
The nineties too, whose evolution was punctually reported by publications such as , and whose current diversity is not so defined. “Through appearance and cultural tastes you were building a personality, almost against it, like my protagonist does, in that stage in which there are also enormous changes: it is like an armor against the world,” says the author. “But there are no longer urban tribes and that makes me very sad: now everything is a pastiche. Everything passes over us, nothing stays with us.”
Anxiety processes, often materialized in the consumption of benzodiazepines (orfidal), are common in Serrano’s work. “There are many people who are verbalizing what is happening to them, asking for help, and no one pays attention to them,” says the writer, “and this is a serious problem we have in this country.” The data corroborate the dimension of the problem in terms of , a category in which Spain is world champion according to the World Health Organization.
An irreverent podcast
Serrano wonders if it is a genetic issue of what is Spanish or, rather, it is about insufficient public health, the instability and pressure of jobs, the exorbitant prices of rents, that is, that everything is very bad. . “What keeps us up at night are very specific things,” says the author. In times of , Serrano has the knowledge and the courage to leave a squatted social center in a good place in his novel, in which one of the characters finds support, among hippies, punks and anarchists, on which to fight against his alienation. vital.
Since everything is very bad, Serrano shows his most irreverent side in (Podium Podcast) that he does with the journalist from EL PAÍS as well. They started with little faith but things grew until they were awarded an Ondas award for the best conversational podcast. There they attack, fundamentally, everything they hate about late capitalism, which is no small thing, they release vitriol with a lot of humor, in a successful mix of hypercriticism and snobbery. And they show that political incorrectness is not only the heritage of the extreme right. They even made a program against “what Beatriz has done”, in relation to being a Planeta finalist. They were afraid that a large audience, attracted by the prize, would come to their unorthodox podcast and find what they did not expect.
“Could you tell with what face, now that you are part of the establishment more recalcitrant, more commercial, more mainstreamAre we going to do this podcast in which we dedicate ourselves to saying that everything is bad, that we just want to drink, get high, go to sleep because we can’t stand late capitalism? And now you are late capitalism!” Alonso snapped, laughing.
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