Consuelo López-Zuriaga. Interview with the Nadal Prize finalist

Photography: Consuelo López-Zuriaga. Facebook profile.

Consuelo Lopez-Zuriaga was finalist of the last Nadal Award with the novel Maybe in fall, which he published at the end of April. In this interview He tells us about her and her recent arrival in the publishing world. I really appreciate your kindness and time.

Consuelo López-Zuriaga. Interview

  • ACTUALIDAD LITERATURA: Maybe in fall It is your first novel and has been a finalist for the last Nadal Prize. What do you tell us about it and where did the idea come from?

CONSUELO LOPEZ-ZURIAGA: Perhaps in autumn talks about the fragility of the apparent normality of our lives. How everyday life can change, in an instant, when coming into contact with mortality. The story tries to capture that moment when the normal ceases to exist. 

As for the plot, it tells how the life of Claudia figueroa, a brilliant lawyer dedicated to the defense of human rights, takes a radical turn when Mauricio, your partner, you are diagnosed with a advanced cancer. From that moment on, the protagonist must make important decisions that will affect what, until then, had been her life and her ambitions. Without a map or compass to face the devastation of the disease and the misunderstanding of death, she will begin a path in which she will debate between the fear of the loss of the man she loves, the break with her previous life and the realization that she will never it will be the same again.

Ultimately, Maybe in fall narrates a Transformation proccess whose final destination is to overcome the fear of ceasing to be what we have always been.

The idea of ​​the novel has a biographical and other literary origin. As for the first, it comes from my own experience with cancer and the impact that my partner's diagnosis had on our lives. Regarding the second, the plot of this novel and its narrative voice emerged from the words of Joan didionWhen en The Year of Magical Thinking, he stated: «You sit down to dinner and the life you used to know is over ». Reading Didion gave me the tone of the novel. She is an author with a formidable ability to narrate facts tremendously dramatic of their life with almost surgical precision, away from victimhood and any sentimentality. I wanted to place Claudia's narrative voice in that register, where the emotion does not derail or become excessive, but it reaches the reader emphatically.

  • AL: Do you remember the first book you read? And the first story you wrote?

CLZ: The first books I remember reading are by Enid blyton. The Three Wise Men always came loaded with a copy of The five, The Seven Secrets or from that boarding school - pre Harry Potter but also very British - which was Malory Towers. The tinkles, with cloth spine, from the collection of my brother and the adventures of Asterix and Obelix They also accompanied me in many snacks of bread with chocolate.

I was an introverted girl and a reader and, perhaps for this reason, the writing soon sprouted in the form of psmall narrations and stories. Stories that he was storing in notebooks, accompanied by illustrations and collages, like remnants of a life that was beginning to take off.

  • AL: A head writer? You can choose more than one and from all eras. 

CLZ: It is impossible to reduce it to just one, there are many writers who have inspired me and with whom I have discovered that "great expedition to the truth" that is reading. I like XNUMXth century novelists and their monumental ability to narrate as Flaubert, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Galdós or Clarín. But I am also passionate about the corrosive look that Americans cast on reality, Hemingway, Dospassos, Scott Fitzgerald, Cheever or Richard Yates.

Nor can I forget those authors who experience with the novel and, at the same time, question my own narrative project as Faulkner, Cortázar, Kafka or Juan Rulfo. And in more recent times, I have been rendered in awe of the narrative intelligence of Lucy Berlin and his ability to transform bits of squalor into lucid stories. 

  • AL: What character in a book would you have liked to meet and create? 

CLZ: Gregory samsa, the protagonist of MetamorphosisHe seems to me an extraordinary character who presents multiple layers and who reflects like none other the loneliness and universal pain, as well as contempt for the other, the different, the stranger. 

As well Emma bovary It is a monumental creation that alludes to the ravages of romantic love and emotional toxicity, becoming an unquestionable archetype. 

  • AL: Any special habits or habits when it comes to writing or reading? 

CLZ: I have few rituals. I prefer not to condition myself. I just need sIlencio, a coffee and a clear table. To write I have to listen to myself, it is important to listen to the characters and visualize the scenes so that the story starts to rise on the laptop screen.

  • AL: And your preferred place and time to do it? 

CLZ: I write in silence. I need to isolate myself to write so, since I live in the country, I have found the perfect space. Changing the streets of Madrid for the forest has increased my ability to concentrate. Also, when I get stuck, I call the bitches and go for a hike in the bush. However, I don't think you have to wait for "a room of your own", a colonial desk or a study with a sea view. When the story lives inside you, move forward with urgency, without stopping and no matter where you are. I write best in the early morning when the noise of the day has not yet entered my head and history rides without interruption.

I like it read lying on the couch or do it in bed, although I also read on the bus, in the Metro, on trains and planes, in waiting rooms and anywhere, when the story catches me and I devour each page of the book until I reach the end. Among the thousand things that I carry in my bag there is usually a book.

  • AL: Are there other genres that you like? 

CLZ: I also read test, history of art and I like the historical novel. Outside of the purely literary realm, I love botany and cookbooks. 

  • AL: What are you reading now? And writing?

CLZ: Lately I have read the wonderful trilogy of Rachel Cusk A backlight, Transit y Prestige. I have found extraordinary how the The absence of a plot, of cause-effect logic, far from leading us into a void, leads us to a mosaic of fragments that occupy everything and constitute the novel itself. I'm too rereading a Miguel Delibes placeholder image, a great author who never disappoints.

As for writing, I am in the phase of planning my next novel. A story about the power of secrets: those that produce redemption and, those, that it is better not to reveal. 

  • AL: How do you think the publishing scene is and what decided you to try to publish?

CLZ: I have just landed in the publishing world, so I would not dare to carry out an exhaustive analysis on its current situation. My first impressions are of perplexity. I see a saturated market, with a huge supply of manuscripts, impossible to channel through conventional publishers; and on the other hand, I also perceive a transforming system, where very interesting publication alternatives and formats arise, and where competition with other forms of «entertainment» is fierce. In short, there is a tension between collapse and innovation.

My decision to launch myself to publish is associated with the conviction that him book is completed when the reader reaches the last page. I think the magic of literature is in that round trip between the writer and the reader. The novel, Umberto Eco already said, «it is an interpretation machine ».

  • AL: Is the moment of crisis that we are experiencing being difficult for you or can you keep something positive for future stories?

CLZ: The last year has been very difficult and sad for many people, but perhaps the positive part has been the fact that the pandemic has shown the essential fragility of our lives and the absurdity of existential arrogance. We are probably more aware. Another important aspect is the reading increase. Many people have returned to the books looking in their pages for evasion, comfort, learning ... In short, the magic of literature.


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