Berna González Harbor: Author of the black series starring curator María Ruiz.
We have the privilege and pleasure of having today on our blog with Berna González Harbor (Santander, 1965): writer, journalist and analyst of today's society in all its facets. His career as a journalist is linked to El País where she has held prominent positions as editor of Babelia, deputy director of the newspaper or special envoy to countries in conflict among others.
González Harbor has entered through the big door in the crime novel with his Police series starring Commissioner María Ruiz.
Actualidad Literatura: You came to the novel in 2010, with a successful and consolidated career as a journalist and director in one of the greats of the Spanish press: El País. What attracted you to literature, to crime novels?
Berna González Harbor:
Literature called me long before journalism, since I was a child. But I didn't undertake a novel until 2010, when I felt ready. The crime novel is a perfect tool for digging into the holes of reality.
AL: You start the literary adventure at the hands of your protagonist, the police commissioner María Ruiz. After two installments, when the readers were already asking for more curator Ruiz, they bet on launching a new work without her, and in this last installment, The Tears of Claire Jones, we can enjoy your cases again. Long live Commissioner Ruiz?
BGH: I hope so, without a doubt, as long as the readers join me. It is more complicated than independent works, because supporting the threads of the protagonists' lives must keep not only an internal coherence in the book, but a vital long-term coherence that is more complex, but I am afraid I am already doomed. I won't be able to kill Ruiz.
AL: Your protagonist is independent, intelligent, successful, disenchanted, lonely, cultured, sportsman, childless, single, feminist, full-time worker, introverted and loyal. What gives Berna to Maria and Maria to Berna?
BGH: Every time we give each other more, although counting the 13 characteristics you mentioned, I think we only share eight and differ in 5. Both, Ruiz and I, like so many current women, have given up a lot to fulfill without respite.
AL: Your experience of reality is very varied and intense after a dizzying career as a field journalist taking part in great moments in the history of the XNUMXth and XNUMXst centuries. How much reality is there in your novels? How much is literary fiction and how much is fictional journalism that recreates images of the social reality of the moment?
BGH: Everything is fiction, but always based on the cases that move me, that leave me perplexed in reality. From the pedophilia scandals to the chain suicides on France Telecom or the collective and shared rapes on wasap, everything has a foot in what I do not understand of reality. Writing is also a way of trying to understand.
AL: Times of change for women, finally feminism is a matter for the majority and not just for a few small groups of women stigmatized for it. You, from your position, speak with a loudspeaker in hand defending equality, what is your message to society about the role of women and the role we play at this time?
BGH: I just wish that, in every decision they make, men and women of any degree of power would ask themselves if they are representing society. The photo of power does not correspond to the photo of reality.
The Tears of Claire Jones: Last installment of the curator María Ruiz.
AL: Your latest novel, The Tears of Claire Jones, was published last year, in 2017, is there already a next project? Are you one of those who start the next novel as soon as the previous one ends, or do you need a time for creative regeneration?
BGH: Every occasion is different. The tears ... it cost me more because in the middle I had written a different one and I had moved too far away. But in this case I started immediately, I already had María Ruiz and all the characters and situations in my head again, so my body asked for it. I think it will be very powerful.
AL: Literary piracy: A platform for new writers to make themselves known or irreparable damage to literary production?
BGH: It is not a damage to production, which will continue through thick and thin, but to our pockets. It's a theft soft. I would have no crumb for a crime novel case!
AL: Despite the traditional image of the introverted writer, locked up and without social exposure, there is a new generation of writers who tweets every day, for whom social networks are their communication window to the world. How is your relationship with social networks? What weighs more on Berna González Harbor, her facet as a journalist open to the world or that of a writer jealous of her privacy?
BGH: It is a relationship that I have very bad, that always bothers me. It is more difficult for me to reconcile my two gorillas there than in real life. But I think that a XNUMXst century communicator -by writer or journalist- cannot be absent.
AL: Paper or digital format?
BGH: I read in all formats.
AL: How is Berna in the role of reader? What are the books in your library that you reread every few years and always come back to enjoy like the first time? Any author that you are passionate about, the kind you buy the only ones that are published?
BGH: My God, reading good literature is an addiction almost comparable to trying to write it. I enjoy discovering new authors, especially from Latin America, savoring new rhythms, cadences, styles, arguments, voices. They are thoroughly shaking the way of counting. Right now The Uruguayan from Mairal, Hurricane season by Fernanda Melchor, Empty set by Verónica Gerber when we have the information. Waiting I have The unknown dimension scored by Nona Fernández. Regarding top authors, he would always live in the arms of Melville, Borges, Proust and Nooteboom.
AL: Finally, I ask you to give readers a little more of yourself: What are the special moments of your professional career? Those that you will tell your grandchildren.
BGH: Those are for me, sorry. I try to talk to my children about their courses, their friends, their things and little things, like everyone else, which is actually the greatest thing there is. Our lessons are abundant. If one day I have grandchildren I will try to know what they have inside.
Thanks, Berna González Harbor, I wish you to continue collecting successes in each challenge you undertake and that you continue to provide us with many great novels and great articles to reflect on.