Photography: (c) Begoña Rivas, for El Cultural.
Today is a memory for the thinker and writer Jose Luis Sampedro. Simply because and especially because of its connection with Aranjuez, city where I reside. So there goes one review of their works through their sentences, some about the creation process, others about writing in general.
Write
My belief is that writing is being self miner, become an archaeologist, delve into one, "go deeper into the thicket."
Truly, I do not know very well why one is dedicated to writing, how the writer is born in the person.
In my novels the scenarios, both invented and known, are absolutely real to me, I live in them and in them I move. Although of course when I speak of a known city I pass it through the sieve of my experiences and it is different from the city that others know.
Writing is living. Living is traveling. For the memories. By imagination. Through the geographies that one day we traveled, that one day we imagined.
10 works and their creative process
Congress in Stockholm
The idea came from my attendance at a banking congress, transformed into the novel in a scientific conference because it seems more interesting to me than the profit and loss figures.
I wrote the novel under the impact of the fascinating surprises that Sweden brought me: the Scandinavian landscape (water, forests, lakes) fascinated me, I was dazzled. And then, the freedom of life.
The river that takes us
In the summer of the thirties we used to go with the bike gang to bathe in the Tagus river. One fine day, when we went to bathe, we came across the parquet river, from which it would emerge years later. The river that takes us.
Write the novel it took me nine years because, apart from the multiple occupations, to document myself I dedicated myself to touring those lands, to kicking the Tagus river basin, the path of the gancheros.
October, october
It took me nineteen years to write October, october. Throughout all those years I discovered that it is a world novel. When I finished it, the stack of papers, typed by me and which I still have, was one meter and ten inches long.
The Etruscan smile
Of all my novels only one, The Etruscan smile, I can explain exactly the day, moment in which it was born and the event that inspired it. The birth of my grandson the novel inspired by that little creature became a literary event.
The old mermaid
This novel is born from my readings of the Sappho poems, specifically the image of the desperate young man who throws himself into the sea for not being loved by the one he loved.
Royal Site
It is a novel matured over forty years because it is the novel of Aranjuez. I wanted to write it long before, but this is not a novel for a young writer.
The lesbian lover
The lesbian lover is above all a cry of freedom in general and sexual freedom in particular. It is a good example of the mysterious, inexplicable part of creation.
I took great care of the language in the manner of the French libertines, I took special care to compensate with an exquisite language for the harshness of the narrated facts. Like it or not nobody can seem vulgar.
Sea in the background
The stories de Sea in the background they obey a plan to try to give "translation", in human types, of the peculiarities that we associate with the different seas.
My attitude in writing these lines is that of little boy who, playing on the beach, finds a pearly shell on the sand and runs to the mother to offer her the humble treasure.
Quartet for a soloist
We can speak of a novel of thought or a fictionalized essay, a moral fable or a philosophical tale. In any case, the vindication of a better society in the face of a world unfaithful to its values it is undoubtedly the central axis.
- Source: Friends of José Luis Sampedro Association.