Lola Fernandez Pazos. Interview

Lola Fernandez Pazos She is from Madrid with Galician and Andalusian roots. She graduated in Journalism and with a long career in the media, she presented her first novel in May, The Pazo de Lourizan, heavily influenced by his taste for the Victorian era in literature. In this interview He tells us about it and many other topics. I really appreciate her kindness and time spent on it.

Lola Fernandez Pazos — Interview

• ACTUALIDAD LITERATURA: Your last published novel is The Pazo de Lourizan. What do you tell us about it and where did the idea come from?

LOLA FERNÁNDEZ PAZOS: This is a typical family saga story, in which a powerful lineage hides a series of riddles around a country house that will not be revealed until the end. Throughout the work, the reader will have to gradually put the pieces together, as if it were a puzzle, to discover the truth. There will come a time, even, that he will know more than one of the protagonists, but even so he will continue with her, he will not abandon her to her fate, to understand the full meaning of the novel.

In addition, the book has all the ingredients of this genre: a love story between different social classes, a beautiful palace where they reside the Carballos, an industrial fishing family from the Rías Baixas and a warlike episode that, together with the advance of progress, will upset the life and fortune of the family.

The idea comes from my own family, since it is a story that happened many years ago around my ancestors and was told to me so that, in turn, I would write it sometime. So yeah, it's about true events, which actually happened in Marin, a small fishing village near Pontevedra.

• AL: Can you remember any of your first readings? And the first story you wrote?

LFP: The first reading I remember is The way, de Miguel Delibes placeholder image. She seemed so simple and at the same time so beautiful that I always wanted to write something like that. A novel that could be read and dazzled a preteen and an adult alike. The first story I wrote, if we don't talk about the animal stories I sketched when I was 5 or 6 years old, it was Love in the time of Tinder.

More than a novel, it is a test. In it I imagine Jane Austen returns from the XNUMXth to the XNUMXst century and finds that courtship between human beings no longer takes place in dances but in an application called Tinder. From there and through stories taken from her most emblematic works, Austen will advise Tinder users, men and women, how they should behave in order not to make mistakes.

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

LFP: For me, my favorite writer will always be the famous Javier Marías. Thanks to his work, which I know by heart, I began to reflect on the blank page. It is not just about telling, but about observing and meditating why the characters act in this or another way. he was the one instilled in me a love of British classics, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, but especially the victorians, the sisters bronte, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Charles DickensElizabeth Gaskell, to name just a few. Thanks to this influence, I enrolled in English Studies, after finishing Journalism.

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

LFP: As a man, without a doubt, Mr Darcy, Pride and Prejudice. As a woman, Jane Eyre, from the play of the same name by Charlotte Brönte. They look perfect to me. Darcy makes the best declaration of love a woman can ever receive, and Jane Eyre does the same. They are both so real that I think Austen wrote that excerpt imagining what she would have liked to receive and Brönte what she would have liked to do.

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

LP: Nothing. The truth. I'm not maniacal.

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

LFP: I write on my desk and I usually read before going to bed, always half lying down.

• AL: Are there other genres that you like?

LFP: Yes, I love social novels, like Mary barton, by Elizabeth Gaskell, but also the detective genre, such as Joel Dicker.

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

LFP: I'm with my second novel, Which is a mix of Dicker, Mary Barton along with hints of reflections in the purest Marías style (save the difference). I would call it a "social thriller" but it also has a lot of self-fiction. Now that my reference writer, Marías, has left me, I wanted to pay him a special tribute. I would never think that she was going to leave so soon and that has left me not only sad, but also an orphan of teachers. It has been a catastrophic time for my contemporary references, who were also too young to leave: Almudena Grandes, Sunday Villar. Seriously, I don't know who I'm going to read now.

• AL: How do you think the publishing scene is?

LFP: I think there are quite interesting books, but others that seem prefabricated in the sense that the author knows what works and expresses it, without leaving any hunch or feeling in their pages, and I notice that too much. I like books with soul, that impact. And something that makes me a little sad is that publishers bet more on famous faces than on interesting pens, but we are in a terrible competition and companies do not live on thin air. I understand that.

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

LFP: All crises are positive if one ends up getting out of them. The novel I'm in right now talks about the new human feelings that this new environment aroused. Then I was working for a Communications director agency and I saw how the lack of work led to a save yourself. No one cared about speaking ill of the next door, or the departure of a colleague, the important thing was to stay one. And that has been positive because, by experiencing it, it is easier for me to tell and meditate on it.