Cover photos: courtesy of Sara Gutiérrez.
Sara Gutiérrez She is an ophthalmologist, but she also writes from essays to reports. He also runs the Ingenio de Comunicación agency, together with Eva Orue. Now he has presented a novel, the first, entitled The last summer of the USSR. In this interview He tells us about it and tells us about much more. I thank you very much for the time and kindness you have given me.
Sara Gutiérrez - Interview
- ACTUALIDAD LITERATURA: Your latest novel is The last summer of the USSR. What do you tell us in it?
SARA GUTIERREZ: Last and first, until now all I had written was an essay or a big report.
The last summer of the USSR is a story based on the trip I made through Soviet lands, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, during the first week of July 1991, a few months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The one that I started as one more tourist journey ended up becoming a extraordinary experience worthy of being shared, mainly thanks to two factors: the first, my travel companion, an Uzbek colleague who had never traveled for the pleasure of doing it, had never seen the sea or tasted freedom, and who at first I did not want her to come with me; and the second, night trains, those to whom we were forced by my condition of scholarship in the USSR (which prevented me from moving without special permits or staying in a hotel) and in which we coincide with people of all kinds willing to talk about the divine and the human.
With the perspective of time, the day walks by the cities we visitLeningrad, Tallin, Riga, Vilnius, Lvov, Kiev y Odessa, starting from Kharkiv): the barricades in Riga, the intense religious activity in Lvov, the independence demonstration in which we were involved in Kiev, for example, were a catalog of signals about the transcendence of the moment.
In the narration of the trip there are necessarily interspersed prints of everyday life the last two years of the USSR (I had arrived in the country in November 1989 to specialize in ophthalmology) and the first 5 years of independent life in the republics (I lived in Russia until July 1996).
The book is completed with the excellent illustrations by Pedro Arjona, and some photos and documentation of the royal journey, in an exquisite edition of Reino de Cordelia.
- AL: Can you go back to the memory of that first book you read? And the first story you wrote?
SG: I think the first book I read was Adventure in the valley of Enid Blyton and, later, all the adventures that had and to have of that gang.
If I draw from memory, what I remember as first writings are some Love Poems in adolescence.
- AL: What was the first book that struck you and why?
SG: The first first ... no idea. I remember looking forward to it hitting the bookstores Love in the Time of Cholera for the great taste in my mouth that it had left me One Hundred Years of Solitude possibly because of how realistic García Márquez's magical realism was to me. And, in between, I remember passionately giving myself to the Rayuela of Cortázar.
- AL: That favorite writer? They can be more than one and of all times.
SG: I'm a big fan of comic, and I try not to miss anything of Joe sacco.
- AL: What character in a book would you have liked to meet and create?
SG: I would have liked to meet Sherlock Holmes, and hang out with him in the office of my ophthalmologist colleague Dr. Conan Doyle. I suppose it would have been especially stimulating for me to create Frankenstein.
- AL: Any special habits when writing or reading?
SG: I was going to say none, but now that I think about it I always read or write lying down, or at least with your legs stretched up high, relaxed.
- AL: And your preferred place and time to do it?
SG: La Sunday morning, in bed. Reading on a deck chair facing the sea is also a great pleasure.
- AL: Other genres that you like?
SG: I especially like the comic and test.
- AL: What are you reading now? And writing?
SG: I'm reading The gospel of the eels by Patrik Svensson (Asteroid Books, 2020). I'm thinking about the account of another trip.
- AL: How do you think the publishing scene is from your position in the team that you make up at Ingenio de Comunicación?
SG: General speaking is difficult and dangerous, but sticking to the part of the sector with which I interact, I think it is very active, growing and looking for new ways to reinforce the importance of books as such, turning them even into objects of desire, and very committed to bookstores.
- AL: Is the moment of crisis that we are living difficult for you or can you keep something positive for future novels?
SG: The moment that we live is being very very hard, but I have no doubt that, if something remains, in the long run it will be the least bad.