{"id":303536,"date":"2016-02-05T16:35:32","date_gmt":"2016-02-05T16:35:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2016\/02\/05\/introducing-rafael-chirbes-rtwbc\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:57:25","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:57:25","slug":"introducing-rafael-chirbes-rtwbc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2016\/02\/05\/introducing-rafael-chirbes-rtwbc\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing Rafael Chirbes [RTWBC]"},"content":{"rendered":"

For anyone who missed this in my earlier posts, the fiction book for February’s Reading the World Book Club<\/a> is On the Edge<\/em><\/a> by Rafael Chirbes, which is translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and published by New Directions. <\/p>\n

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As a way of introducing Chirbes, I thought I’d post this bio and interview from A Thousand Forests in One Acorn<\/em>,<\/a> an anthology of Spanish-language writers Open Letter published in the fall of 2014 featuring the first of Chirbes’s writing to appear in English translation. The principle idea of the book is that each of the included literary masters select the best thing s\/he has ever written. (In Chirbes’s case, he selected part of Crematorio.<\/em>) Prefacing these excerpts are long biographies situating the writer, and a short interview in which each author answers a few standard questions about their influences and why they chose the section they did. That’s what’s posted below.<\/p>\n

From A Thousand Forests in One Acorn<\/em>, edited by Valerie Miles:<\/b><\/p>\n

Rafael Chirbes is an author who has been creating his work\u2014indispensable to understanding Spain\u2019s recent history\u2014in the shadows. Born the 27th of June, 1949, in Tabernes de Valldigna, in the province of Valencia. He is the son of a republican family, but above all a child of the post-war\u2014social and historical conscience have marked both his life and his writing. From the age of eight, he studied in schools for the orphans of railway workers, and he spent parts of his childhood and adolescence in \u00c1vila, Le\u00f3n, and Salamanca. When he was sixteen, he left for Madrid, where he got a degree in Modern and Contemporary History, perhaps to better understand that particular time in history (the second half of the twentieth century) of which he considered himself a product, that moment when a generation\u2014his\u2014succumbed to \u201cchronic amnesia\u201d right when they took power. <\/p>\n

An insatiable reader, he worked for several years in bookstores and spent others writing literary criticism. Then he lived in Morocco (where he was a Spanish teacher), Paris, Barcelona, La Coru\u00f1a, and Extremadura, and finally he went back to his city of birth, Valencia. For years he did various journalistic activities; writing restaurant reviews for the magazine Sobremesa<\/em> and travel reports. It wasn\u2019t until he was thirty-nine, in 1988, that he became known as a writer. His first novel, Mimoun<\/em>, was a finalist for the Premio Herralde. Since then, Chirbes has published eight novels that have composed a bitter portrayal of modern-day Spain, blending realism and introspection, history and story, in what the author defines as \u201ca boomerang effect\u201d: you have to look behind you to get back to the present. Rafael Chirbes\u2019s novels are populated with individuals who long to change history and who, nevertheless, end up succumbing, confronting the impossibility of intervening in anything, torn away toward the end of the world; revolutionaries who shield themselves behind a historical past in order to justify their uselessness in the present.<\/p>\n

After publishing En la lucha final<\/em> (1991), La buena letra<\/em> (1992), and Los disparos del cazador<\/em> (1994), in 1996 appeared La larga marcha<\/em>, a novel that along with La ca\u00edda de Madrid<\/em> (2000) and Los viejos amigos<\/em> (2003) formed a trilogy about Spanish society from post-war times, through the Transition. The ethical sensibility in Chirbes\u2019s writing consists precisely in situating the reader in front of a moral conflict, forcing the reader to take part. Through his minutely detailed stories, the minature world of his characters, Rafael Chirbes manages to shed light on the mechanisms that make the real world run. In his most recently published novel, Crematorio<\/em> (for which he received the Premio Nacional de la Cr\u00edtica and the Premio Dulce Chac\u00f3n), he depicts a world adrift, eaten away by corruption and speculation, where that game of masking the real within the fictional becomes rawer and savager. Skeptical and happy, he has accepted the recognition with his characteristic discretion, which serves him so well in Beniarbieg, a small Valencian town, where he currently lives, far away from literary cliques.<\/p>\n

Rafael Chirbes states that up until this moment he has the impression of having written only one book. In that book \u201cthey don\u2019t talk about the war, though the war is present; they don\u2019t talk about hope, though they carry the aspirations of the twentieth century.\u201d The book he\u2019s referring to is a place where you go to try to understand the past in order to attend to the present; it\u2019s a place where you find yourself forced, simply, to find out who you are.<\/p>\n

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The Torture of Doctor Johnson<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the end of my most recent novel, and although the protagonist who\u2019s speaking in the text isn\u2019t very much like me, I do share a certain texture of his dark outlook.<\/p>\n

In Conversation with the Dead<\/em><\/p>\n

There are a lot of deceased authors I love crowding my bookshelves at home. I talk to them; I listen to them. From Aub and Gald\u00f3s, to Tolstoy, Montaigne, Yourcenar, Lucretius and Virgil, Faulkner, D\u00f6blin, Proust, Balzac, E\u00e7a de Queiroz, and on and on. I don\u2019t leave the house much, so I reread them either at random or impelled by some intuition that tells me that this one and no other is the dead author I should hear at a particular time. For the most part, I\u2019m not mistaken. I also dream about the dead people I knew when they were alive; I\u2019ve touched them, even, and now they\u2019re nowhere, and knowing that they\u2019re not here and that I can\u2019t talk to them or hear their voices distresses me when I go to bed. Some nights they take control of the room: their absence leaves me breathless and I have to turn on the light so I don\u2019t suffocate. With the light on, it\u2019s easier to send them back to the peaceful nothingness they\u2019re struggling to escape from.<\/p>\n

Coda<\/em><\/p>\n

You said once that literature is like a lover. Either you go all the way or they leave you. You have to know the value of hitting bottom.<\/em><\/p>\n

I think texts betray any sort of imposture on the part of their authors; they\u2019re an extremely sensitive detector. They contain what the author wants to say, but also\u2014and almost more importantly\u2014what\u2019s up his sleeve. And yes, I have the impression that writing saves me\u2014I know, I know it\u2019s sort of a romantic idea\u2014don\u2019t ask me from what, even if it\u2019s from myself, it helps me stay afloat. It puts my doubts, my anxieties, at a certain distance and, more importantly, in the service of something.<\/p>\n

Do you think there\u2019s an ethical place for literature or is it merely an aesthetic exercise?<\/em><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t believe in an aesthetic without ethics, there\u2019s no such thing: all aesthetics suggest a particular outlook on the world, and no outlook is innocent. A point of view situates you somewhere, in a location where potentialities\u2014ways of being\u2014battle one another. When you write, or paint, as when you read or look at something, you have to be conscious of the fact that the author wants to invite you to look from where he\u2019s looking. Your mission is to protect yourself. Know that they want to seduce you.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

For anyone who missed this in my earlier posts, the fiction book for February’s Reading the World Book Club is On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes, which is translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and published by New Directions. As a way of introducing Chirbes, I thought I’d post this bio and interview […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[57266,13566,63136,11716,63806,1646,63816,36026],"class_list":["post-303536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-a-thousand-forests-in-one-acorn","tag-margaret-jull-costa","tag-on-the-edge","tag-rafael-chirbes","tag-reading-the-world-book-club","tag-review","tag-rtwbc","tag-valerie-miles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303536"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":316196,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303536\/revisions\/316196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}

I hope you grab a copy of On the Edge<\/em> (AND<\/span> A Thousand Forests in One Acorn<\/em>!<\/a>) and join in the reading group. Feel free to email me comments and thoughts, or post them in the comments section below, or use #RTWBC on Twitter, or join the Facebook Group.<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"