The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Félix de Azúa: "Our time hides death"

2020-10-28T04:39:12.741Z


The writer addresses the seventies in 'Third act', a new installment of his false autobiographyFélix de Azúa, in Madrid in the fall of 2020 Luis Asín Félix de Azúa (Barcelona, ​​76 years old) has just published Third Act (Random House Literature), the fourth installment of that false autobiography in which he has tried to understand, through different strategies, the world as he has known it. What he is dealing with in this case, he explains, is "the dismissal of that false self, a review


Félix de Azúa, in Madrid in the fall of 2020 Luis Asín

Félix de Azúa (Barcelona, ​​76 years old) has just published

Third Act

(Random House Literature), the fourth installment of that false autobiography in which he has tried to understand, through different strategies, the world as he has known it.

What he is dealing with in this case, he explains, is "the dismissal of that false self, a review of various ways of approaching death, a teaching to die well."

Third act

It starts in an attic in Vallvidrera, a neighborhood in Barcelona, ​​where some young people have taken an acid and are hallucinating.

The chapter, like all those in the book, is headed by a date: 1971. The seventies are the substance of this heterodox literary exploration around that generation that was around 30 years old when Franco died, but again and again there are jumps to other moments : 1963, 1981, 2007. The past and the present: where and how the purposes of some boys were put together, what they walked on then, how they changed, where they ended.

The exile in Paris, the gathering organized by a rebellious philosopher, drugs, a visit to Ernst Jünger, a grotto in Port Lligat, Heiddeger's Being, Zorroaga's faculty of philosophy, and so on: the novel goes from side to side. another follows characters, frequents sex and death, reconstructs a half-hidden world, the one in which those who found the death of a dictator wandered and set out on the road to democracy.

The seventies.

“They are very turbulent years.

In Barcelona there is a real explosion of ludibrio, lust and mess, of great merriment, is the burial of the sardine.

In Madrid is the move.

They are parallel phenomena: two brutal outbreaks after 40 years of repression.

I get involved in those years because they are the ones I know best, but the subject of the novel is how one dies.

Our age hides death.

What children are taught is that it is a very cute little skeleton drawn by Walt Disney.

For us death was a corpse nailed to a tree, bloody ”.

  • Balance

  • Félix de Azúa: "The inclusive language is one of those fashions that go by, like the 'hula hoop"

The drugs.

“Many people of my generation entered the true reality, when Franco died, through drugs.

The entrance to the reality of our country was through hallucination.

In my group, what we worked on the most was lysergic acid, LSD, as something really everyday.

It had nothing to do with the little things that are taken now, ours was fierce: at least the trip was 8 hours, and it could be 12, with true hallucinations, some unreal and others very tremendous.

I do not get much into that world, but I have brought it into account for that, because we were deeply distorted, and with the conviction of youth that you are right and others are wrong.

Along with the physical hallucination was the philosophical one.

It was the time of Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida.

An absolutely nihilistic philosophy, which denied the existence of the human.

Then it seemed very elegant to us, the horror came later.

It is that world that I wanted to show in small pieces.

I have sliced ​​time as it is sliced ​​in memory, where there is no continuity.

Memories come to us when they feel like it and in the most unexpected way, like Proust's cupcake ”.

A gathering in Paris.

“Everything is fiction.

In the gathering that brings together a lot of young exiles in a café in Paris, there is a character who looks like Agustín García Calvo, but only looks alike.

There is nothing that matches the civil person.

That must be made clear, because I do not want to offend anyone, least of all their children.

It is the Spanish version of the French philosophers of that time.

And what happens to those who are there is that they do not quite believe Franco's death.

He was already dead before.

What was still alive was the Franco regime, which was not a fierce network of policemen, priests and bankers: the Franco regime was within the Spanish population.

The opposition was a very minority.

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán was right when he said that against Franco we were living wonderfully ”.

Fact and fiction.

“Some close readers told me, before the book was published, that it had included real characters.

They are plausible but they are not true.

There is an error in thinking that such a character corresponds to such a person.

Right now there is a flood of biographical novels or fictionalized biographies: it is not the case.

Obviously, there are characters that resemble real characters.

It is as if he made this description, 'they are very bare mountains, gray rocks, without trees'.

And someone would say, 'Oh, the Dolomites.'

They could be, but maybe not.

There are characters that can remind you of a real character, but in the same way that the description of a landscape with pine trees reminds you of the Costa Brava ”.

Ernst Jünger.

“It is the counterpart of the philosophers of that time.

He also makes use of hallucinogens, but he does so in a strictly literary way.

The scene in the novel is a fiction: there was never a woman visiting her home in Wilflingen.

There is a lot of sex in the novel, there was in those years after Franco's death.

Sex became fun, and people fornicated in public.

A character in the book warns him that this would be normal from then on.

Instead of bread and circus, soccer and sex.

Right now, zapping, I have observed that hundreds of thousands of people are very interested in watching on television who copulates with whom ”.

Europe.

“The Europe of today has nothing to do with that of then.

Those who are less than 50 years old today have no idea what that was like.

Time is inflexible, we are entering another world.

The old one is going to crumble until it disappears, the same thing that happened with the Greek and Latin world when Christianity began.

It was turning into dust until it ceased to exist.

This is what is happening today with Europe and America, with the West.

Death again.

The narrator does not die in the novel, but in a sense he has learned to die.

My life has passed, nothing is left for me.

But I am not the one that is leaving, it is the world that is moving away ”.

Source: elparis

All life articles on 2020-10-28

You may like

News/Politics 2024-02-01T05:01:56.852Z
News/Politics 2024-02-10T09:43:26.563Z
Sports 2024-02-25T16:42:39.614Z

Trends 24h

Life/Entertain 2024-03-28T17:17:20.523Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.