Marta del Riego Anta
(La Bañeza, León) had a few things clear while she was building
Pájaro del
Norte (AdN) her third novel and a true literary leap that tells the story of Icia, a woman who fed up with her life in Madrid decides to return to the earth, to Leon.
The first thing is that he did not want a genre novel or a didactic story about the world of wine, so present in the plot.
The second is that she could not be ascribed to any gender, but that she drank from the black of which she is so fond as a reader, and also from Joyce Carol Oates, William Faulkner and other inhabitants of the dark soul of the human being, or from "cruelty Flannery O'Connor's ironic ”.
"I like that tone that walks on the edge of the precipice that separates country noir from the gothic novel," he summarizes by email.
Icia finds herself on her way home with a scenario that includes a suicide who is not a suicide, a missing person and a Civil Guard sergeant who investigates everything.
We also have a mysterious mother and a witch grandmother.
And the strength of the earth, reflected by dint of "sharpening the senses", a good cast of characters and poetry, of which Del Riego Anta is a reader and a debtor.
Would it be interesting to write a novel about women only?
The truth is, no.
QUESTION
: In a way, this is a family in decline, as Icia herself recognizes.
A decadence that arises with the grandfather, that gentleman on the left, but of which he decides to show the consequences, two generations later, in another look away from the
fin de siècle
tone
.
Why?
ANSWER
: Where a land is lost, it is historically exhausted, because its memory is lost, and it is not replaced by anything.
For going to Madrid, which in terms of identity is nothing.
In Leonese literature the obsession is loss, from Julio Llamazares to the Panero family.
In that sense I am part of a tradition.
In my novel, that pessimism of the
fin de siècle
tone
is in the atmosphere, but not in its protagonist, Icia.
Icia feels like the last of a long line of farmers, but she is not satisfied, because she is a woman of action.
He returns to town to break with the defeatism of the phrase that permeates everything, the "this is dead" that prevails in rural Spain.
He seizes the reins of his own life and launches himself like a projectile forward.
Q:
Precisely, the novel is sustained by the powerful voice of Icia.
Where does it come from?
I believe that violence is in all of us regardless of gender.
And that does not mean that we are bad.
A:
Maybe it's my
alter ego
, what I always would have liked to do: return to my land and live from a business that is embedded in the DNA of those landscapes.
Break with that little regulated life and measure that you have in the city and start from scratch, build something by staining your hands with dirt.
That conviction, that of seeking an authentic life, gives him strength.
P:
There is also a very dark part, beyond the deaths, and Leonor stars almost entirely with her traumatic childhood, her coldness, her profile of an attractive mature woman and her drift into old age, the strange lady of the birds, with the jackdaw, so gloomy.
Where does this Gothic come from?
A:
It is given by the landscape and given by the background of history.
I have rescued legends and mysterious beings that I heard about as a child.
The Renuberu, who brings the storms, the snake that sucks mothers' breast milk ... I suppose that all that hodgepodge is part of my imagination.
Icia's mother, Leonor, is a scientist-minded woman, but she grew up in that primordial mud and, little by little, as she gets older, it is as if she cannot fight it, she becomes more and more mystical, mysterious.
Exploring how madness corrupts a scientific mind was fascinating to me.
The jackdaw that accompanies her, Mars, seems like the healthy and free part of her spirit.
The jackdaw is a species that seems ominous and yet it is one of the most intelligent that exists.
Furthermore, if domesticated, it is capable of developing a very deep love relationship with its human caretakers.
So we have all those symbols: the cats of the grandmother, the birds of the mother, the squawk of the kite, the souls that fly over the crossroads of the old Camino de Santiago ...
Q:
The land Icia returns to is a land of unbelievers.
Damien's character says that this land produces these men, but what women does it produce?
A:
Tough women.
That they never learned to express their feelings, especially to express love.
I have seen women in my family cry at a funeral, tears running down their faces, without making any fuss, by themselves, standing in front of the open grave, and no one was going to hug them, to console them.
That, I don't know, left me petrified.
They are women accustomed to working and suffering, since no one recognizes either one or the other.
Work in the fields, take care of the house, give birth to children.
My grandmother was orphaned at the age of nine, married at sixteen, looked after the beasts and a grocery store, had eight children, four died.
She had a gifted IQ.
She was a very introverted woman, she never hugged or kissed her children.
I remember her always dressed in black, with a long braid of white hair.
It is a very powerful image that I keep in memory.
And I wonder, what must that woman feel inside?
Icia returns to the town to break with the defeatism of the phrase that permeates everything, the "this is dead" that prevails in rural Spain.
Q:
While reading the novel I thought at times that the strength was in those huge female characters but also the men who hover around the protagonist (Flavio, despite his absence, and Helí and Damián and their father, of course) they have enough strength.
What I'm not so sure is what would be of them without those women around whom they gravitate ...
A:
Would it be interesting to write a novel about women only?
The truth is, no.
I have always thought that relationships between men and women, not only in the couple, also in the purely sexual, in friendship or within the family, are enriching.
I like the transposition of roles.
That, in this case, Icia's father is the "maternal one", the one who takes care of her children.
Or that in the relationship between the winemaker couple, it is she who has the male role.
And then it is true that violence is associated more with men, however, in my novel women also exercise violence.
I believe that violence is in all of us regardless of gender.
And that does not mean that we are bad.
I try not to judge my characters.
Q:
This is a book of mothers, of women who fight for their place.
You are a mother, you work, you write on the mornings of the holydays and on Saturdays while your child waits. Do you want to continue?
A:
If there is something that is clear to me in life, it is that I want to dedicate myself to writing.
If one day I don't get up early to write, it's a wasted day.
Is it an obsession?
Can be.
But at this point in my life my priorities are clear: my family, my writing and my close friends.
Everything else is accessory.
I am now writing a book of poems because I needed to change the rhythm after four years of immersion in this novel, but I will immediately start with the next one that I already have in my head.
And just thinking about it, I already feel a tingling in the tips of my fingers.
Q: With what wine do we start reading
Northwest Bird
?
A: It is clear that with a dark weevil from the south of León.
I have two in mind.
When I started writing the novel, I didn't know that there was a project underway very similar to the one Icia wanted to do.
A winery next to my town, in that area that I portray, that has rescued vineyards of more than 80 years without using phytosanitary products, respecting the environment, and that has managed to make a magnificent wine by taking out all the expression of the prieto picudo grape and of the mencía.
It's called Fuentes del Silencio, and I recommend Las Jaras.
And then there is another project from the La Osa winery, which a very brave woman has started, also in León and also with a black picudo, and makes a wonderful red called Trasto.
A pencil outline
The approach to the way of working of each author is always curious.
This is Marta del Riego Anta's: “At a Hay Festival two years ago, I heard Ken Follet explain how he built his novels.
It was fascinating.
A year dedicated to researching and writing a “bible” with all the characters, as the scriptwriters of television series do.
It was also fascinating to discover that I would never be able to do that ... Unfortunately I am much more chaotic or, perhaps, more intuitive.
I make a pencil sketch that covers up to the middle of the novel and a page of each of the characters and I start to write.
It sounds cliché, I know, but it's true: the characters lead me.
As I write, they discover their world, their ideas, and above all what moves them, what makes them act as they do.
I do ask myself that question constantly: what moves Icia, what moves Damián.
And towards the middle of the novel, when I have its worlds built I stop to think what is going to happen, how it is going to end, where the story is leading me.
I don't know if it is the best method, I suppose not, but it is my method ”.