Julia Navarro, pictured this Thursday in Madrid Photo: Inma FloresINMA FLORES / EL PAIS
On a page of
From nowhere
, the latest novel by Julia Navarro (Madrid, 67 years old), these words coexist that have been conjugating for centuries to refer, in equal parts, to love, hatred or death: martyrs, heroes, sacrifices, honor ... The book is the bloody echo of the great attacks of the 21st century, from the one that demolished the Twin Towers of New York in 2001, now 20 years ago, to the one that occurred in 2004 in Atocha or the one that had a dramatic effect in 2016 in the Bataclán nightclub, which is now being judged in Paris. In this fiction by Julia Navarro, author of
Historia de un scoundrel
or
You will not kill
Among other novels, the attacks that are being prepared and occur are also of jihadist responsibility, inspired by those concepts (martyrs, heroes ...) that act as a steamroller on the heads of the fanatics.
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Read a trailer for 'From Nowhere'
Julia Navarro: "Madrid is libertarian"
Question.
An Israeli soldier, Jacob, accompanies members of his army on a raid that kills an Arab family of which only Abir survives, a teenager who swears revenge by looking at his young enemy.
That look marks that soldier and waters the novel with the blood of hatred.
And that is the
leitmotif
of his book.
Answer.
Hatred is intrinsic to human nature, as can love, generosity, or greed.
Since the beginning of time, men have been the same as ourselves, and that look of hatred from Abir, which is going to be a nightmare for Jacob, is the face of resentment that has been repeated over the centuries.
P.
Where does this image that leads your novel come from?
R.
It is what I try to find out in my books making that trip to the chiaroscuro of the human condition.
Perhaps Abir is the character that has cost me the most to create in my life, because I tried to get under his skin and make his way from that boy who wakes up one morning at his house, sees that an Israeli commando kills his family and ends up training in Afghanistan for revenge.
That journey is what has cost me the most to build to understand when that seed of hatred is planted and how it grows and germinates until it turns a boy into a monster.
Q.
What is the role of Jacob?
R.
This novel is also about uprooting, about who feels a stranger within himself and a foreigner wherever he goes.
The role of Jacob is that of someone who constantly questions what he does, who is forced to live a life that he has not chosen.
Ortega y Gasset's concept of circumstances marks me: I always think that circumstances are stones in my backpack that are sometimes light or sometimes have a really unbearable weight.
Jacob has to carry some stones that are the events in which he participates without ever wanting to be present.
Therefore, he always has that moral dilemma between good and evil, how far his freedom reaches to be able or not to be able to choose.
Q.
Do you write from any contemporary real image?
A.
This is an action novel for thought.
And it is about terrorism, immigration, the permanent tension between the media and power, be it political or economic.
It is a current novel, the facts of which could be in the pages of the newspapers, it could be a news item from a newspaper.
P.
In fiction, in fact, a television receives the threat of an attack that will soon take place at its own headquarters, in Brussels ...
R.
In the heart of Europe.
There are so many attacks that have occurred these years in the heart of Europe ... It is a reality, it is not a fiction.
But apart from this fiction and the reality of the attacks for which I am offering a metaphor here, I raise the problem of immigration.
How we treat immigrants.
Do we help them to integrate so that they do not feel like citizens of nowhere?
What would happen to us if we made that trip?
The problem of immigration is not having an adequate response from the West, from the European Union.
I am shocked that there are refugee camps, in terrible conditions.
P.
9/11 seems to be the start of all your metaphors.
R.
Its consequences continue to damage international coexistence.
The West also has to ask itself whether it does things right.
The exit from Afghanistan as it has been proposed is a true irresponsibility, because normally the interventions are for the defense of specific interests, rarely of the citizens of the countries in which they intervene, but of geostrategic games.
"I enter Afghanistan and now I do not want to be in Afghanistan, there you stay and I leave you with the horror of the Taliban."
It tears my soul when I hear in the media the echo of the Afghans shouting: "Get us out of here!"
P.
In your novel, fanaticism embraces God, in whom he seeks protection after his immolation ...
A.
If God exists, he will not forgive those fanatics for what they do in his name. Call it God, Yahweh or Allah ... In the end, in the history of humanity, murder is present in all of history, invoking God or the defense of privileges or the need to expand territories. It is ultimately an excuse to kill in the name of ideals and interests. Killing in the name of God is the last straw, the worst of sins. In the past people were killed in the name of the Catholic God, in this century they are killed in the name of Allah ... It is totalitarian thinking. "Mine is the good thing and I am going to impose it on you the hard way."
Q.
Jacob's mother says something that marks the book: “I decided that the time had come to assume who we really are.
I can't change the past, but I can't run from it either ”.
All those people are prisoners of a past that they did not star in.
R.
It is an evil that many human beings suffer, being prisoners of a time that they did not star in.
Sometimes when I see Spanish politics and hear some new political leaders speak, I think that they are prisoners of a past that they have not lived through.
And this must produce enormous suffering because they are becoming protagonists of something that they have not really suffered in their own flesh.
This is what happens to Jacob's mother, to Abir's family, and it happens every day in Spain.
In some Spanish politicians.
Q.
At the end of the novel, your character Jacob, on the verge of the denouement that opposes him to Abir, says: "No, no, nobody will win."
R.
Can the battle of terrorism be won?
No, because as long as there is a person willing to die for something, it can always cause a tragedy.
That is a battle in which both parties are aiming so many, and so we have been in different parts of the world for many years suffering the scourge of terrorism, and there it is.