Leila Guerriero says that she works well in two formats: the very short and the "insanely long". Or columns, or reports that spill over into books like Opus Gelber (Anagrama, 2019), about the bizarre life of the pianist Bruno Gelber, or A simple story (Anagrama, 2011), the chronicle of a folk dance festival in the interior of Argentina. His latest book is of the other species, the micro. In Theory of Gravity (Libros del Asteroide) it collects some of the columns it publishes every Wednesday against EL PAÍS.
He has purged many, all of which had to do with current media coverage, and with the chosen ones he has formulated a kind of playlist, but with texts. "The beginning is quite insolent. The first two columns are slapping readers. I wanted to start up there, stuck to the ceiling. I wanted the book to jerk and end more smoothly. In fact, the last printed word is curiosity. A person who flies to the apartment where it all started, which is empty, sits at his computer, starts to write and asks himself: 'What will come next?' In that “emotional landscape” that he wanted to draw based on columns, there are, for example, those that he wrote about his mother's illness and death (“I knew that God did not have to be thankful for anything because the illness was going to bury my mother with fists in a hospital room that would never come out again ") and another series, more playful, called Instructions and written in imperative. Kind like this: “I spent two or three days drinking heavily. In the morning, as soon as you wake up, feel the weight of the anguish like a dead bird on your chest. ”
The first lesson he teaches his students is that they deliver what their publisher has asked them to do, which seems simple but in reality is not. "If they ask you for a profile of Roger Federer, don't write a history of tennis"
Guerriero has used this series, inspired by the second person tales of Georges Perec and Lorrie Moore, as a "test bench" and to dump some of the stories that his radar captures when, as she says, "he takes out the flaps" and lands in some literary interesting reality around him. “The Instructions, which are actually rather destruction, came to me one night at the typical engagement dinner. In the end, that thing happened that irritates me a lot because women leave on one side and men on the other. And one of them had like a collapse. It made me uncomfortable. So I said, 'Well, what an interesting situation. What if I build these gadgets to talk about those couples where everything they love turns into everything they hate? ”
Although he is intrigued by the territory of worn couples, he does not inhabit it. The book is dedicated to his partner, photographer Diego Sampere, with whom, at 48 years of age, he has a nomadic existence, with a domicile at the many airports in the Hispanic world. "I come from Medellín and I meet the same person here, in Barcelona, and we say to ourselves: 'See you in Guadalajara.' It is all half snobbish and I am aware that this is not what happens in real life. That circuit is small, inbred and you run the risk of ending up speaking for a tribune that always applauds you, but at the same time it is my job… ”. Sighs. "I'm trying to put a brake on it."
Some of these trips help him to teach writing workshops, in which he tries to instill in the students two simple rules. The first, that they deliver what their publisher has asked for, something that seems simple but in reality is not. "If they ask for a profile of Roger Federer, don't write a tennis story." The second task is more complicated and consists of removing “the conglomerate of sentences made from them. That is not writing, it is cutting and pasting, and it is done a lot by journalists in the daily press, which can be very noble, but it usually comes imbued with that bureaucratic spirit ”.
You can follow ICON on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or subscribe to the Newsletter here.