The first thing Marta Jiménez Serrano did when she finalized her novel
The Proper Names
(Sixth Floor) was to continue sitting in her chair for a little longer to write a poem. Already by sheer inertia. This happened during the confinement, which came on time when this 31-year-old philologist from Madrid was considering giving up vacation from her job at the Turner publishing house. All in order to make time for the book he had written scratching hours at the weekends of more than a year. This novel debut, –for whom he was already awarded the Adonais prize in 2020 for his poetry book
The Light
Age-, is already in its third edition since it came out in March.
In it, the author narrates the cumbersome passage from childhood to the adult world of a girl through the peculiar point of view of her invisible friend, who will accompany her on her journey, as if she were the wheels of a bicycle. one day it must come off. Like the protagonist of the book, the author grew up in Madrid, so this search for identity inevitably passes through the Malasaña neighborhood, the university city or the Plaza del Cascorro. Youth scenarios in a big city that are opposed to the people, where he is happy during childhood, but then falls short in the face of few job opportunities. "We are used to the rural emptiness and its inhabitants going to the cities despite the precariousness that exists," he says. “In the end I have a very clear portrait of Madrid,but it has been almost involuntary ”.
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The character of the protagonist's grandmother, to whom the city seems immeasurable, appears in representation of the work of many women that was made invisible because it was considered domestic. In the next step is the mother, who has managed to enter the world of work, but not let go of the burden of care that is alien to the father. "You cannot conceive that that woman who meets your needs every day can have her own needs, that before you existed she lived in the center of Madrid, often went to the movies, traveled." The author considers that expectations about what life should be have increased from those grandparents born in the postwar period to parents who were able to study at university. “It seemed that the world was going to be of my generation,and we have come face to face with one crisis after another, ”he says.
The plot of apparent simplicity serves to illuminate certain common nooks and crannies in the lives of girls such as menstruation or the early requirement of maturity in most cases. Also the beginnings in love and sexuality, unfortunate in most cases, but decisive in personal geography. "When did love become a series of tests? Maybe it's not called love, maybe it's called gymkana. ”, Reflects Jiménez.
It is impossible for the author to know to what extent the readings of Joan Didion, Amelie Nothomb or Garcilaso de la Vega have affected her. The predilection for worldly subjects, as well as language, makes this philologist feel identified with authors such as Alejandro Zambra. However, most comparisons tend to pigeonhole her along with other successful authors of her fifth, such as Cristina Morales with
Easy Reading
, whom she considers wonderful but much more intellectual: “What bothers me is that being a young woman seems like be a literary category and put us in the same bag. We have passed the phase of being intruders in a man's world, but they have sat us at the children's table ”.
Inertia before writing arises in Marta since she was little through short poems about nature, flowers and fields, inspired by the images of Gloria Fuertes and Antonio Machado. Later he began to teach his writings to his school teachers, later to those of the Complutense University of Madrid, also to his friends at the time, with whom he shared a hobby. It was an open secret. “I have a lot of Word files open with story beginnings. I write it all down in a notebook. Images, ideas, characters that I never know when I'm going to take out again ”, he explains.
Although he did not really make the decision to publish until he felt the last frontier before the age of thirty, when he returned from France, where he was working. “So I learned a lot of French and other languages. It was a lot of fun but I went back to Madrid because I need an environment that speaks Spanish, in the end it is the language I write and it was the path I wanted to take ”. For her the external vision of the text is fundamental. To her boyfriend she read the novel from cover to cover aloud to check the sound of the text, as well as that its characteristic pungent rhythm did not decay at any time.
As in the book, a person can hold many versions of oneself, although the author assures that the professions do not mix. “La Marta editora is very normative and I try to adapt to someone else's voice. When I write I forget. It is a pleasure to deliver a text and have it returned to you with corrections and not have to be pending ”. Marta Jiménez Serrano knows very closely all the faces of the writing profession: “It is a very precarious profession that entails a lot of sacrifice. Everything that one writes is written without any remuneration and then the percentage of sale that the writer gets is low ”. Still, she admits that she wouldn't trade it for anything and feels very lucky to be able to bet on it.
Right now she is immersed in a book of stories where the ghost of Madrid remains, imposing a rhythm of life that plays a very important role in the way the characters create relationships.
Stories that began while writing the novel.
It seems that inertia is never lost.
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