An Argentina – surely different from the one he knows so well – received during these days Arturo Pérez-Reverte, one of the Spanish writers with the greatest impact among us and in the world and for whom Revolution, his novel set precisely in the Mexican rebellions of a century ago, was the reason for his presentation at the Book Fair and his last promotional tours.
"I used to come almost every year, but when the pandemic hit, my friend Jorge (Fernández Díaz) advised me, 'This is getting really bad.' He was right, we suspended and only now I was able to return. I was very excited, as always, although some of those endearing bars or bookstores that I used to enjoy in Buenos Aires are no longer there," he says.
And he bases it, since – after his 70 years and throughout his literary work – Pérez-Reverte never abandons his condition as a "reporter", a restless soul that led him for more than two decades to cover wars as a "special envoy" or, always, to endow each of his novels with a severe investigative work.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte was presented on Saturday, May 6 at the Book Fair. Photo Juano Tesone
He explains to Clarín Cultura: "I was a journalist, an editor. And I maintain those habits. It is true that literature was deep inside, in my origins. But I always retain the instinct of a reporter. That's why my way of working is to get into each place, take note. I build my novels based on that instinct, that style of work and in the places that attract me. For El Tango de la Vieja Guardia, which develops chapters in the Buenos Aires of another time, I toured Barracas from end to end, the most unusual places. I have that habit. Because in my work as a novelist there are two phases, preparation and writing. With the latter I justify the previous stage. And this one is really beautiful. I enjoy preparing the book, traveling, reading and above all, talking to people. In short, being a reporter makes me happy."
But there are important differences between the genders. How can the hard data and vertigo that make the essence of journalism be transferred to the novel?
Sometimes I think that my novels work because I never stopped being a reporter. I consider myself a reporter who writes novels. From the reporter I have my work rhythm, I can write under pressure, forced by the clock. My head works like that of a reporter, which gives me an agility, a way of moving, of relating to people, of preparing myself.
I don't feel that mine is the relationship of "a novelist who had a kind of success" but that of someone who goes to the neighborhood, even in the underworld and tries to make friends everywhere. It's an attitude that, I feel, benefits me a lot. And in the end, in my novels that way of approaching things is revealed.
But also transferring to the reader the language of another time and another geography requires a time that not every novelist takes.
For me, listening is fundamental, listening to the other. Sometimes I am amazed by the audacity of the writer who goes as a tourist to a place and writes a novel without worrying about how it is actually spoken there. In Revolution, moreover, I had the challenge of making people speak as they spoke in the Mexico of a century ago, which is completely different from what we know today.
That's why I read his novels of the time, there are a dozen excellent works from the 20s to 40s, such as those of Vasconcelos or Campobello, among others.
With El tango... the same thing happened to me and that is why it is essential to read Borges and approach tango, I saw all the films with Carlos Gardel to know the tone with which they spoke in the neighborhood of Barracas and at that time. In short, I do not consider myself a typical novelist but I keep the illusion of moving. The reporter's illusion.
"Revolución", by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (Alfaguara, $8,399 paper; $5,266 audiobook; $2,316 ebook).
He also said that there are places that no longer interest him.
At this point, I write novels to feel that I can be happier. A novel takes me a year or a year and a half of work and I don't want to suffer it. On the contrary, I want to feel comfortable with the people and the place.
Another issue is important: as a child I was very imaginative, I watched a movie or read a book and I appropriated the character, I wanted to be a soldier, an astronaut, a harpooner. And as a writer I can be a boy who did not grow up, who continues to play and disguises himself as a character, I can be a tango dancer in Buenos Aires, a revolutionary in Mexico or an Italian who prepares a bomb in Gibraltar. At that point, I know how to play.
Who were your models at that time of formation?
"I was lucky enough to grow up in a house with a large library. Everything was there: from the adventure novels of Salgari or Dumas to Balzac, Thomas Mann, Stendhal or Proust. I have an intense library training, but what marked me at the beginning were adventure books.
That is why, when some literary critics place themselves on another plane, I answer that for me all literature is important, whether Agatha Christie or Dumas or Thomas Mann, each one responds to a reading need of a certain public. It doesn't make me itchy to be told 'he looks like Salgari...', I take it as a compliment.
If the novelist becomes too serious and boasts of his quality, he loses touch with what was. And it must maintain its essence, know its debts to the past. I read Borges, Arlt, Soriano, I'm never going to give that up. No one explained Argentina like Soriano, anyone who wants to understand Argentina should read it. Soriano as well as Borges and Mujica Lainez, of course.
Is there a limit to quality?
The current problem is that, given the general crisis that translates into the crisis of readers, publishers are launching a war to publish everything and sometimes anything. Of course, it covers what is of authentic quality.
And a good novel, from a Dumas to a Soriano, appears suffocated by an amount that, deep down, does not interest anyone. Much of the blame, I insist, is some publishers that publish everything, to see if they get any of them right.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte: "People associate Revolution with 'settling scores,' making it a factor of hopelessness, destructive. And it makes the word more dangerous." Photo Ariel Grinberg
In relation to your latest book, you stressed that the concept of revolution is no longer linked to the one we knew.
"It's just an opinion, I could be wrong... But that's what I think. In the nineteenth or twentieth centuries at the beginning, especially, the word revolution was used in a noble sense: "We make revolution to change the world." And words like socialism, communism or national socialism (the isms) had not yet shown their dark side, Hitler's death camps or Stalin's gulags.
There were many noble and honest people who wanted to change the world. And for good, to improve it. What has happened since then, causes that the word "revolution" – which was a word of hope – has become in our days a term associated with resentment, to settle accounts.
It was a word adulterated, manipulated and perverted by many of those who "made the Revolution." I had to see him in Nicaragua, where I covered the Sandinista revolution and now it has led to a dictator like Ortega. So, people associate Revolution with "reckoning," making it a hopeless, destructive factor. And it makes the word more dangerous.
In the specific case of the Mexican Revolution, the axis of the book, he maintained idealism. For example, the one transmitted by the first of its great chroniclers, John Reed.
That vision would not be possible today. Considering what happened next, Reed had a political naivety that – at the same time – made him charming. Because he was a man of faith. Today you don't find a John Reed among the would-be revolutionaries, not even among those who seem most honored. It is as if that word, so manipulated and perverted as it was, lost its nobility.
One aspect of your novels, which appears in Revolution but also in other more recent novels such as The Italian and Line of Fire (set in a key episode of the Spanish Civil War such as the Battle of the Ebro) is that it concentrates the tension on the pre-combat rather than on the combat itself.
"I was in the war, in the real fighting. There are only shots there, there is no reflection. It's action and you have to act. It's pure instinct, bend down so you don't get killed. Or shoot. In combat there is no fear – it has not happened to me – but the real fear is the one you feel sooner or later, when traveling a lonely road, in full uncertainty.
Interesting sensations are created while a fight is only adrenaline. That's why the pre-battle has a greater importance in my novels. Because in the previous one you are alone, nobody helps you, you are with your thoughts in your family or with the fear of being mutilated. It is a personal fear, not a collective one.
I remember especially in the Balkans, three decades ago, when we took refuge in a fenced village and had to hide in the cornfields at dawn. The night before, I vomited in fright. In battle, it is easier to be brave. The difficulty is when you are alone, with reflection and thoughts about what can happen to you.
On the word "revolution", Arturo Pérez-Reverte, considers that "it was a word adulterated, manipulated and perverted by many of those who 'made the Revolution'. I had to see him in Nicaragua, where I covered the Sandinista revolution and now it has led to a dictator like Ortega." Photos Ariel Grinberg
This brings us to the theme of cruelty, which in many of the conflicts he had to see, or about which he wrote, finds no limits.
The human being is very varied. There are the good ones and the non-good ones. And there are places where certain characters go beyond all humanity. You can be a good man and not want to kill, but the one next to you does... And for some there is no limit to their cruelty, they are very dangerous.
War allows them to exercise what they cannot do in social life. There are places in Africa where you can kill, slit your throat, and it seems that nothing is going to happen to you... There, some feel free to exercise all their cruelty. And you see terrible, atrocious things. In short, war is a place where certain men are freed from the corset that a civilized society imposes on cruelty.
Another issue is that period characters, as could be the case of Pancho Villa in Revolution, appear, but always on another plane.
Pancho Villa, or even Emiliano Zapata, serve as a historical framework. I don't do novels about them, I'm not a biographer. To go further, Dumas did not make Richelieu the protagonist but the musketeers. I learned it when I was ten years old and I say it by practicing. Because I'm a novelist, not a historian. My daughter is a historian. And I only use history as an ingredient for my novels.
Why this "return" to Mexico, which had already been present in other novels?
"It's not about anything special. I go through life with stories in my head, what the people I met left me, the works I read. And suddenly, some generate a story for me. In the specific case of Revolution and Mexico, what I try to do is describe a boy who finds in war the explanation to the world in which he lives, the keys to life and death, war as learning and not as horror or in prison. And that he meets the place where he sees things that are not seen in "normal life".
And what is the relationship with your own life?
–The same. When you have an education like I was fortunate to receive – with books, people who guided you in life – and suddenly you go out into the world and see violence, obviously you know the other side. Because you had grown up in a world where you defined guards as good, priests as saints, a world where you believed in politicians.
Your parents raised you in that sense and you thought the world was like that. But you go out, you see the war and it's a shock. Because in war there are those who kill, rape, destroy. But you also see the manifestations of goodness and human dignity. It's a school. I came to that when I was twenty years old and a training, that helped me to digest it, to draw conclusions. And I had to understand the world through wars.
Pérez Reverte's novels took us through almost all eras and almost all geographies. Photo EFE/ Juan Carlos Hidalgo
Pérez Reverte's novels took us through almost all eras and almost all geographies. From the battles of El Cid to that drama of the Civil War in his own land, he "traveled" through Eritrea, but also through all European corners and almost all Americans. Intrigue, romance, adventure, chess or art appear in the most dissimilar, unexpected corners. He is concerned about his legacy, he is interested in what he generates. And not be encapsulated in the tower of the 'consecrated'.
"I never believed it... I live reality. And that reality is that of the man who is sleeping on this autumn night under a blanket on Corrientes Avenue. If you approach that – here and in any other city – you understand many things, you understand the grudges that are being built. And you can even understand some reactions. I am not talking about philosophy but about the simple subjects, of everyday life. To know that, to understand it, to live with it is to live lucidly. And I try to understand. And my novels are a periodic summary of all this, of what I am learning."
On inclusive language
In recent years, Pérez-Reverte added, to his vocation as a novelist, his participation as a member of the Royal Spanish Academy. And from there – and also appealing in all forms of communication – he was seen in the middle of other "battles", in the defense of the tradition of the language in the face of the slips of the "inclusive" or with a very firm position against the attempts of cancellation in the culture.
"I never fully believed in that solemnity that 'The Academy' represents. I am a kind of luck in life and getting to the Academy was an honor that, at first, I refused, finally convinced my friends. But I'm not your typical academic, I joke about some of those conventions, impostures or vanities. I have my vanities, but they are different. As for the function, I do take it seriously, I fulfill all the duties. And I think the most important is to maintain the unity of the Spanish language, much more in these times, that Argentines, Colombians, Spaniards, we can continue to handle ourselves with the same lexicon and grammatical language, respecting the identity of each one. It is important that we use the same grammar, the same spelling. I am proud of that defense and the words in our language," he says.
Faced with "feminist" claims, she argues that "we must understand that language is a very important weapon and some politicians want to infiltrate its management. I believe that feminism is necessary in our lives, but I do not accept that the 'radicals' force you to change a way of speaking and writing, to switch to a language that nobody uses. Spanish is a tool that we need clean, that nobody entangles us with that... Perhaps it is a losing battle in our defense of language, when stupidity and demagoguery try to take over the world. But we must fight, not abandon this camp to the enemy."
He also questioned the offensive of the attempts of "cancellation" in the cultural environment, widespread in all the arts: "Suddenly some appear who want to cancel works by Chaplin, or even texts by Borges because supposedly one day he made a joke about women ... It's all very ridiculous."
Perez-Reverte Basic
- He was born in Cartagena, Spain, in 1951. He was a war reporter for twenty-one years and covered eighteen armed conflicts for newspapers and television.
- With more than twenty million readers in the world, translated into forty languages, many of his works have been taken to film and television.
Today he shares his life between literature, the sea and navigation. He is a member of the Royal Spanish Academy and the Association of Marine Writers of France.
PC
See also
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