With “The island of the sleeping woman”, his new book under his arm, the writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte landed in Argentina to participate in the 49th International Book Fair of Buenos Aires. The scenario could not be more conducive, a city that breathes literature and receives it as its dearest friend. Because this 73 -year -old Spanish, like Pichuco in the “nightlife of my neighborhood”, to our country “is always returning.” Author of the trilogy “Falcó” and the best seller “The Italian”, now he meets his southernmost audience, eager to listen to the stories of a man who wrote his more than 30 novels with the same intensity with which he lives.
However, Pérez-Reverte is not just any narrator.
Before becoming one of the most read authors in the world with twenty -seven million books sold and translated into more than 40 languages, he was a war journalist for more than two decades. Today, successful and already on the side of those who did and lived a lot, they are preparing to enjoy. He prefers not to talk about his war past, which he already spoke a lot and not about politics, because “the story is repeated and what I could say today, I already said it 20 years ago.” Then it is the most interesting and confidential, its intimacy. The recesses of his head, that river of ink that generates a story after another, of intrigue, love, sex, power, ambition and betrayal.
“There are brain novelists like my admired and remembered friend Javier Marías, but I am more hunter, always looking out. My novels are not introspections, reflections on me and my intimacy. I go for life with the binocular plays. Namely,” beautiful girl “,” situation “,” adventure “,” adventure “, all inside Useful, it is the basis of my writing and what keeps me alive. ”
News: Who believes that in his novels are his fears and contradictions is wrong?
Arturo Pérez-Reverte: I live from the outside, to project. My backpack is loaded with the outside world. If I cut the link and I dedicate myself to me, to be at home thinking about me, my old age, my wife, my children and what I have, I do not think anyone likes. I clarify that excellent novels of that world arise, but it is not mine. The Savia of the outside is what motorizes me every day. Which allows me to feel and not get older like a grumpy grandfather.
News: He listens to it between intuitive and passionate but the market requires a certain literary pattern.
Pérez-Reverte: Today I am a professional novelist. When I started it was pure enthusiasm. Not anymore today, I have already written 30 novels and I have an experience and reader public in more than 40 countries so I have to be attentive to that spectrum of readers. Argentines, Chinese, Poles and Russians, among many more. So when raising a novel, I want to be effective. I want my Chinese reader to enjoy it just like the Italian and English reader. Then I need to move in parameters that are generous enough to welcome them all, and that requires a lot of effort.
News: What role does he play in an author of his size?
Pérez-Reverte: My work is based on a structure. I don’t feel to see what comes out. Some writers sit down to see what comes out and take out masterpieces, but I need to plan it much earlier. My greatest pride is being an effective writer. Then I get up every day at seven in the morning, I exercise, I give myself a shower and I am in my library writing. I work six or eight hours every day, you feel or not feel. I have an absolutely Spartan, routine work system and when the good time comes, of fluid inspiration, I take it, and when not, to give it more force.
News: Spanish is his mother language.
Pérez-Reverte: The Spanish language is not perfect as no language. And I am very far from being perfect. So as a novelist I am in trouble every day, because I have in my head what I want to tell perfectly but I can’t find those words. And I have an age in which my teachers are no longer. So what do I do? I go to the greatest teachers. The Eternal. I go to my library and I seek: “Let’s see Balzac, Borges, Art. How will you? And in them I find the solution. My library is not a place of dead books or future books, but of living books.
In the last 20 years, Pérez-Reverte became one of the most replicated authors in cinema. Is that his prose has the plus of his personal experience. And while not turning it out on its pages, it knows and transmits it in the third person. His new book “The island of sleeping woman” is no exception. Set in a paradise as beautiful as disturbing, the novel puts into play the moral dilemmas that characterize his work.
“During the final stage of my previous book” The final problem “I was in Greece and it was with that landscape that this novel appeared in my head and I started to weave. That island such, a story Equis, that corsair, a modern pirate, which is during the Spanish civil war. The story of a woman like Lena, a man like Jordan, a marriage in the middle. And with all that I had adventure, love, sex, sex.
News: Have a new story changed the plans?
Pérez-Reverte: Yes. Several times. It happened to me many times to realize that I was writing novels that were not for that moment. With two pages, with ten and up to three months of work. It happened to me with “The tango of the old guard.” I started it and at the same time I realized that I had to leave it because I was going to be wrong. 20 years later I understood that it was a good novel. Today I would say it is very solid. It is divided into three places and moments, Buenos Aires, the Costa Azul and Sorrento. It is a love in three phases. Where the couple is known, where it is reunited and already in old age. And why I had not worked when I started it, because I lacked age and experience to write the second and third stage.
News: Many directors brought their novels to the cinema. An amalgam that almost always leaves the writer.
Pérez-Reverte: When I write I never think about the cinema. But critics say that I am very visual, so I imagine that I must facilitate the task to the director. They have made many series and movies and the truth is that I almost never like what I see. Roman Polanski made “The Club Dumas” and did very well. They made “the Flanders Table” and I wanted to go fighting with the director. He was another age and other energies. Over time I have learned that one charges the rights and loose. I am not responsible. If I like it, applaud; If I don’t like it, I shut up.
News: In her literature the woman occupies a preponderant place.
Pérez-Reverte: Even secondary women have important papers in my novels. Because? Because for war I have seen women in very extreme situations. In critical places, being raped, being loot of the winner, being them and avengeing men, killing, dead. And I always want to see that woman who fights, the one who does not resign her role in history. A vindictive woman is the most dangerous human being that the race can experience, while a lover is the most faithful person. Not so man. My novel “The Queen of the South” talks a little about it.
News: literature and cinema are determined at the end of the world.
Pérez-Reverte: There are two ways to face the horror that the world proposes. Or you scare and generate more chaos or go to the window with a glass of wine and watch. As someone will have observed the barbarians to burn Rome. And what allows you to be in the window looking without scared is the culture. Once I traveled on a plane between Cyprus and Beirut and thought it fell. Everyone began to scream out of control and I said: “I’m going to die between these alienated assholes? I can’t die like them,” then I relaxed and started looking at them. Culture is knowing that the time came and that the inexorable rules of life are met. My luck is that I get to old age with that culture that allows me to digest my own old age and the decline of the world in which I have lived.
