Newsweek magazine in Spanish Dec 07, 2016
The Brexit or Donald Trump represent “the triumph of the lie” “way away,” says the Spanish writer Javier Cercas, awarded the European Book Prize for his novel “The imposter” and who defends in an interview on the power of literature to change the world.
“we’re seeing an escalation of the lie of a unprecedented proportions and with impunity,” says Fences, in front of an espresso decaffeinated in a former abbey in brussels was converted into a hotel, hours before receiving the award in the European Parliament, awarded by the association Esprit d’europe.
“In the Brexit said some terrible things and, on the day that they win, because they say that that was not true, and nothing happens. Clear that Hillary Clinton had lies, but that had Donald Trump were to be 25,000 times more. They are excellent students of Hitler as saying: ‘The white lie don’t believe anyone, that you believe are the lies big,’” he says.
The battle between the lie and the truth, as he himself explains, is the thread of “The imposter”, which tells the story of “a fiction embodied in a man”, specifically in Enric Marco, a spaniard, who caused astonishment international in 2005 after the discovery that it was not a Holocaust survivor as he had secured until then.
For the awarded the national Narrative prize in Spain in 2010, “when it comes to our personal past or our collective past, which we like are the lies, because both the countries and the people, when it comes to this past, hard, complex, bloody, terrible, we tend to hide it”.
“Enric Marco is an example of that, of how we invent a past to suit our wishes,” explains the author of such novels as “Soldiers of Salamis” or “Anatomy of a moment” , for whom literature must reveal the reality or the truth “but to his way.”
The power of the arts
In a world of impostors, the literature has, to a Fence, a “huge”. “The power of literature is not the power of politics and journalism. It is a power long-term,” which changes “the perception of the world of the reader”. “Literature, of course that changes the world, but it doesn’t change from one day to another, can’t do that resign Trump, or to mount a strike.”
The award-winning believes that “the truth of literature is a universal truth, a moral truth, which often comes through fiction, through the lie”, while acknowledging that “every book has its rules,” and the duty of the writer is to find them.
In “Anatomy of a moment”, which tells of the attempt of coup d’état in Spain on 23 February 1981, and in “The imposter”, the author born in Ibahernando (centre-east) in 1962 opted for “novels without fiction” to unearth the reality, “because they were issues dummy for themselves.”
“The 23-F is our great fiction collective, in the same sense that it is the murder of Kennedy for the americans. Historical fact, real, buried in the middle of piles of fictions, theories were foolish and measures truths”, he says.
The power of the arts
In a world of impostors, the literature has, to a Fence, a “huge”. “The power of literature is not the power of politics and journalism. It is a power long-term,” which changes “the perception of the world of the reader”. “Literature, of course that changes the world, but it doesn’t change from one day to another, can’t do that resign Trump, or to mount a strike.”
The award-winning believes that “the truth of literature is a universal truth, a moral truth, which often comes through fiction, through the lie”, while acknowledging that “every book has its rules,” and the duty of the writer is to find them.
In “Anatomy of a moment”, which tells of the attempt of coup d’état in Spain on 23 February 1981, and in “The imposter”, the author born in Ibahernando (centre-east) in 1962 opted for “novels without fiction” to unearth the reality, “because they were issues dummy for themselves.”
“The 23-F is our great fiction collective, in the same sense that it is the murder of Kennedy for the americans. Historical fact, real, buried in the middle of piles of fictions, theories were foolish and measures truths”, he says.
“A past present”
“The monarch of shadows” will be his next novel, to be published in 2017, and in which it reverts to the Spanish Civil War after “Soldiers of Salamis”, but whose common thread, beyond conflict, is the legacy of the Civil War”.
Fences tells the story of her family, who during the war was on the side of franco. “The hero, between the quotation marks, of the family for years was a guy very young 17 years old marched to war led by the enthusiasm and the idealism, because it was also idealistic in the side of franco”. He would die two years later at the battle of the Ebro.
“My novels are supposedly historical, are not historical, they speak of the present,” warns the writer. “The past, especially the past that there is memory and there are witnesses, has not gone, still here, still acting. And if you do not have in mind, we do not understand the present”.
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