Defends the writer Ana Merino (Madrid, 1971) that the characters of The map of the affections, his debut novel and with that this Monday, he won in Barcelona the 76th Nadal prize (€18,000), “are good; I believe in goodness”. It is a statement that sounds, in literature, as the phrase of Tolstoy that all happy families are alike, but in social it is even more shocking in troubled times, where they seem to reign in the opposite, the evil. “No, not the world evolves by the goodness: that empaticemos, let us celebrate being alive, that is goodness; I claim that place that makes things better,” he says. Holding it, he says, from the character of Valeria, the teacher, from which you will discover episodes emotional hidden in his small town american. “The character happens to him, something horrible, but I decided on the psychology of the good, not the evil that is also, and see how it faces from that goodness to the adversity and suffering”.
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The prose’s emotional Ana Merino wins the Nadal
Aware of the classics that you admire, holds that “don Quixote and Sancho are genuine of this goodness, you are impregnated with it.” Was it not an irony cervantina, as is Voltaire’s Candide? “Don’t leo, as well, in any case, I’m interested in the substrate of the persons who, despite the blows, continue to believe in others.” What dfiende who until now has been manifested as a poet and essayist, the empathy, the kindness, will learn, and that literature is the best tool to do this: “gives Us a breather to observe and understand the other; but to understand it you must listen to and the literature allows you to stop in to listen, to give you time in loneliness to understand a few characters that express patterns of human and see how it is resolved…,” or “no”.
he Speaks so quickly as serenity, the same as the one that takes handwritten notes in a few notebooks where are born the first versions of their books, and the same that says that gives the reading. “If we stop reading we stop to reflect, that is why it is vital to continue reading today and do so in a harmonious and concentrated, not reading a sentence and respondiéndola immediately: that is to play the stimulus, and it gives another kind of response”, says, without quoting the empire of social networks. There is in the novel a nod to all of this, she reveals, by having the protagonist be a preschool teacher: “Forge the emotional base of our children; if you lose the reading is lose social parameters, and vital for the coexistence; for this reason the literature is goodness and we should have the right to literature; how naive? Maybe, but reading books teaches us to listen”.
The literature is goodness and we should have the right to literature; how naive? Maybe, but reading books teaches us to listen to
Is aware Merino that the phrase can be translated to the situation of Spanish politics, where listening has not been the tonic dominant during the discussion of the investiture of these days. “All that will happen, it is effervescent: they are going to have to learn to live together and to listen; they seriously put them all to read, like when you have the kids excited and calm pulling out the play dough; they need to stop the emotions and work for the good of all Humanity.”
The crisis management of feelings is something which has marked the literary production of Merino, the daughter of writer and member of the Academy José María Merino, and companion of the author Manuel Vilas, finalist of the last Planet. Maybe that is why it speaks of his as a literature emotional, of feeling. “Are tags, but it is the will of the emotion is in the psychology of the characters and the omniscient narrator can show the thoughts and feelings of each one, with different options; there is a thought on style: is Valeria, but also that of others who express other concepts, such as evil, or the war, as well as veterans, important in the united States”. Well-known to the sociology of this country because he has lived 25 years as a professor of literature, now in Iowa. And even so it costs you to explain the leap that has led Obama to Trump. “It is a country that has been isolated: I have lived in five different states, especially rural America, and Hillary Clinton was not there to campaign; the american perspective is different: the responsibility of european policy is not in education, american politics, who does have the concept of freedom, but not the other”.
what do my literature emotional? Are labels, but it is the will of the emotion is in the psychology of the characters
the work of The american poet Edgar Lee Masters, Anthology of Spoon River, where “the characters of a people speaking from the tombstones,” is on the basis of his debut fiction (in libraries, on February 4,), in a new flow of influences between a poetry that has served to “reflect an ” I ” more poetic” and a prose “more an observer with the other, full of details human”, an aspect that until now, he admits, had strayed into the theatre.
All the while, as the creator of a prestigious writing workshop at the University of Iowa, maintains that yes you can teach writing, to poetry. “Yes of course, what happens is that first we need to teach to help to read poetry; the young people of today are not surrounded by the density of literature that we had, or the social respect they enjoyed; how are they going to know literature if it is not in your environment? You have to start to read with this people who have sensitivity or heard or curiosity; in the workshops they were accompanied on the talent; they just need to partners; when you share what you write or read with a friend you’re doing something similar”. That is, the literary workshop as another form of kindness, according to Merino.
