Those from Bilbao are born where they want by María Larrea (Review + interview)

Original title: People from Bilbao are born wherever they want
Translation: Alicia Martorell
Year of publication: 2022
Valuation: It’s very nice

French literature has a long tradition of personal and family autobiography and/or autofiction. We will not go back too far in time and will focus on literature written by women to give two examples: Delphine de Vigan and Brigitte Giraud. In that tradition and in the same heading as these names we can place the debut book of the Bilbao resident in France María Larrea. Later we will ask the author if this comparison is accurate or not, but I think it can serve as an initial location.

It is almost impossible to talk about Those from Bilbao are born where they want without making “spoilers”. The story told in it is so tremendous that it is very difficult not to spoil the book, but we are going to try.

We are facing a family autobiography that takes place between the Spanish post-war period and the Paris of the 21st century, before an Almodovarian drama (changing the colorinchis of La Mancha for the gray of pre-Guggenheim Bilbao) in which the search and construction of personal and family/collective identity occupies the central place.

Therefore, it is not only the story of María Larrea but also, and especially, that of Victoria and Julián. Lives marked by terrible conditions in childhood, by abandonment, violence, exile, loneliness, hardship, revelations, doubts, etc., although always with a point of hope and tenderness among all that suffering.

In this type of text there is always the risk that the story itself ends up devouring other aspects of the book. The power that it possesses is undeniable, but it is also true that Those from Bilbao are born where they want It also has a high literary value. For many reasons:

• The different readings it offers, thanks to the structure chosen by the author. Brief chapters with time jumps that serve to show a crude portrait of post-Franco Spain (more in the first part of the text) are mixed with intimate chapters focused on closer times and problems.
• The right combination of drama, humor (María, how can you think of The Spy Store!!!!) and tenderness (oh, that chapter 23). The material made for free falls into the melodramatic and self-pitying, but the author achieves the right tone for the text, in my opinion.
• The rhythm, thanks to those short chapters I was talking about. The changes in characters and settings, in addition to giving the text different layers, give the narrative an agility that is appreciated.

In short, a magnificent debut with a shocking story but very well handled by its author. It remains to be seen what path María Larrea’s writing will take in the future. We’ll be alert

*********************************

Thanks to the people at Alianza Editorial (Pepe, Raúl), we are lucky enough to sneak in on 11/16, the day of Pedro Sánchez’s investiture, on the tour to present the novel and chat for a while with María Larrea. These are our questions and their more than interesting answers:

ULAD: I speak at the beginning of the review of the French literary tradition as far as autobiographical literature is concerned (Duras or Simone de Beauvoir in the past and Ernaux, De Vigan, Brigitte Giraud or Vanessa Springora more recently). Is it correct to place Those from Bilbao are born where they want in that tradition?

ML: Yes, I would talk more (I bother with this novel) about Ordesa, by Manuel Vilas. It is my favorite Spanish novel, number 1 for me. I read it when I wrote, so it really has been a very important novel for me. And also Nothing opposes the night, by Delphine de Vigan. I read this after writing, I didn’t want to read it before.

Despite this, Those from Bilbao are born where they want It is an autobiographical novel, yes, but I insist a lot that it is a novel. Not in an essay, it is not a testimony. It is a novel and that is also what Delphine de Vigan says about her book, which is a novel based on real events.

ULAD: Being autobiographical, your novel has many layers, many readings. The story of your parents is brutal and speaks of a Spain that, fortunately, no longer exists, but it also has that reading, for example.

ML: Well, I don’t know if that Spain doesn’t exist. I believe that there are still echoes of that Spain in this society. Right now, using the word amnesty for 24 hours seems to me to be not harmless (harmless is the word used by María) and that stirs many things. I think there is still that darkness, or that dark Spain, hidden there.

ULAD: Before you yourself included the reference to Almodóvar in the novel, I thought of an Almodóvar without color, but after a few days of reading the book I think of an Almodóvar scripted by Agustín Gómez Arcos or of an Almodóvar passed through the filter of the Truffaut The 400 blows o del Louis Malle de A blow at the heart. Can these be valid references for someone who hasn’t read the book?

ML: Yes, absolutely. The 400 blows It is a reference. I’ve thought a lot about Truffaut. It’s one of my references. He made a cinema, through the character of Antoine Doinel, intimate and commercial at the same time, but without the word being “ugly.” He could reach a lot of people by talking about himself.

And Almodóvar, too. I think Almodóvar has been very important for me, being the daughter of immigrants. It was my first window towards Spain, and towards a Spain and a world of socially invisible women that I did not see represented in French cinema or literature. So he and his cinema have helped me a lot as I grew up, in my life as a teenager in Paris that was beginning to be called by cinema.

ULAD: In chapter 11 of the text he says that “he puts his salvation in celluloid and in stories.” What do you put in this book?

ML: Also salvation. Salvation in fiction, whether in cinema or literature. Since I started writing films, making short films or books, I wanted to understand the world, that life is, many times, very absurd and that with fiction we ask questions and try to find answers to the absurd, the complicated, the hard or violent.

When I start the novel, I ask myself this question: how are three orphans from the same nation going to form a family in France in the 80s? And so I have had to revisit all the stories to be able to understand them and to be able to understand where I came from and where I am going. We ask ourselves existential questions and try to answer them by writing.

ULAD: I recently saw an interview with the Cuban writer Severo Sarduy (who lived and died in Paris, by the way) in which he said that “the biography of a man is a rather arbitrary cut. Why does this biography necessarily begin in the moment that man is born and end at the moment that a man dies?” Did he unknowingly anticipate your novel?

ML: Yes, what you have quoted is very shocking and precisely the first sentence of my novel is “no one remembers the moment they were born.” That was what bothered me, not being able to remember to know what happened. And the whole novel is about trying to find out about that birth. For me, that first page, paragraph or sentence is very important, which is going to be the “program” of the book.

That’s also why I wanted to invent Julián and Victoria’s birth until I reached mine because that has been the key to our family, those births, those abandonments…

Curiously, in the book there is only one character (Julián, the father) whom we follow from the moment he is born to the moment he dies and with that character what I have sought is redemption. I have written about that antihero and redeeming him through the summary of his life.

ULAD: How much is personal memory and how much is research/documentation in the text?

ML: The best thing I did when I started the novel was throw away the movie script I had written and stop asking questions. I stopped asking my mother, I just wanted to function with my memory and my memories. In French, the word memory is souvenir and the etymology of souvenir It is “come to the aid of.” I believe that memory and remembrance come to help us in the face of suffering or questions.

Later I did research what Galicia or Bilbao were like in the 1940s, but fundamentally I wanted to work on memory and recollection. As Vilas says in the 5th anniversary edition of Ordesa, “Memory is one of the most mysterious forms of love.” Manuel Vilas kills me, kills me!

I have worked, as I told you, fundamentally with those memories or that memory that I had of my parents and the little that they had told me and in the end the novel is a declaration of love towards them. There is no other way to say it.

ULAD: And how does a person with a family background as “peculiar as yours” face their own motherhood?

ML: I have been a mother twice; one without knowing and the other knowing. I lived it both ways. One of them was totally incomprehensible, she didn’t understand what it was like to be a mother. With my first child I felt totally disarmed and with my second child, already knowing the secret of my birth, having reflected on it and without having all the answers, I have been a mother in a somewhat different way, accepting that I will not be able to be the best mother in the world but the only mother available to him and who will try to do the best possible.

ULAD: Now I write autofiction and tell you that a relatively close relative has a story very similar to yours (not in Bilbao, but in another city in northern Spain) but in his case he never wanted to know. What do you think of this position, so diametrically opposed to yours?

ML: In my case, I didn’t know where it came from. In my case there was a great mystery, a great black hole, and I, being a screenwriter and liking stories and with a mind that creates scenarios and scripts of all possibilities, drove me crazy and had this obsession of knowing, knowing, knowing. , know…I wanted to know the real story, which was the family tree hidden behind the other.

On the other hand, in addition to an adoptee’s obsession with knowing where they come from, I have always been obsessed with people’s stories (my friends, people I meet, etc.) or their human trajectories. And for that reason, too, I wanted to know the history of my biological parents.

ULAD: Another book theme, although to a lesser extent, is the change of cities. Do you recognize in the San Francisco of today the San Francisco of your paternal grandmother (San Francisco was, for years, the “bad life” neighborhood of Bilbao and has suffered a brutal process of gentrification in recent years?

ML: Bilbao is a clear protagonist of the book. As I told you, the almost only documentation or research I did for the novel was about Bilbao. And I also wanted to tell about that Bilbao of the 80s that has nothing to do with the Bilbao of today and the transformation of that Bilbao that my friends, finally, know is not that dark, black, dirty city of the 80s or that city that Portuguese or Moroccan immigrants passed through in the summer when they returned to their origins.

For me, Bilbao, or Irala, were my town and I wanted to tell the transformation of the city until reaching the Guggenheim, until the postcard city that it is now, and the resilience of the people of Bilbao. I am very proud to come from a city that has been able and knew how to transform itself without turning its back on what it has been. I think that is the pride of being from Bilbao.

ULAD: And to finish. We are not going to give you a Bilbao test or ask you to tell us Athletic’s lineup, which I don’t even know, but we do have a very important question: butter bun or carolina?

ML: With the butter bun. I am “team butter bun” (Maria’s laughter but not mine because I am “team carolina”) and “team” chocolate palm tree from Arrese!.