First was Tomás
Son
of Alberto
Gonzalez and Tulia Gutierrez, Tomás Gonzalez is the nephew of the
writer,
lawyer and philosopher Fernando González Ochoa, who shared some of his
childhood years in Envigado. The relationship with his uncle was very
close,
and direct, because they both lived on adjoining farms. The way
Fernando
interacted with people of all kinds and their farm animals quickly made
him a
figure of reference and personal admiration for Tomás; thanks to this,
one of the protagonists in "La historia de Horacio" is based on him.
Twenty years later, the writer returned to his uncle's house, now
converted into
a museum dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of his work.
From him
he learned "to look at life with your own eyes, not with anyone else
".
Tomás
Gonzalez studied at Colegio La Salle de Envigado, school from where he
graduated. After school, he began the Chemical Engineering career at
the Bolivarian University of Medellín, but then chose philosophy
because he got bored. After finishing his career, he traveled six
months to Strasbourg, France. He returned to Colombia and worked as a
bartender in a Bogota bar while writing "First was the sea". After
writing of the novel, he traveled with his family to Miami, where he
lived three years. Then they moved to New York for sixteen years.
Recently
he has begun to publicize his work in Colombia. Several experts
attribute some of this silence to his particular literary style.
Therefore, Gonzalez is for many an inarguable good writer. An interview
to him by another author he said he has always preferred "readers
involved in the creation of the novel or story, that is, taking the
data to be leaving Colprensa agency and they themselves are history. It
is a very different reader readers commercial novels, is a more
difficult to please and demanding reader with the writer. That to me is
more interesting. Thanks to that there is that kind of readers is that
I interested in writing"
Literary
development
The
passion for reading was instilled by his mother, who shared with him
and his brothers’ books by Jules Verne and Emilio Salgari. Several
years later, in the sixties, González was dedicated to study Latin
American boom writers, especially Gabriel García Márquez, Julio
Cortázar and Juan Rulfo. Moreover, in poetry he prefers Jose Asuncion
Silva, Leon de Greiff and Federico Garcia Lorca.
Literary
vision
For
Gonzalez, literature is a way of exploring the world, believing that
writing helps to understand it and live in it: "Literature is the
ability to understand through recreation, astonishment, admiration, joy
and even the awe horror."
Despite
having lived a part of his life in the United States, he does not consider
writing from the outside is too important for the literary work, because as he
says, he is convinced that the artist has a picture of the world that
accompanies him everywhere and you can recreate without having to leave
their land. In fact, he states that any situation of life is raw
material for writing, because life and death are always present in the
world.
Journalism
While accepting that journalism could have been a good training camp for the preparation of his style, he believes that the use of your life to make fiction is a kind of journalism, having no qualms to use actual facts in his work.
@Copyright Federico Luna Rodríguez 2015
