My Horacio´s Story

   The music, the water, the precise word. Tomas Gonzalez is the writer of  First was the Sea, a book that is nominated for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (important British recognition), with another of his novels, in Fog at noon. "And he was also so excited she was, but the smoke snow turned herself became nothing, turned water, mud turned fog returned. We must stand still to see it. Will move things a bit and they cling to their illusion of solid, "he wrote on his farm in Cachipay (Cundinamarca) from where he also replied in writing to TIME:

How do you feel when you got nominated for the prize? I'm glad. They are nominating a young writer of 33 years; when I had finished the book, and it's like they're producing changes in my past. Newly I finished the book I thought, without too much modesty, which would be translated into many languages. And that is happening, but decades later than I expected. What does that book means in your life? I wrote taken of the need to understand the death of my brother Juan. In that book I realized that I would devote the rest of my life to write. In recent years he has published at a much faster pace. Do you think the speed in artistic creation can affect the quality of the works?


I think you have the written work that has the best quality, no matter how long it takes. What happens in my case is that I no longer work for a living and can devote full time to writing. If I had to work for a living, The Hard Light would have taken me four years, not two, as each of the three books that followed. What did it mean for you to do 'Fog at midday'?I wrote out of necessity, like all my books. I had fun writing it, it's true, but I did not wrote it for fun but because I had to write it.Why after "Temporary" and "Wild Love strangers' you wanted to make a thriller? I am very fond of Chandler, Hammett and Cain. Every so often return to read them. I'm not theoretical and, other than to say that I enjoy a lot with humor and efficiency in the use of language and character creation, you can not think of more to say about them or the novel. I doubt that my novel strictly belongs to that genre, because I have womanizing detective, fond of eating and drinking, and only two policemen who are not chasing murderers but chasing and receiving bribes appear. But I have dead or deceased, yes, and no murderer. At about humor and economy of language was first coming working him from the sea and even before, probably taken by my penchant for crime writers and other writers like Rulfo and Hemingway, who also like the right word. The musicianship is decisive in his work. I confess that I read aloud to find the rhythm and guess what music heard ... I also read the text aloud. Low rather voice and I've been told that by far is heard as if praying or reciting mantras. In any case it is a pleasure to hear that words are being put -well well "placed" a character would say fine speech I have in the novel. The words are beautiful bodies in itself, but describe "the unlucky, so grating, so fatal, so gloomy," says César Vallejo. In this music, for me it was important to distinguish between the beautiful and nice, there is always the temptation to sweeten the matter. I aspire to a musicality with some sugar Celia Cruz came to my mind, but never too much.


With 'The hard light' again heard vallenato, what was the music of 'Fog'? Boleros, ballads, tangos and romantic vallenato, that is, what he had heard while writing the stories of the distant love of strangers. Also heard classical, jazz music, but during that time the romantic music of spite and were at the forefront.It feels like a novel about love and death. What was more important issue?

It is a novel of love and hate. It becomes continuation of the series of tales of the distant love of strangers, one that is longer and is novel. It also has the theme of death, as you say, that it weighs as much as love. A brutal tear suffered as Raul can kill and novel tells him that close to the abyss.Is it impossible to separate the love of death?It would seem not. That is why they are mentioned together so often. It must be shown that when love between two people there is always the possibility that the end wounds like Raul and poked cariflaca, black hood and scythe-armed occur. Also in the popular romantic language, love and death appear very close to one another: "I'm dying for you." "I kill your eyes." "Kill me with your kisses, treacherous".What kind of love was interested in telling here? Difficult to name such love. It is an unhealthy love, without sustainability, as sociologists and economists say no future. The person knows the other really did not want or did not love him, he is aware of the monumental flaws of another person, sometimes hates the other person hates, I would kill her, and think you can not live without it. "Neither you nor without you". He himself does not understand how you can be in those. And when finally the abandonment occurs, as you see. It may be pertinent to repeat here Pambelé Boxer response when asked about their marital status. "Acrimonious" he said.


In the novel reconstructs the events through multiple voices and yet never know the truth. Is it really always so difficult to grasp in the novel? The truth is always elusive. Here where I live there are butterflies blue edged transparent wings, butterflies mirror the call, flapping very fast, flying with short, jerky movements, and do not pose rarely, so it is very hard to look at. The truth seems. In my novel four people, one from the beyond to medium touch the truth of what happened, and also to play the unfathomable what happened they are needed. The truth requires stability, and stability of our world is always precarious. So he lives much closer to the truth a musician than a philosopher or a physicist. Again present the strength of the environment ...

We are nature. It is impossible to create a character without showing how their environment is manifested in him. And if we spoke of changing environment, we would have to tell how that character is related to the new environment and internalized to become part of it. If he fails, he starts to suffer terribly and then either escapes or dies. Raul, abandonment will upset the environment and to change it, let it drift. What about the water? Did you used to mark the rhythms or a character in itself? Water is a symbol of the fluidity of the world. Fluidity and musicality. "The sound of water says what I think," the Taoist Chuang Tze. But it's more than that. Ninety percent do not know how our body is water. We are made of water, we are water. At noon Fog is an essential element of the narrative. It appears from the title and its sound is constant throughout the story. Julia speaks from the water.The character of Julia (poet) is egocentric. Was it a portrait of the literary world in Colombia?My intention was not to portray that world. Novelists and Colombian storytellers I know are people pretty focused on themselves, like me, because that seems to be typical of writers from all latitudes, but work with critical sense of his own work, they are demanding their own work and the others, and that is why at this time is occurring in Colombia unprecedented narrative work. Nor was it my intention to portray the world of poets, because I do not know him very well.


There is also a mockery of bad poetry. How do you see the place of poetry today? Sometime poetry lost its readers and I think that the fault had the same poets, who allowed the bond to break. They fell into the easy maybe, I dunno. He started missing the music. The fact is that one does not read the poets, and the need for poetry in prose satisfies the good storytellers. García Márquez, Rulfo, Cortazar are for me great poets. Joyce also, Carson McCullers, Marguerite Duras. Poets and storytellers put prosaic, poetic, and now the biggest requirement is made to have a narrator is poetry. If you do not have that, they say, it will never be a storyteller first order. I agree. How important is poetry in prose?Say what poetry has never been easy. When it is defined by its vertically no problem. But now we are speaki of poetry in prose and each person might define it differently. For me it is the beauty of the images (and translate the horror) and the musicality of speech or expression flow. I speak not only of tunes, alliteration and others 'irons' of traditional poetry, which are also valid, of course, but for harmony in the sounds, and that harmony can be dry and sharp, unmusical, or also in the musical traditional sense. Rather, anything goes. The important thing is that the writer is aware of the sounds produced and that the tone of the novel remains ringing at the end, when the reader has read the last word. Easier said than done, I know too well, but that's been my ambition.

Biography            © 2015 Federico Luna