Clara Sánchez, a book that disappeared (and found) in the new novel – Corriere.it

My father drives a thirty-eight-ton truck with a trailer and spends a lot of time outside the home, and this has created a bond between me and my mother that partly excludes him. The same goes for the fact that my mum and I have blue eyes and we look alike physically, while my dad is dark, stout and a little rough. When he comes back from his travels he looks at us like two tourists passing through his gloomy life, and crosses his arms on the table trying to fold in on himself; sometimes he reaches out to open the jar of gherkins, and the musculature of his hand and arm pushes its way through our thinner limbs. My mother asks him what he saw around again, and he shrugs. “Nothing better than this,” she replies.

There was a time when he brought us gifts, but when he realized that we didn’t like them and that it was a burden for us to magnify them, he stopped doing it. He prefers to replenish our bank account. “Go see some houses,” he says to my mother. “We can afford to buy one, I don’t want you to continue living in this one.” A year ago he bought me the apartment that once belonged to the doormen and that we rearranged, giving it the look of a studio apartment for young people. Thus, when he returns from his travels, he is no longer forced to see me as soon as he sets foot in the house and can enjoy the presence of my mother, a presence that repays him for the whole world in which he wanders far and wide without finding anything better than this. He always looks at her almost ashamed of being able to look at her, of having her for himself, of being able to find her every time he comes back. “I don’t deserve you,” he seems to be saying all the time, and my mother pours him a glass of wine, strokes his hair, tells him to go change. He never asks her about what she did with her during her absence, she seems to him enough that she didn’t run off with another blue-eyed man like us. I’ve always had the feeling that, to him, I’m a cheap replica of my mother. What is the point of me, if she already exists? He would have preferred that I had been a strong man like him and not have to feel in competition with an apathetic subject like me.

I feel good in my studio. I play music and, after completing my studies without infamy and without praise, I prepare a competition to enter the bank. My father doesn’t believe in anything I do, he knows I don’t do anything, he doesn’t expect anything from me, he doesn’t ask me how things are going. He considers the contest a pastime to justify my monthly allowance and the fact that I live by latch. He doesn’t say it out loud so as not to upset my mother. They are one of the many things he has to swallow. Not that he doesn’t love me: every time I got sick he worried a lot. I’m just a stranger to him, he doesn’t understand me at all. He doesn’t know how to encourage me, how to scold me, how to impose himself on me, and I don’t make things easier for him, because it would be really tiring to have deep conversations with him, but also superficial conversations, even short sentences to ask him if he wants milk in coffee.

It is a sunny and cheerful morning in April. People are replacing coats with leather jackets and light jackets, and the storefront of the mall’s bookstore shines with the latest literary novelty everyone is talking about, Unfathomable dreams.

Inside of, the photo of its author, Luis Isla, rests on piles of fifty copieseach of which produces a sensation so irresistible that I can’t help but take one, touch its raised letters – one of those unconscious caresses that come by themselves – and open it.

“A great story and a great discovery, this boy,” says Simón, the bookseller, with the enthusiasm he reserves only for important launches. The atmosphere around the novelty table is summery, almost stuffy. Simón wouldn’t recommend a book he doesn’t believe in, he adds in an attempt to surprise me with my guard down to buy something: a hope he has cherished for years. Normally I come here to browse the news a little while waiting for them to arrive at the public library and then borrow them. I am not prepared to shell out a single euro for an industry that thirty years ago treated me with indifference, not to say contempt. By now who remembers more of my only novel, Sunny dayspublished in 1989, out of print, nowhere to be found, forgotten?

“I see that Carolina Cox has published a new book”, I say pointing to a mound of volumes buried by the great mountains of novelty. Unfathomable dreams and yet another repetitive volume by Carolina ». I feel a good feeling in my heart, a kind of love towards Simón. He cannot suspect that Carolina published her first novel just when I did too, and with the same publisher, with the difference that she triumphed in a big way while I disappeared: a coin thrown into the air that the universe has turned in its favor. “You can’t always carry the same writers forward,” continues Simón. “Literature needs fresh bloodAnd Unfathomable dreams it is.”

It is this statement that prompts me to take a look at the front page in the hope that it really is better than anything Carolina has written. And I’m forced to close the book. I never expected to read what I read. It will be an illusion, like when you think you know someone you don’t know or believe you’ve seen something you haven’t seen, or have one of those clear, premonitory dreams about something that might happen. Either way, I can’t stop my heart from starting to beat faster than it is healthy. Maybe it’s the heat and that sort of radiation emanating from the accumulation of books, but also a warning that I should check my blood pressure from time to time – I’m not a kid anymore.

I reopen the volume and read again words that I recognize within me. Or maybe it is a signal sent by Carolina to remind me once again that she is in the window and I am out? I feel distraught, nauseated, like I’ve been running and sweating and then drank a glass of ice water. To reassure myself, I open the book in half and read half a page. I can’t help but lean on the news table, and I notice a little nosebleed coming out of my nose. A drop falls that smears the word “sea”, so I can’t put the book back in its place and I go to the cashier to pay under the surprised gaze of Simón. It’s probably the first time you’ve seen me walk out of the library with a bagwith which he holds out a piece of cotton wool.

I can’t blame him for not reading Sunny days and not knowing of its existence. At the time it went unnoticed due to the low circulation and because those few copies were destroyed by the publishing house to make room in the warehouses, not without first having communicated it to me in the coldest and most concise way possible. I’m pretty sure I haven’t even kept a copy. The removals, the responsibilities and the commitment to forget that I had written a novel managed to make me move onthat I uprooted Sunny days from my life like those parents who kill their children to try to return to the light-heartedness of the past. But one does not stop being a parent even if he has killed his children, now the damage is done. And my novel disappeared into deep space like Sunny daysto return long after transformed into Unfathomable dreams of the charming Luis Isla.

The mall is four kilometers from home, and Mauricio and I usually drive there. But now I need to walk to shake off the impression of having read my novel in another book, three hundred pages abandoned in the darkness that even I had ended up denying when I had thrown away the few free copies that the house publisher had granted me. On the way I have time to stop at a bar, have a coffee, go to the bathroom, replace the piece of cotton wool in the nose with a piece of toilet paper, look at myself in a mirror misted by a hundred thousand different breaths and feel confused, feel bad , for reaching sixty without realizing it, for hibernating in an invisible capsule and waking up out of the blue. I suddenly opened my eyes, and I don’t understand anything. I need time to get my feet back on the ground and say hello as if it were any day Mauricio, who will be watering the small garden at the entrance in his T-shirt and pajama shorts.
(© 2022, Garzanti srl, Milan, Mauri Spagnol Publishing Group)

The inspiration. Thirst for “poetic justice”

With The sins of Marisa Salas which comes out on Monday 31 October in Italy for Garzanti (even before Spain), Clara Sánchez chooses for her new novel, with the contours of a thriller, an environment she knows perfectly: the publishing world. Explore the rivalries between the authors and the infatuations of the publishers, the anxiety of success and the struggle to keep it. The last character, in chronological order, created by the Spanish writer is a colleague and her age. The sixty-year-old Marisa Salas, however, did not have the luck of her author. You published only one novel in your youth, immediately overshadowed by that of a competitor, which benefited from greater promotion by the common publisher. Marisa soon resigned herself to her fate as a failed writer. Until, many years later, a rookie, Luis Isla, climbs the charts with Unfathomable dreamswhich Marisa recognizes from the very first pages: it is Sunny days, her first and only book, now unobtainable, and of which she herself has lost the original. Demonstrating the motherhood of the bestseller and restoring “poetic justice” seems impossible. And, as Sánchez suggests, failure can sometimes even prove useful. Poetic justice is not guaranteed. So a life in the shadows, but authentic, can balance the scores. (Elisabetta Rosaspina)