Jesús Carrasco (Olivenza, 1972) highlights an element so common that one might even forget its importance. After the family story Llévame a casa (2021), the writer from Badajoz champions hands in his latest novel, with whom he has "a happy, recreational, and emancipating experience" and to whom he could dedicate a dozen books. "If there's one thing that doesn't bore or tire me, it's working with my hands. Hands and manual labor have always been present in my family," says Carrasco, recalling how his father gave him a hammer to learn how to use it when he was a child or how he earned extra income by binding books to support the family.
For now, Elogio de las manos has earned him the Premio Biblioteca Breve, endowed with 30,000 euros and presented this Monday at the Museu Marítim de Barcelona by the Seix Barral publishing house. Carrasco won unanimously among almost 800 manuscripts, with a significant number coming from the American continent. "It is a healing and luminous novel," defends the jury, formed by bookseller Rafael Arias, poet Pere Gimferrer, philologist Lola Pons, the writer and last winner of the literary award, Rosario Villajos, and the editorial director of Seix Barral, Elena Ramírez. "A great work and not just a good book," emphasizes Ramírez, who took it upon herself to explain an anecdote that defines Carrasco: when they called him to tell him he had won, he was precisely painting the bathroom wall, "he continues to work with his hands."
Carrasco, also author of Intemperie (2013), translated into 28 languages, and La tierra que pisamos (2016), not only puts hands in their rightful place but also articulates a defense of what truly matters, "what is at hand," dispensing with grand words or impactful plots, as he already did in previous novels, states the editorial director of Seix Barral. "It is the story of a family inhabiting a house that is going to be demolished," summarizes Carrasco, a domestic starting point that could happen to anyone, from which he defends the small things, in times when "everything is fragmented and moves at an extraordinary speed, and what is important seems to be elsewhere."
The writer believes that it is "in that close space where decisive things happen," even though it is often reviled, so he doesn't complicate things and fits everything into a house in a small southern town, where the members of a family make the house their own, feel it, and work it with their hands, despite knowing that it has another owner and one day it will be demolished to build tourist apartments. A plot that, moreover, is set in Empty Spain, where most of the houses in the town are uninhabited due to the lack of opportunities and services. He also doesn't forget humor, even comparing one of his characters to Don Quixote.
"The house will fall just as life ends," remarks the author, who has acknowledged that this is his most personal novel, but with a coded intimacy so that only his loved ones can understand it. Although he started with an essayistic intention, Carrasco ended up feeling more comfortable moving in his natural space, fiction, and changing some names, with references such as My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell, Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, or The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg. "This is the novel of Jesus's life, an essential novel written from the heart, where his way of understanding writing and life is told," says Ramírez. And, most importantly, the editor emphasizes, it is a story that "reaches the reader and feels good" and makes you want to give it as a gift. Elogio de las manos will be published on March 6.