Javier Pérez Andújar (Sant Adrià de Besòs, 1965) has emerged this Monday as the winner of the Herralde Novel Prize, convened by the Anagrama publishing house. "As a good Spaniard, I abide by the verdict, but I do not share it," he proclaimed as soon as he took the floor, feeling the weight of the responsibility of now carrying the surname of the editor who welcomed him a couple of years ago, Jorge Herralde.
About El año del Búfalo (The Year of the Buffalo), the winning novel, the Barcelona writer has defined it as a "truly strange" book that he had wanted to write for a long time. He had started thinking about it 25 years ago, but it wasn't until the arrival of the pandemic, that "time of nobody," that he dared to do it.
Pérez Andújar's novel tells what happens to four artists "of an unlucky generation" who are locked in a garage. But it also narrates the life of a Finnish writer in love with Spain, named Folke Ingo, who turns out to be the author of the story of the secluded artists, which he has turned into his posthumous novel.
As if that weren't enough, the plot is nourished by footnotes that contradict it, written by Ingo's Spanish translator, his mother, a professor from the Ministry of Humanities, the parents of the locked-up artists... Even the president of the Gregorio Morán Friends Club gets into the discussion. And, to round it off, Pérez Andújar includes psychophonies that recount the history of the 20th century through political figures such as Franco, Mussolini, Gaddafi, Pétain, or Agostinho Neto. The former president of the Generalitat, Carles Puigdemont, also appears.
"It's a delusion," summarized the winner, to which Juan Pablo Villalobos, a member of the jury, added: "It's a wonderful madness." For Villalobos, Pérez Andújar's novel manages to be "exasperating in a positive sense," wanting to put it down continuously but failing to do so, provoking "a very funny reading experience" that harks back to Don Quixote.
Almost 600 manuscripts submitted
Pérez Andújar, author of novels such as Paseos con mi madre (Walks with My Mother), Los príncipes valientes (The Valiant Princes), and La noche fenomenal (The Phenomenal Night), has prevailed among the almost 600 manuscripts submitted to the 39th Herralde Novel Prize, endowed with 18,000 euros. He was accompanied as a finalist by the Mexican Daniel Saldaña París with El baile y el incendio (The Dance and the Fire), in which three former schoolmates find themselves "half broken" by the passage of years while the city they live in is besieged by fires.
Despite the winning plots speaking of confinement, there haven't been as many as one might expect related to the pandemic, explained Anagrama's editorial director, Silvia Sesé, but rather "stories that reflect the tension and vulnerability of the individual in the contemporary world." Both El año del Búfalo and El baile y el incendio will be published in the coming weeks.