For the first time, Albert Sánchez Piñol has felt sadness when he finished writing his latest book, Oración a Proserpina (Prayer to Proserpina), published by Alfaguara (La Campana in Catalan). Now on his seventh novel, the author has had a great time putting it together, feeling that he had once again played a prank and had to run away, and he hopes the same for his readers, whom he encourages to immerse themselves in a parallel reality inhabited by Romans, slaves, and monsters, but not only that.
If a year ago he addressed in El monstruo de Santa Elena (The Monster of Saint Helena) the far from balanced relationship between power and culture by reviving Napoleon, this time he has focused on change and the resistance it provokes. It is set in Ancient Rome, an era that fascinates him, despite being aware that it was a "terribly unjust and precarious" society, sustained by slavery and rotten with corruption.
The Barcelona-born author this time puts himself in the shoes of Cicero's son, a young Marcus Tullius who has to go to Africa to find a horrible beast that announces the end of an empire. As if it were a classic adventure novel, the expedition will begin accompanied by peculiar characters, including slaves he doesn't care much about, and the group will grow as they approach their destination.
"Nature is essentially conservative. People don't change unless they are forced to," explains the writer, interested in how we resist, even when it is inevitable, as he believes is evidenced by the current passivity in the face of the climate emergency. Aware that his characters would also be reluctant to evolve, Sánchez Piñol puts them against the wall, bringing forth from the depths an even worse creature than they expected, nicknamed tecton, horrifying them when they see that there is not just one.
"I have been working with tectons for decades. I know them perfectly. They are the worst part of ourselves," reflects the also anthropologist, a background that helps him to outline a society parallel to the Romans that takes individualism to the limit, unscrupulous and prepared for invasion. It is not the first time that monsters like the tectons have appeared, always in different forms, whether in La piel fría (Cold Skin) (2002), Pandora en el Congo (Pandora in the Congo) (2005), Fungus (2018) or El monstruo de Santa Elena (The Monster of Saint Helena).
The only way out is to change, which is why Sánchez Piñol prepares Marco Tulio ---and readers--- by showing him what happens to those who don't change, taking him to see ancient Carthage, razed by the most bloodthirsty Roman army. But to evolve, they will have to renounce their essence, allowing themselves a small historical trick.
"We are making fiction, I take Ancient Rome as a setting," the writer recalls, feeling a little alone among his colleagues, whom he believes are too obsessed with autofiction. "When we were young, the book was a door to a three-dimensional world. Now, the author is the protagonist in disguise, a monument to the self and vanity," he laments. That is why he will never write his memoirs and will continue, as every year, not going to Sant Jordi, "I prefer to be behind the book and not in front." Even being one of the best-selling Catalan authors, he likes to dedicate that day to writing at home, trying to make the difficult easy: making rich fictions, with many layers and without leaving out any narrative trick, accessible to everyone.