"Simón Aliaga revealed himself as a mediocre orator. Without a doubt, he was not a Führer, nor a Duce, nor even a Caudillo, but only the spigot from which a fire bigger than him sprouted, a mere channel of an emotion that boiled under their feet, the visible face of a story in which the victims became executioners, in which those who had historically suffered discrimination, women, homosexuals, immigrants, now became the agents or beneficiaries of a fabulous plot to put an end to national values. After all, it was the old idea that there is only one way of being Spanish, only a healthy and clean one, harassed by endless viruses and bacteria that had to be eliminated." After his extraordinary El don of the fever, Mario Cuenca Sandoval (Sabadell, 1975) returns with another brave and lucid novel: now he takes the pulse of the moment we live from the best literature and wonders about the rise of the extreme right.In LUX (Seix Barral), a character that is part of this advance recounts the "national effort" led by a party "to restore decency in our streets", to "clean up, disinfect everything".
–The book begins with a quote from Céline that talks about emotion. A feeling that may not be the best company in politics...
–Yes, especially the emotions that have a darker extraction, such as fear or anger. I think that nothing good can come of it, and less so in politics. What I did was design a situation, a collective catastrophe, that would energize the fears and anger of society, and at the same time I imagined a series of individual circumstances that make the protagonist slide towards resentment, resentment, factors that become the engine of his transformation, leading him to embrace the ideals of LUX.
–That character is a professor with a humanistic background, who defines himself as "sensitive to beauty"... At first, he doesn't seem like an easy prey for an extremist discourse.
-Yes, I wanted to put an intelligent and educated person in the dilemma of a personal transformation of that category, confronting him with certain prejudices against which someone with training should be vaccinated. That's what we talked about before, the fear, the resentment, and all the intelligence of that man is now put at the service of rationalizing those emotions.
-Throughout the novel there are opinions, from the narrator or from the characters, who point out that immigrants are parasites, women are hysterical, homosexuals are perverts... Did writing from that way of looking at the world bother you? ?
-It was difficult to get into the mind of the protagonist, who is very complex, full of contradictions... I think I don't look like him, fortunately, but it is true that there are passages in which his reasoning, not exactly the sentences that has stated before, they do not seem so crazy to us. I wanted the reader's reaction to oscillate between astonishment, bewilderment, at what he says, and recognition, identification, at the observations he makes at other times, even though those statements horrify us. But that, that darkness, is also within all of us.
–The protagonist tells the woman to whom he directs his narration, the mother of a young homosexual who suffers LUX's hostility, that they have "lived in the same time but not in the same country, because everyone has their own story of the recent history of Spain.” Will we one day be able to find the similarities and propose a common vision?
-It seems complicated to me, because the very nature of knowledge and information in our time makes it difficult. Each person generates a perception of the political reality on his wall, on social networks, thus creating a panorama that does not coincide at all with that proposed by others. And then we are shocked by what others think, we think it's stupid, nonsense. But who is the referee, who decides what is credible and what is not? Now it seems incredible that we believed that the internet and social networks were going to install us in a new illustration, that they were going to spread knowledge to the whole world. In the end, they have generated so much information that they have caused us confusion, and not lucidity.
–Regarding social networks, it is said in the book that no party has understood as LUX "the importance of a tool like that." And a paradox is also pointed out: that those who fight these ideas end up, by denouncing them, giving them more diffusion and making them more visible...
-They know very well, and not only here, but also the new right in the US, how to stir up the hornet's nest, and they currently position themselves through a series of controversies. The curious thing about all these controversies is that they present their position as an act of courage. It is that politicians do not dare to say these truths, to open the melon of these issues... They affirm that the white middle class has become lumpen, that the homosexual lobby, feminism, immigrants, take the best part of the cake... They use the networks very well, they boast of audacity, and in reality it is not courage, but lack of respect for the dignity of the other, and lack of respect for the rivals, whom they caricature as if they were straw men .
-You think that the moderate parties have not escaped the temptation of populism either.
-Populism is already a seasoning of politics, and those traditional parties that describe the new forces as populist have incorporated and normalized the same strategies. And I think that's the worst. The danger we are facing is not that an authoritarian regime develops, I think it is unlikely, but that a letter of marque is given, it is normalized, a discourse that returns many prejudices that we thought had been overcome. What they call a progressive consensus was nothing more than a democratic consensus, in which the left, the right, the liberal and the conservative tradition had agreed.
–Your narrator assures that “quarantine turned us into horrible people”. Do you agree?
–It is curious. I opted for a pandemic because I needed a collective catastrophe strong enough to raise those low passions, and then it has been shown that yes, something like that has that power. It's going to sound pedantic, but I raised the pandemic in the novel before it happened in reality, although if I'm honest I called it an epidemic. In 2019 I was working with that element in the book, and I was about to remove it several times, and replace it with another tragedy, because it seemed very science-fiction to me. I didn't marry the rest of the text... [laughs]. But that I came up with something like that has no merit. I wanted to talk about some disaster that changed society, and if I drew an earthquake... it would sound very much like an American disaster movie, that's why I chose the pandemic. But yeah, I'm afraid this hasn't gotten the best of us...