Álvaro Colomer, a writer without a country by Daniel Vázquez Sallés
Born in Barcelona in 1973, Álvaro Colomer is a versatile writer and journalist. As a journalist, he has contributed to and currently contributes to 'El Mundo' and 'La Vanguardia' as well as other outlets such as Yo Dona, Cultura/s, Mercurio, Primera Línea, Cadena Ser, or Ajoblanco. In recent years, he has stood out as a cultural correspondent.
Como escritor ha cultivado la ficción y el ensayo con un gran éxito entre la crítica y el público. Entre sus novelas destacan “Los bosques de Upsala”, la última obra de una trilogía en la que se analiza en primera persona el fenómeno de la muerte y el suicidio, y "Aunque caminen por el valle de la muerte", novela que reconstruye la 'batalla de Najaf', uno de los combates más importantes de cuantos libró el ejército español durante la invasión de Irak.
As a young adult novelist, you have just won the thirty-fifth edition of the Jaén Prize for Young Adult Fiction with the work "Now Comes the Silence”.
On a table at a bar on Compte Urgell Street, a red tea, a still water, and two smoldering cigarettes in the ashtray.
What is the Barcelona of your childhood?
Yo soy nacido en les Corts, cerca del Campo del Barça y casi en la frontera con l’Hospitalet, pero educado en la Bonanova, en las Escuelas Pías de Sarriá. En aquella época les Corts era un barrio más popular, mucho más que ahora, que parece una extensión de Pedralbes. Cuando yo era niño, al estar mi casa tan cerca de Hospitalet, me horrorizaba que pensaran que yo no era un barcelonés de pura raza. Cosas de la niñez.
But as far as your education is concerned, you see yourself more as a boy from the upper area
In fact, the playful memories of my adolescence are located in bars like the Pippermint, or in emblematic places like the UP&DOWN. And to my regret, because I was very much against everything that smelled of snobbery. The death of my father when I was 13 years old changed many things, but despite the tragedy, the friends I have dragged along since my very early youth are from the upper zone.
What did your father's death mean to you?
An emotional cataclysm, of course, and an economic one as well. My father had inherited a plastics company and we lived very comfortably, but from day to day. As a family that depended entirely on the money he earned, the inevitable happened: when the dog dies, the rabies dies with it. With my father's disappearance, I realized that I did not belong either socially or economically to the social sector in which I had been educated.
Did you have to change schools?
No, because at that school there was an agreement stating that if one of its members suffered a misfortune like mine, the other parents had to cover the cost of education for the orphaned student. That's why my mother told me: here, you have to pass everything up to the pre-university course and don't come up with nonsense. Of course, I started studying like crazy.
The ups and downs of life, always being in no man's land, led to the teenager Colomer ending up living in the apartment his grandfather had on Mandri street.
Imagine this. In the end, for health reasons, my grandfather went to live with my mother, and they let me stay alone at 18 in an old rental house on the condition that the landlord wouldn't find out. By day I worked at the Levis store and at night... the parties eventually gave me away, and I was forced to leave the apartment.
Studies in philosophy, initiatory writings and his first forays as a journalist in the magazine Ajoblanco directed by the renowned Pepe Ribas.
I worked for free, of course, typing texts, and anything else that was sent my way. After an experience in England, I managed to join the Z group as an all-around journalist. One day I was in Baghdad, another on Tibidabo talking about the ghost train. The magazine Interviú, on the other hand, did ask me for powerful reports taking advantage of my youth to spend a lot of nights out and everything that nightlife entails. Although, if I'm honest, I've always wanted to write reports on the history of Barcelona, but I never found the opportunity.
In your books, in your novels, Barcelona has never had a unique prominence.
Never. Even in the novel The Forests of Upsala, where the imprint of Barcelona silently follows the course of the narrative, the city is mentioned only tangentially. Something that happens in all my urban novels.
Would you be a different writer if you had been born in another city?
No. In a literary sense, I am from Barcelona by accident.
In these last years, you have indeed had the opportunity or the need to reflect the Barcelonian culture in your cultural chronicles.
Yes, and they have helped me to open my eyes. I belong to the cultural group that writes in Spanish, and the chronicle allowed me to discover that there is a lot of life beyond Mars. With the chronicles, I was surprised to find that the cultural significance of Barcelona is inversely proportional to the size of the city, a small city compared, for example, with London.
Even if a city is very large, the truth is that everyone's city is small because they always move around the same neighborhood.
I acknowledge that I don't know what lies beyond Paseo San Juan. My city stretches from Raval to Bonanova. And to Bonanova, because of my friends from the years of my prime youth, as Pasolini would say.
“Oh, young man. I am born in the scent that the rain sighs from the meadows of fresh grass,” says the poem by the Roman writer.
Returning to the chronicles, the chronicles have unveiled to me a universe in Catalan that was completely unknown to me.
Are you an optimistic person? It doesn't seem so from the themes of your books.
I am more optimistic about the human condition than my novels reflect. As an author, I like to distance myself from myself. In fact, many friends laugh at me because when I talk about certain notable events, I always embrace the anniversary. “We've sent a ship to Pluto,” and they crack up. The one who is really worried about my novels is my mother. Poor woman.
You've just won a young adult novel prize, haven't you?
Yes, I won the Jaén Prize for Youth Narrative with "Now Silence Comes". I was awarded the Monserrat Roig scholarship, which consists of being provided an office anywhere in the city for three months on the condition of developing a story, and I was assigned Montjuïc. The novel is about a dystopia set in a post-apocalyptic Barcelona where, due to a virus, only those under 22 years of age survive.
Like a kind of Lord of the Flies.
Yes, indeed. In that society, young adults curse at children who only find shelter with teenagers who must decide whether they want to be like those violent youths or if they embrace rebellion. Whether they belong to one group or the other, they are all doomed to die.
And your mother, happy with the new story.
You see. The protagonists of the novel are three teenagers who take on the guardianship of an abandoned baby they find and decide to save by taking it from point a, which could be Les Corts, to point b, which they call The Castle, and which the reader can identify as La Sagrada Familia. On this journey, they will go through adventures, dodging the various gangs that control the neighborhoods that have emerged from the apocalypse.
What will they find in the castle?
They have heard that there a new society is being forged where, although its members are also doomed to die at 22, the children will be taken under the care of other mothers once their own have passed away. Amidst the chaos, The Castle stands as a paradisiacal promise.
What pre-apocalyptic neighborhood do you live in now?
In the Left Eixample next to my wife, Marta.
What do you like about Barcelona?
I'm really into bars. Those quiet bars that allow me to go read religiously from 8 to 9 in the evening and that now hardly exist. When I lived in Gracia, I used to go a lot to the bars around the Plaza de la Virreina.
And in this city full of noisy bars, have you found a place that allows you to continue with your routine?
I keep trying. Even though it's hard to find the perfect setting, I refuse to give up my compulsive reading methodology. From 25 to 50 pages every day where I mix pleasure with my work as a literary critic.
At a table in a bar on Compte Urgell Street, a glass and an empty cup, and in the ashtray, two newly lit cigarettes.
Marta Calvo's cover photo
