Pablo Gutiérrez
GRANTA 113: THE BEST OF YOUNG SPANISH-LANGUAGE NOVELISTS
Lately I’ve been interested in the different attitudes motion stories take toward their subjects. Given the same basic plotline – say, an athlete fatally injures one of his rivals and must live with the consequences – no two writers, or at least no two of the writers I love, will venture through it in quite the same way. Franz Kafka will dive straight to its centre; William Maxwell will bump delicately along the surface of it, feeling with his fingertips for a way inside; Italo Calvino will start it spinning and chase after the various projectiles it casts; Javier Marías will orbit it, glancing off its margins again and again until his tangents have defined its shape; G. K. Chesterton will climb it one-two-three like a set of stairs.
There is no need to guess what motion Pablo Gutiérrez will adopt toward ‘Gigantomachy,’ because he announces it in the story’s second sentence: ‘The dew soaked the concrete and we glided on the court like an aeroplane when it rains, our hands hidden in our fists, the pavement greasy beneath Saturday’s frost and, just at the mouth of the airport, eleven pale giants fastened to the seats like packages, the pilot narrows his eyes so that the nose meets the blue lines, the wind, the rain, all of the gods’ lightning illuminating our enormous jaws.’
It seems to me that ‘Gigantomachy’ is in no small sense about the gliding motion of its narrative, the long gestures of its sentences, which carry us across its pages as if over a frozen pond, until that late moment when the ice becomes transparent and we can see straight through to the depths; that, and the bursts of full feeling and astounding clarity that emerge from a story when you allow its rhythms to take charge of it: the illusion that ‘the sky falls in pieces’ whenever it rains at night, the memory of sitting at camp feeling imprisoned ‘while Mom and Dad go off to Paris for a week to see if they can kiss each other there like they don’t here,’ the desire to ‘make a call like in the last century from a telephone booth,’ the dream of ‘a regular life with a wife and regular children who aren't conspiring against you or telling you you’re inconvenient or ugly.’
His story is a single breathless expression of grief, of grief and bewilderment over a life turned bitter in an instant, and I suspect that it’s the way the narrator seems to coast so helplessly through his mind that will linger once the rest of its details have been forgotten. – Kevin Brockmeier , Best Young American Novelist 2007
Each of the Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists answered a questionnaire on their influences and the role of the writer in public life. Here are Gutiérrez's answers:
Name the five writers you most admire at the moment (any period, language or genre).
Milan Kundera, Martin Amis, Baroja, Juan Ramón Jiménez, José Agustín Goytisolo.
Have you published literary criticism?
Yes, I’ve written reviews for La Tormenta en un vaso.
Which languages do you read in?
Spanish, and English if it’s a play.
Do you have your own web page?
I have a blog that I don’t always update.
Is your fiction your sole source of income? If not, what else do you live off?
Literature hardly gives me enough to eat more than a few times a month. I’m a teacher - that pays my bills and my mortgage.
Should writers play a role in public life beyond the publication of their work? If so, in what way?
There was always a duality on this subject: the writer who venerates his or her work, setting it apart like an island, and the model of the committed intellectual. These categories from the handbook of literature were made obsolete long enough ago to make you blush. I don't think that writers, just by being writers, become watchmen for others, like shepherds who guide their flock. But a writer is not a miniaturist, nor does their work consist of putting ships in bottles, independently of what is going on outside. When I write I don’t go out on to the street to take notes on reality, nor do I delve inside myself as if it were all about a therapy for my obsessions. I think there’s a middle ground. On the other hand, the influence of writers on public opinion in our country is minimal, limited to columns in a few newspapers read by fewer and fewer people. This is not a nostalgic comment: I don't think that writer, just by being a writer, has a greater analytical capability or intellectual wisdom than a scientist or an economist. On the contrary, the writer probably only knows about certain things and has to turn those things into fiction or verse in order to understand them. I don't believe in the wise writer who has an opinion on everything. The world has become much too complex.
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– Read Pablo Gutierrez’s story from the issue, ‘Gigantomachy’.
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