A few years ago, I had the opportunity to share a booth at the Madrid Book Fair with Jorge Edwards. At that time, for those who were limited in their knowledge of Latin American literature, it was the most prestigious living Chilean writer of the moment. A man with shortened eyes and an aged face, we accompany the signing of our books with a placid conversation, between diplomacy and writing. They were a crowd, or meekness depending on how you look at it, those who passed by oblivious to the presence of the Cervantes Prizeand, instead, they stopped at a booth on the opposite sidewalk, near the Ramón y Cajal memorial in the Retiro. An extravagant-looking guy signed there with a waiting line that could reach the park’s lake itself.. Edwards watched, with a dull smile, as a full adolescence struggled to obtain the signature of the alleged author. “Who is this man?”he asked me with undisguised curiosity. «I don’t know, really, but selling, selling», I replied, before surrendering again to our musings on literature and on life itself.
I confess that at the end of the signing liturgy, that same afternoon I went to a department store to browse some of the work of the meritorious writer. I will not reveal the name out of modesty and even out of respect, but that seemed like unspeakable garbage to me.. Without palliatives. And I sank into strangeness and resignation that everything had definitely changed.
And the fact is that not even the mother who gave birth to him recognizes this country. Delibes, Valle or Cela, if they were new authors, would notor they would sell a bill today at the Book Fair. What’s more, for the vast majority of readers sponsored by the declared stupidity of the new century, his writing would be an indigestible rubbish. Because, almost without wanting to, we have left the Age of Enlightenment far behind to settle irrevocably in the Age of Darkness. Bookstores are full of bad books that are good for publishers and for an increasingly simple and boring demand.. If literature is left behind in the corner of effective demand and publishing success, disaster is assured. The most important literary awards in this country are a joke in bad taste and an insult to the intelligence of those who made literature a worthy profession in the past. Quality replaced by profitability at the service of a majority group of readers who cannot overcome the barrier of six words per sentence. The rest is like climbing Everest barefoot and with one arm tied behind your back.. The sad paradox of good bad books.
