This literary week, My interviewee is the Valencian writer Salvador Alemany Climent (Valencia, 1968). I ask him some questions after reading his crime novel Scorpion (Amarante Publishing). He will be signing copies at the Valencia Book Fair this Friday 27 (afternoon) and on sunday 29 (tomorrow). His multiple stays in various countries have generated a cascade of experiences that he captures in his literary work.. He began his literary career with “Luck does not exist”, finalist of the II Bubok Literary Creation Award. He followed Ireland, was a finalist for the La Trama Award from Ediciones B. For this second novel, a controversial scandal was documented.: he Informe Ferns, which revealed a plot of abuse within the Irish Diocese of Ferns. Scorpion It is his third novel. GINÉS J. Vera
File Scorpion is to enter a crime novel of action with touches of thriller in which the short sentences, The narrated images and the narration in the present tense delve into the psychological pulse of this story, up to a point, cinematic. Have I got the first thing right?? Would it be easy to adapt it to the small or big screen??
Yeah, you are right. I think that if something defines my way of narrating, it is that cinematic vision.. I try to visualize the scenes, and that also carries over to the way in which the chapters are structured.. On whether it would be easy to adapt it to the screen, during a screenwriting course taught by Carlos Bassas del Rey, I began to convert the novel into a film script, but it was just an exercise, very interesting indeed. Regarding its adaptation to the screen, it is something that is very far away for me., although it would undoubtedly be great.
The father figure is very present in the novel in one way or another.; in the case of Santos in the form of latent past, coming to reflect that when faced with the frequent questions of why he is where he is or why he does what he does the answer “He looks too much like his father's face”. Comment on it.
The importance of a father figure, buena, mala, regular or even non-existent goes beyond what many of us want or can admit. I was not aware of how much I owed my father until I became an adult., And I think that's true for everyone.. In my case it has been for the better, but I think that in many others, as in the case of the protagonist, it has been for the worse. One of the most terrible things that can happen to a child is being abused or mistreated by the person who is supposed to teach you what love means.. This disrupts the entire system of values and that is why it is so common for abused children to become abusers when they grow up..
As in any good detective novel, there is space for social reflection; in Scorpion There is no lack of a blow to the socioeconomic situation of many families on both sides between the North American giant and its neighbor to the south.. We read: “Drug trafficking would not exist in Mexico without the United States”.
The United States is the main market and first consumer of all the cocaine and marijuana produced in Mexico. And if you think about it, it's not a coincidence.. The Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico that President Bush signed was an open sky for the world of drug trafficking, who went from sending their goods by plane or ship (much easier to track and stop) to do it in trucks, most of which do not pass any customs control. You just have to control some customs agents and you have free passage for your merchandise. It is something that was not taken into account at the time or was minimized by the commercial implications of the Treaty.. Today, opioids have already reached epidemic status in the United States., causing a significant number of deaths each year.
“To keep the things that are true afloat – Santos reflects at another point in the plot –, we often have to lie”. I don't know if you share this reflection, although it is evident that as a writer the lie, or a substitute for this, has to play an important role in the triangle between the work and the reader, it isn't true?
we all lie. All the time. To others and to ourselves. Sometimes I think that the only way for a writer to be completely sincere is through fiction., although it seems like a contradiction. And when as a reader I open a book, I accept that pact, I accept someone telling me a story without asking me if it is true or not, but I demand that it be credible and that it interests me or at least entertains me. As a writer I try to be honest., with the reader and with the characters. There is a lot of truth in good fiction and we can find many lessons in stories that have not happened, because it doesn't matter if they happened or not. For me, as a reader, Moby Dick existed, and I learned from Ahab, Ishmael o Queequeg, as if they were real characters. In the end, except what we experience, that we live in the first person and in the present, everything else is stories they tell us, in a book, on a newscast, in the cinema, in a magazine, at a conference… Maybe that's why I like to travel so much, because personal experience is the only truth, and it is also non-transferable.
