We interview José Luis Muñoz (Salamanca, 1951) soap opera writer, almost always black, articles, literary and film criticism; gives lectures, He travels and as a columnist he has collaborated in magazines Interview, Penthouse, Playboy, File, GQ, DT, National Geographic Routes, Nomads y Traveler, among other, and in the newspapers The Sun, The Observer, The Independent y The Newspaper… currently does it in digital media The Everyday, The Cultural Distiller, Tarantula y Calibre 38. He has been running the blog for years. The loneliness of the long-distance runner. He lives between Barcelona and the Aran Valley and his books have been translated into Czech, Italian and French.
What order and/or criteria have you followed when selecting these odd stories?, nineteen in total, that make up the volume Marero edited by Contrabando publishing house?
Well, I'll tell you that it was a bit in order of fall.. It was clear to me that “Marero” was going to open the book of stories and that “The Last Tenant” had to close it.. The first, for its power; the second to relieve, with a vampire story, ghosts and romantic loves, so much violence and cruelty poured into the previous. It is a book of varied stories. It is like a kind of literary tasting menu in which the reader will find various genres with which I feel comfortable.: negro, fantastic and erotic. And there is no chronological order either.. There are stories written ago 45 years, like “Flutters”, a fly observing a murder, along with other rabidly recent.
A bit along the lines of the previous question, it is about knowing why you have chosen some already published and/or awarded ones along with unpublished ones such as Fase Terminal.
When I make my own anthology, in this case the fifth, The most important criterion is to give outlet and absolute visibility to award-winning stories., who are no longer eligible for any contest, or published in anthologies with other authors. Gathering them in one volume was a necessity: that they would not be lost. Some of these stories have been published in volumes published by public institutions., but that has little distance. By compiling them they reach a greater number of readers..
I was pleasantly surprised that they delve into somewhat realistic stories., rather than bordering on the fanciful, I think they tend towards a speculative fiction, to a fictional case, How could the argument be? flames of passion o Sed Negra.
I believe in the internal logic of the story. Many of them draw on real events, as is the case of “Flames of passion”. What if the shadows seen in the burning Windsor were those of two arsonist lovers?? To those lovers, to link with what was said above, sexual passion makes them forget the danger of flames. They decide it like this. When I wrote “Black Thirst” I was going back to that desert landscape, Mad Max, of the Monegros of my youth, when driving through them was a nightmare. In fanciful speculation it is possible, besides, social criticism. “City on fire”, a dystopian novel, I quite anticipated what is happening in today's world with puppet governments of the industrial corporations that dominate the world..
I also notice literary touches between the pages, references to works by other authors such as Joyce's Ulysses or Cortázar's House Tomada or more delicately like detective novels in Flight to Orly or the job of the protagonist of The last tenant.
In literature, he feeds on literature. The dichotomy writing or living is false. Writing is living. How to read is to live. Thanks to my childhood readings, Jack London's gold digger, I went to Alaska a few years ago. Thanks to Sommerseth Maugham I stayed at the Raffels Hotel in Singapore. That is why in my work there are frequent references to literature and writers., and a good part of the protagonists of my novels (“Lifting”, "Patpong Road") They are writers. I name Joyce's “Ulysses” because I can't stand it., despite the gigantic weight it has had in literature. Something else happens with Cortazar. Cortazar is my teacher. With Cortazar I discovered the playful side of writing. “Street closed”, the anthology story, It is Cortazarian for accurately reflecting an anecdote that affected me personally. That story, like “Flight to Orly”, It was written as an exorcism. The first to survive some infernal works that had me surrounded in my house in Granada; The second, so I could take a plane to New York a week after that flight to Orly never arrived at its destination. The protagonist of “The Last Tenant”, a commission from Fernando Marías, He had to be a writer to meet his ghosts in that apartment in Barcelona's Eixample that I recreated thanks to a series of homes that I visited, to buy them, and they gave me a bad vibe. I had those gloomy houses in my memory and they jumped into the story as soon as I started writing it..
Returning to the theme of palpitating realism in these stories, I imagine that he will sometimes be inspired by her, in reality. Is there a character with whom you identify to a greater or lesser extent?, perhaps the one in the last story in search of that favorable climate that I alluded to in another question?
If I identify with anyone, it is the writer of “The Last Tenant.”, of course. It's an alter ego. I would have liked to box, because I like that ritual of boxers in the ring, which is almost a male dance, but I lacked aggression. It is often said that the author is in his work. That works in a relative way. In some works I am 30%. In others I don't even reach 2%. I do not identify with the murderous police officer in “Terminal Phase” to whom a hitman imposes the sentence that ordinary justice could not impose., but I was interested in telling the story and imagining the torture of the agony of that abject being.. There is another one who is me, the protagonist of ”Last Supper in Sofia”, What can happen when someone goes on a blind date with an admirer they know on Facebook and is not who they say they are?. The one from “Dark Awakening”, which was published in the magazine Interviú, It's Juan Madrid, in memory of a monumental party that we had, precisely, in the city of Valencia more than thirty years ago. I told you, when he presented the book to me in Malaga, and he remembered, which gives an idea of the magnitude of the event.
What is the reader of short stories looking for in an anthology that they will not find in a novel?? I ask you not only as an author of both genres but surely aware that little is read and readers increasingly look more when choosing between the varied offerings on the tables in bookstores..
Certain readers are influenced by the number of pages. I see them loaded with heavy and voluminous books, difficult to handle. This book has 800 pages, Well, it has to be good because otherwise the author wouldn't have gotten around to it.. The story, for its brevity, It has to be intense and perfect like a piece of clockwork. In the novel there may be digressions, downtime even, rhythm drops. The story is usually the result of a literary impulse and is written in one go, and in the same way it is read. The story comes in like a flash and you start writing it. But there is no tradition of reading short story writers in our country. There are masters in the short genre who were not masters in the long genre.: Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver…Ignacio Aldecoa was one of us. “Marero” won the Ignacio Aldecoa award. That story, ultimately, is to blame for this book being on the streets.
Live between Barcelona and the Aran Valley, I was wondering about your quirks as a writer., Do you need absolute silence? Do you have any fetish objects on your table or office??
Absolute silence and no one within four hundred meters. Better at night than during the day. Choosing the Aran Valley as a place of residence was something very thoughtful.. I really like the mountains, get lost in the woods, but when I do it I am enjoying and working because I can think of black stories that happen in rural areas.. I have a bottle of Ballantine's on my desk., but I usually have the glass in the kitchen, two floors down, so that temptations do not enter me. When I write in black key I usually use Miles Davis. An epic novel, that I have them, The loss of Paradise, demands Wagner.
GINÉS VERA
