This week, My interviewee is the Valencian writer Enrique Vaqué. Doctor in Chemical Sciences and Master in Business Administration, his professional work in the field of raw materials (café, cacao…) has allowed him to travel around the world, from the jungles of the Amazon to the highest hills of Cameroon. After winning the Pedro de Estopiñán Poetry Prize, combines his position as an executive of a chemical business group with university graduate classes and his perennial devotion to writing. To his first novel The fangs of the tropics (2012), has followed him The lords of the end of the world (to lunch), work finalist for the Albert Jovell First Novel Award, why you grant me this interview. GINÉS J. VERA.
The lords of the end of the worldIt straddles the line between the adventure and historical genres., you must have had a great time writing it.
Yeah, the novel, when it is felt, When you see the character and when you see the environment you get into it. Condition sine qua nonso that the reader also gets into it. For me it is very important that it be like a kind of experience that makes the person truly move to another time.. I work a lot on that. How to work? This is worked mainly with the setting and, above all, with an impressionistic description that is based for example, at a certain time how it smells, or what noises there are, or tactile sensation, constantly so that the person does not lose, let's say, immersion in the world in which you want to put it.
For curious readers, it not only includes numerous explanatory footnotes, but also a glossary of terms at the end of the book.
Yeah. I was trying to reproduce Arab culture in an accessible way, Yes, you do need a translation process and the way to approach it that I have seen is instead of making long explanations., or instead of circumlocutions or instead of periphrasis or what I have done is use the original word. Of course, That makes the book have a hundred and something footnotes., which is a bit uncomfortable because it seems to stop reading, but I think that's the price you have to pay, in quotes, the reader to be able to truly immerse themselves in a culture that is not ours. But I insist, through a translation process.
Among the documentation work is that related to the medical science of the time, I think he has had the help of a surgeon to supervise this part.
Yeah, a surgeon who is my brother, Javier Vaqué, who is a general surgeon in La Fe, and that has prevented me from making many mistakes. He knows how the human body operates when certain types of operations are performed...
Although the medicine, in this case, is from that time and his brother practices medicine in the current era
Yeah, because the human body is the same.
The protagonist, the modest mutabibHe is going to tell Queen Isabel of Castile about his adventures almost in a way similar to that oral tradition that we know from Arabian Nights, an intentional resemblance, I imagine.
Yeah, There is a wink first because this novel arises distantly from my fascination with that set of books that is Arabian Nights, so, let him tell the queen, Telling him about the adventures over several nights is an evidently programmed wink., thought, no casual. Looking to pay tribute, we would say.
