The writer Gustavo Martín Garzo says that classic books do not provide answers to humanity’s great questions, but they strive to keep them alive, because literature is not a world of answers, but a world in which essential questions return to life. In an interview with EFE, the author, who participated in a discussion about his work at the Menéndez Pelayo International University in Santander, argues that the stories reflected in myth and the classics “continue to live.”
For Martín Garzo (Valladolid, 1948), questions such as death, love, justice, pain, and power are often trivialized and have come to belong to sociology or psychology. Yet he insists that speaking of something as vast as love is to speak of “the world of enchantment, of that which makes one leave the world of identity and reason. It takes you into the realm of dream, of desire, of the unexpected. The world where you lose your footing,” Garzo reflects. Over a long career he has earned prizes such as the National Prize for Narrative (1993) for his work The Language of the Sources and the Nadal Prize (1999) for The Stories of Marta and Fernando.
He emphasizes that thinking that questions such as love “have nothing more to say” is an absolute nonsense, because myth is full of extraordinary stories that continue to be used to explain the complexity of the human being. He argues that, both in literature and in life, there is a shift in how we confront the “great questions,” because the new form of writing corresponds to the contemporary obsession with being oneself.
“The intense moments and the poetic moments of our lives are those in which, in some way, we lose our footing and feel that we are opening something we cannot explain and do not know what it is,” says the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including Hidden Tide and My Dear Eve.
The author believes the world is traversing a “deeply rational” era in which there is a desire to understand everything, and when something cannot be understood, it is rejected. But Martín Garzo defends that “not understanding is not bad,” and contends that if one tries to separate from oneself a component as essential as love by attempting to reason about everything, it will eventually return in the most unexpected moments to disturb. “That moment of love appears unexpectedly. It returns in your dreams, it returns when you genuinely long for someone, it returns in everything that arrives in your life in an unforeseen way.”
The writer laments that the myths’ stories are being forgotten, due to their beauty and the way they explain human relationships and conflicts, which are “complex.” In his latest book, A Paradise of Debris, Martín Garzo gathers, through 14 stories, several well-known Greek myths told from the perspective of the female characters. From Orpheus and Eurydice or Odysseus to Leda and the Swan or the Minotaur, the author again retells these stories “told a thousand times,” but giving voice to the women who star in them. It is not the first time he has gathered or adapted classical themes in his work: he has done so before, for example, in The Golden Garden. “It is easy to recount the feats of heroes and rogues because they have feats that belong to them,” he explains, but not so easy for the those “essential” people in their lives to whom, however, “no one had ever given a voice.”
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Source: EFE