Manuel Vilas: "In Catalan you have more glamour because you have not received our stale heritage"

Barcelona"I am no longer in love with you": with these words the narrator's partner ends the eleven-year relationship in Islandia (Destino, 2026), the latest novel by Manuel Vilas. Once again, after the great impact of Ordesa (Alfaguara, 2018) and being a finalist for the Planeta award with Alegría (2019), the writer born in Barbastro in 1962 draws on his own life experience to tell a story of rupture that leaves the protagonist devastated. Will he be able to pick himself up again? Will he be able to find love once more, having suffered two separations that have caused him so much pain? Although Vilas does not shy away from chapters motivated by rage and misunderstanding, Islandia is a book that tries to help the author relearn to look at the world with a spark of optimism.

Has guilt motivated this latest novel of his?

— It is one of his driving forces, yes. In one of the chapters I dare to twist that phrase by Descartes that says: "I think, therefore I am." I say: "I am guilty, therefore I am." Guilt can be existential and unmotivated. Kafka said it another way: "You may be innocent, but you look guilty."

The narrator of the story, who is an alter ego of yourself –as happened in Ordesa–, is partly responsible for the crisis in your relationship.

— He realizes too late that he should have dedicated himself to that marriage as if it were a job and exclusively, making it take precedence over anything else. But he is not in time. He is a blind man whose marriage is breaking down without him realizing it, even though she was sending out distress signals: asking him for more affection, more kisses, and more intimacy.

"He who leaves the other does not break his heart," the man blames the woman.

— At another point in the book I write that her heart doesn't break when she leaves me because I have been breaking hers over the past few years.

They have lived a relationship of more than a decade, just like the one you shared with the writer and academic Ana Merino.

— It is a novel based on our history. I wrote it just after the separation, between May and July of last year.

He wrote it in a hot moment. How did he do it?

— I see it as a report of what I felt, from initial incomprehension to pain, anger, and final acceptance. Saving details of all I suffered because of the divorce made no sense.

Mental health plays a relevant role in the novel. The psychiatrist often appears there.

— The divorce caused me a depression, but luckily I'm already getting over it. It would be worse if I hadn't felt anything. If you go through life without getting depressed or anxious, you are a psychopath. When my editor, Emili Rosales, read the novel, he told me that a confession of male vulnerability like this was unusual. Men have been victims of the impossibility of talking about all this. In the confession of vulnerability there is a release. I am not Clint Eastwood, but Woody Allen, an ugly, small, and timid man. A man who doesn't stop talking. With a sense of humor.

This sense of humor takes its toll on the relationship.

— Yes, because my sense of humor and hers were different.

In the book, Ana transforms into Ada, and the other characters often have no name, but we can easily relate them to real people. When she leaves him, they agree that he will write the breakup before telling anyone. We read: "It seemed to us an act of beauty that the farewell became a book, and the book an altar."

— If she had told me that I couldn't draw inspiration from our divorce to write, I would have respected it. I am very much a compromiser, at this point I recognize the Aragonese cultural heritage. I have had to live many years in Madrid to realize it.

Emmanuel Carrère wrote Yoga during his separation and his ex-wife forbade him from mentioning her. The book could only be read in an amputated version.

— Neither Emmanuel Carrère nor Karl Ove Knausgard made the effort to make an agreement with their ex-wives and ended up in court. It is also true that in my case I was not writing to air our dirty laundry about our relationship, but to celebrate the love we experienced and also to address the sad breakup. A critic reproached me for having dared to write a novel like Islandia because, by anthropological definition, a Spaniard cannot have the glamour of a Carrère or a Knausgard. We are condemned to be Benito Pérez Galdós. We cannot afford to exist in the world without the Meseta weight of realism. For Catalans it is different.

In what sense?

— You are not bound by this impossibility of aesthetic flight that we have. Writing in Catalan you can have more glamour, because you have not received our stale heritage.

The novel opens with the memory of these words, "I'm not in love with you anymore," which Ada says to the narrator over the phone. She regrets that he didn't break up with her in person.

— There are two devilish human inventions: the telephone and photography.

Why?

— Both have to do with aspects of the human condition. The telephone can give you terrible news without either of you being present. Photography is diabolical because, as Roland Barthes said, its main subject is death. Looking at photographs of our dead destroys us. There is nothing more incomprehensible.

Is breaking up a relationship over the phone easier?

— I think so. Following the publication of the novel, some readers have told me that they have even been asked for a divorce by email. The key, in both the case of the telephone and email, is the absence of the body of either party in the notification of the breakup.

Iceland includes very intimate real WhatsApp conversations. They are more direct and unfiltered than those the characters have with each other.

— Via WhatsApp we say truths that we don't dare to express face to face. The human being continues to be irrational and experiencing terrible passions. The whatsapps show this. There are people who reproach me for being so cruel... If I had sweetened the content of the novel, it would have been a lack of respect for literature, wouldn't it? For me, literature is a representation and a reflection of life. If these whatsapps have existed, I have to include them in the book.

While reading the novel, I thought she was more balanced and had a superior emotional intelligence to his.

— She knew how to manage emotions better. Without a doubt. I don't know how. Besides, there was something that terrified me: living alone again. I tell her on several occasions. She also had to live alone again, because there were no third parties motivating the breakup, but she handled it much better than I did. When she asked me for a divorce, I became a broken man. Without resources.

I would say that the lack of emotional intelligence is more of a male problem than a female one, in your generation?

— I come from deep Spain. The moral and religious education we received in the sixties did a lot of work, on us. Even though I later tried to modify it through books, university, and travel, something remained from that first educational bite that the history of Spain gave us. Neither cosmopolitanism nor emotional freedom were part of my education.

The age difference with her was also important, at this point?

— From a young age she lived in a better Spain than mine. When Franco died, Ana was three years old. I was twelve. She lived her adolescence and youth in democracy. That was not my case.

It also comments on class difference. She comes from a more cultured and economically privileged background. There is a scene where he has to fork out 10,000 euros upfront to book a cruise and this tortures him.

— I come from a poor family and that will always haunt me. At home it would have been inconceivable, to shell out 10,000 euros for a cruise. When I paid for it, the ancestral demons started to haunt me. How could I dare to do something like this, when my parents had had so many problems to make ends meet and could never afford to buy anything? My parents couldn't even afford their own funerals... When my mother died, she had twenty euros in her current account.

In the end, they both took the cruise, but as friends.

— Traveling to Iceland together allowed us to discover that, once the romantic love was over, we could discover the love of friendship.