Carlota Gurt: “I saw that desolate landscape and thought, ‘I’m like that, dry’”

BarcelonaHow can a stranger with whom you've only exchanged a glance change your life? The second novel by Carlota Gurt (Barcelona, ​​1976), The moors, who won the lastWinner of the Anagrama Books Prize, this is the story of Ramona and Fausto, two people who seemingly have no common ground and who have lost all hope. Through a fleeting encounter at the Parador de Sau, Gurt constructs a solid and vibrant narrative about how these characters inhabit disillusionment. With a fabulous array of metaphors and robust Catalan, the novel moves back and forth between two very specific moments in time—Christmas Eve and Midsummer Eve—with a narrative structure that makes it shine.

With The moorsYou submitted your work for the Anagrama Books PrizeUntil now you had published with Proa, and winning the contract meant a change of publisher. Why did you do it?

— I hadn't felt comfortable with the kind of literature Planeta pushes for a while, even though some of their books are fantastic. I had the feeling that my natural place wasn't there, that perhaps my natural audience wasn't there. I thought about it a lot, because leaving Planeta means giving up the financial windfall. I spoke with my agent and Anagrama seemed like a good fit. They publish excellent books in Catalan and they take risks.

This novel is precisely what makes it risky. It starts at the end and makes it clear from the outset that it's neither about love nor sex. Why was it important to establish that premise from the beginning?

— Because when we read, we always form hypotheses about what we're reading. When you have a female character and a male character, your mind immediately assumes there will be some kind of conflict. I wanted to defuse that from the start so there wouldn't be any misunderstanding. When you begin a novel, as a writer you make a promise that the reader interprets. If they had interpreted it as a love story, the novel would have been a disappointment.

Why did the protagonists have to be two strangers?

— Because I wanted it to seem like an impossible, quite improbable encounter. When we read, we always need some question to keep us going. That's why I begin with a very brief dialogue, so the reader thinks: "How did these two people end up having this conversation?" It seems like they have to confess everything, but deep down they don't really know each other. There's also the idea that, sometimes, the things that save you are found in the most unexpected places.

You describe Ramona as "a sharp-tongued woman," and Fausto as "a fritter." What is it about these characters that made you choose them as the protagonists of the story?

— I went to Sau by chance and decided to write about droughts. Engineering projects are great metaphors for many things, and it seemed to me that I could have a character who was the dam's boss. I wanted the other to be the opposite. In fact, both have been built up through opposition and similarity, because in some ways they are absolutely identical.

Bodies are very present throughout the story. We find "a flamboyant woman," "a rubber man," "a shirtless turnip." Why do you emphasize the characters' physical appearance?

— Metaphor and symbolism sometimes confuse me a bit, but I wanted to include an obese character because of the idea that their body and life weigh them down too much. If Faust was fat, Ramona had to be almost anorexic. Our identity is our body and our name. If I had a different body, I would be a different person, and what people see in me stems, in part, from my body. In another life, I would like to be a fragile, small woman, weighing 50 kilos. It must be very liberating. But the body is a calling card that you don't choose, and it conditions how others perceive you.

And it also greatly affects the protagonists' privacy. Fausto can't stand being overweight, nor not being able to see his penis when he masturbates because of his belly.

— It's that feeling of not being man enough. We often talk about women's oppression, but men are also heavily oppressed by patriarchy. They're pressured to be a certain way, and sometimes feeling less masculine affects them deeply. Take baldness, for example. Women aren't particularly concerned about men's baldness; they're more concerned about themselves. Or the size of their genitals.

Both are experiencing several crises: with their jobs, their relationships, their futures. Why did you make these inner conflicts the heartbeat of the story?

— The idea came to me one day when I went to Sau. I was writing another novel that wasn't making much progress. Suddenly, I saw that desolate landscape and thought, "I'm like that, barren." Nothing grows here anymore. It's a question I often ask myself. Where does joy come from, how is it born? I wanted to explore that lack of hope, which doesn't stem from a major tragedy, but from inertia. You have a job you don't like, a partner you don't like either… In the end, hope is the ability to create it, to believe in a hopeful future.

But Ramona "has turned her back on fiction," which would be an escape route.

— We all spend our days watching series, staring at digitally altered screens. We consume a lot of fiction to escape the truth. I liked that one character was devoted to fiction, a movie lover, and the other was the complete opposite. The novel delves deeply into our psychological mechanisms for escape: self-deception, victimhood, compulsive behaviors, avoidance behaviors…

One of Ramona's biggest problems is with Greta, who has been her partner for three years. Regarding their relationship, you write: "Love is also a noise; you enter, captivated by the scenery, and then, when you want to leave, you don't know how." Is love a trap?

— Falling in love is the great fiction, the fiction of the other, a kind of intoxicated state. To fall in love is to see in another a kind of promised land. When you arrive, sometimes it is the promised land and sometimes it isn't. And getting out of there is difficult, because everything is tangled up, within a spider's web.

The novel is structured in alternating chapters. In some, we find Ramona's story on Christmas Eve at the Parador de Sau. In others, Fausto travels by train from Madrid to Barcelona just before Saint John's Day. Why did you choose this structure?

— They are two separate stories that are also intertwined, interwoven. Until now, I hadn't used two narrators in a novel. This allowed me to explore the fact that the action is relative. You're with one and then you immediately switch to the other; it's a matter of rhythm. I wanted the timeline to be very clear by keeping them tightly defined.

Why do you set part of the story on Christmas Day?

— Because it creates a very particular atmosphere at the Parador, and because these are symbolic dates. When you're alone on a special day, something is bound to happen. There's something strange about being alone on New Year's Eve, Christmas Day, or your birthday, even if it's all the same to you. The fact that it's that particular date makes everything more significant, gives it a greater impact.

The protagonists' context isn't optimistic either. You portray the decline of Catalan, the impact of climate change... Do you see the present with despair?

— It's a book about individual and collective droughts. The drought we experienced a couple of years ago was almost a symbol of the country, of the feeling that it's somewhat dead, that we're all just crawling along. And then there's the idea that Barcelona is parched, that with the invasion of the exados They're squeezing us all dry; the city's natural inhabitants are being driven out because of this subservience to tourism. And then there's the intellectual drought. We're all zombified, spending many hours a day in contact with reality through a screen. It's quite unsettling.

Fausto is the dam manager, and as such, he has to deal with a series of situations at the reservoir. How did you research the more technical aspects of the story?

— I could have made it up and nothing would have happened, but when I write I always try to find out how things really are. I spoke with Sergi Morilla, the manager of the Sau dam. He showed me around and told me a lot of things. I also spoke with a meteorologist to find out if it was plausible that there was so much fog at the reservoir and if it was likely that there would be a dry thunderstorm affecting a train. And then I went to spend Christmas at the Parador to see what it was like. I thought it would be empty, but instead it was full. I also traveled from Madrid to Barcelona by train, taking notes, and I drove to the Monegros desert, to the place where the train stops. I like to observe reality with a literary eye and then portray it.

Ramona hosts a podcast and has committed to publishing an essay, but she has absolutely no desire to do so. At one point in the novel, she asks herself, "How do you write a book you don't feel like writing?" Have you ever written a book without any enthusiasm?

— Generally, when I write a book, I do it because I feel like it. I was writing another one that I abandoned, not for lack of enthusiasm but because I felt inadequate.

Does Saint George's Day excite you?

— Nothing. I feel like I'm just some kind of stage set; people walk by and look at you like you're in a zoo. It's lovely to have the street full of books, but it's a day that writers spend mostly alone, even if someone from the publishing house is with us. We run up and down from one place to another to sign four books and end up exhausted. I always feel like people are draining me; I finish the day drained and with a very discouraging feeling. What I'd really like is to be in a bar from ten to two. Since I won't have lines of 200 people, people can come, sit down, and we can chat. That would be nice and fun.