Joan-Lluís Lluís: "Something as miserable as what this novel describes can only be real."

Barcelona"Nine orangutans are sleeping in the hold of a ship. They sleep with moans and occasional shudders as the drug they've been injected with begins to fade, also with slow movements limited by the bars of the cages they're locked in. One cage for all, and this night is dead for all." Thus it begins. A rain song, the eleventh novel by Joan-Lluís Lluís (Perpignan, 1963). It tells the story of the life of an orangutan, baptized as Ella-Calla, from the cage where she has been temporarily deprived of her freedom on the island of Borneo to the forest where she can reunite with her relatives.

A rain song begins with a few words of Victor Catalan who say: "Perhaps it was a sin, killing a cricket, and perhaps a greater sin than others that had seemed to him to be very great sins."

— I think, without a doubt, that killing a cricket is a sin. Any animal has the same right to live as I do. It's true that sometimes a balance of power arises that causes us to get rid of some, but it's not because we have a superior right.

In the epilogue you admit that it is the novel that has taken you the most work.

— I dedicated four whole years. When I received the first copy ofA rain song and I saw that it was such a small object, I thought, "Oh, they've done an abstract."

Why did you choose orangutans as the almost absolute protagonists of the book?

— The seed of the story comes from a visit to the Barcelona Zoo with my children when they were young. I don't like zoos, but I had no choice but to take them there. It was there that I exchanged a glance with a gorilla a short distance away. I spent a long time wondering what the gorilla had seen and whether he had even had the initial thought about me. We'll never know. There's a part of the unknown about animals that's beyond our reach. After a while, a photo of a male orangutan high in a tree fell into my hands, and I found it to possess an absolutely exceptional majesty.

Was this the starting point of the novel?

— More or less. I immediately thought that the orangutan was Priam's king. My initial intention was to write an adaptation of theOdyssey with an orangutan playing Ulysses. I started looking for analogies between some of the Homeric scenes and what I wanted to do—I had the Cyclops, the Sirens, the burning of Troy—and I read a lot of recent books on primates to keep up with the latest research.

But then there was an unexpected twist...

— Yes. I read a short story that explained, in just a few lines, a terrible true event, and then my novel ceased to exist, giving way to the one I ended up writing.

What can we say about the book to avoid overwhelming the reader?

— Good question. A rain song It has to do with the mistreatment of an orangutan, Ella-Calla, something unthinkable but that really happened.

You tell the story in the third person, but always very close to Ella-Calla: even when she has to interact with humans, we as readers empathize with her.

— One choice I could have made was to write a documentary novel, a true crime, but neither of those interests me. The other extreme would have been to humanize the animals as much as possible, Walt Disney style. I settled on a middle ground: my orangutans had to maintain their animality.

We follow Ella-Calla's journey throughout the 150 pages of the novel: she is the only one who leaves, her companions stay inside the cages like snails.

— I was very successful in choosing a female. An alpha male is literary uninteresting...

The protagonist soon escapes from the ship she's imprisoned on. Her intelligence allows her to escape, but it also takes its toll, because what she finds outside is worse than she could have expected.

— I didn't see that point in terms of intelligence, but rather of freedom. Knowing how to earn your freedom has a price. The other orangutans are stunned, which makes them reach a calmer and quicker conclusion than hers. When I write, I'm not very interested in philosophical, poetic, and moral lessons, but they're necessarily present in a story like this. I realized this when I had already finished the book.

Even if freedom comes at a price, is it worth the risk to get there?

— I don't know if it's worth it or not. It's a question everyone must find their own answer to. This novel has made me suffer more than any other I've written.

Because of what happens to the protagonist?

— In part, yes, because Ella-Calla suffers from human evil. There's no other rational explanation for what she has to go through. The financial gain they make from the orangutan is ridiculous. There's another point that made me suffer, and that was how I managed to make that evil bearable through literature. First, to write it, but also with the reader in mind, so they could read it. I always keep all the versions of my novels, and this time I've outdone myself: there are 38.

How did the novel evolve during the versions?

— The first versions were incredibly crude. I told everything that happened in Ella-Calla. And I felt terrible every time I revised the novel. One day I thought the magic word that could save me was ellipsis. Thanks to this device, I don't hide anything that happens in Ella-Calla, but it saves me from having to write it down.

The story is set in Borneo. This will be the first time a novel written in Catalan features this island.

— I work without any strategy. My novels lack an initial trunk; they're more like rhizomatic ones: there are several stems that come together and eventually advance. Borneo suited me well because it's an island, and so the orangutan has a closed perimeter and can't wander too far. I could have taken gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans. I chose the latter because they're not aggressive, have a complex social life, and practice highly developed empathy, especially the females.

It is her turn to receive human aggression and depravity.

— Yes. Something as miserable as what this novel describes can only be real. I have insisted a lot with the publisher to explain on the back cover that in A rain song There's something real. I would be deeply ashamed if someone thought I made it up.

Fortunately, not all of the humans who appear in the novel are as evil as those who mistreat Ella-Calla.

— I realized I needed a character to counteract the evil I was portraying. That's how the character of the old woman, who at first was just a passing silhouette, took on greater importance. Her goodness is fragile, humble, almost powerless. It helps me convey that human beings aren't inherently evil. They can choose.

In your novels, the protagonists often distinguish themselves from society because they emphasize culture. Ella-Calla and the orangutans are also guided by a unique mythical foundation...

— It's highly unlikely that orangutans have a mythology, but it was an extremely pleasurable exercise inventing one. And I made them communicate with each other telepathically, and they know how to sing in a special way... Humans have sinned by oversimplifying animal behavior: they consider them to be beings of instinct. We know this is a rotten lie. This idea probably comes from the Old Testament, and productivism thrives on conveying the idea that animals don't suffer on farms. According to this point of view, they are there.

Instead of minimizing animal suffering, you empathize so much that it's inevitable to think you've been observing and appreciating them for years. Was there a foundational experience that changed your perspective on them?

— I've never been around animals. My children did have a turtle, but as soon as I could, I took it to a center to be cared for. This turtle was useful to me because I realized it was a wild animal. If you let it out of its cage, it would try to escape, but it couldn't because it was slow, like all turtles. Something that was fundamental for me was becoming a vegetarian.

How long has it been since you got it?

— Yes. About 45 years. Vegetarianism has forced me to think a lot about animals, if only to resist all the fumes, smells, and aromas that come off the neighbors' plates. They find it pleasurable, but it makes me want to throw up.

Is it easier to be a vegetarian now than when you first became a vegetarian?

— It's much easier now. When I was young and said I was a vegetarian, many people would respond, "Oh, are you in a cult?" Sometimes they would also say, "Carrots suffer too." The answer is that they don't suffer because they don't have a nervous system.

THE TRAVELS OF JOAN-LLUÍS LLUÍS

Luis debuted at the age of 30 with a novel that explored one of the greatest taboos in France: the Algerian War. The starting point was seven Arabs and a Kabyle man walking through the mountains. They are the fedains of the war, a group of men united by the dream of independence. They are traveling with a mule loaded with weapons and telling stories, when a platoon of French soldiers commanded by a young officer blocks their path. "I've realized that the present bores me a lot. I don't feel like talking about the world as it is. I don't feel like including the internet in a novel. How lazy.", the author assured in 2022.

After novels like Cherry (The Granada, 1996), The Crime of the Tired Writer (La Magrana, 1999) and essays such as Conversation with my dog about France and the French (La Magrana, 2002), Lluís published a story set in present-day Prats de Molló and steeped in local folklore that had a huge impact on readers and earned him the Crexells Prize. The Prats de Molló, where the book's protagonist returns after her mother's suicide, is a town dominated by fear and obedience to the French army, the same army that took over the town in the 17th century.

AfterAguafang (La Magrana, 2008), Joan-Lluís Lluís did a triple somersault with The Chronicles of the Lame God, where he told the story of the Greek god Hephaestus over thirty centuries inside a Sicilian volcano. "While reading about the 4th century, one of my weaknesses, I began to think that humans had murdered the gods, leaving them to starve to death."I also found a connection between all these deities and the comic book superheroes of the 20th century. The feeling was peculiar," the author admitted during the novel's promotion.

After a short prologue set in Nouméa, New Caledonia, in 1935, The navigator takes a leap back in time and settles in the city of Perpignan in the mid-19th century. The story's protagonist, Assiscle Xatot, has a gift: he is able to speak any language he comes into contact with with extraordinary ease. This ability leads him to live a series of unexpected adventures that will take him to the other side of the world. "The Navigator is a declaration of love for the linguistic diversity of humanity," Joan-Lluís Lluís stated in 2016.

Luis's penultimate novel tells the story of a girl from the first century AD who embarks on an odyssey to the far reaches of the Roman Empire, accompanied by three slaves, to whom more fugitives will gradually be added. Her goal is to find the poet who has captivated her with his verses, Ovid, who spends his final years in exile.All the characters in the novel, even the most illiterate, are nourished by literature. "—the author asserts—"Humans are fictional animals. Our story is how we find food, how we don't freeze to death, how we resist hostile people... and how we tell ourselves all this."