Melcior Comes: "The far right should be attacked more for being clowns than for being fascists."

BarcelonaFrom the outside, Simó Diarte is a privileged man: white, heterosexual, and well-off. He works for a multinational communications company, shops at gourmet stores, and makes a living selling cigarettes. However, from the inside, he lives in misery. The man who sold the world (Proa), the latest novel by Melchor Comes (sa Pobla, 1980), is the story of an advertising executive whose ideas for success have been robbed by a far-right candidate. In a Barcelona sold out to tourism and the widespread use of personal data for the benefit of the powerful, Comes guides this protagonist through political and social chaos. Turbulent and anguishing, Simón's journey is an intelligent narrative that tests his moral compass and portrays a society at the mercy of power.

How would you define Simón Diarte?

— He's a failed success story, a very significant character of the time we're in. He lives in privilege, he's a corporate intellectual, but at the same time he's miserable, he lacks inner happiness. He was a bad father and a bad husband. Now he's trying to put himself in a slightly better place, seeking redemption through love. The novel revolves around this individual's personal crisis, with a lot of plot from his private life but also his professional life. He works at a multinational communications company and is forced to work with the populist candidate, governed by an intellectual who was very important to him. I was interested in the Hamlet-like dynamic of a character within a rotten court. He is forced to decide what to do in the face of this power structure: whether to give in or let it take over.

Power is an old acquaintance of your novels. On the impure land (2018) revolved around an empire of shoemakers and All mechanisms (2022) portrayed political and social corruption. What do you find?

— Ultimately, power belongs to whoever wants to grab it. People are afraid of it, but then there are a number of unscrupulous people, or downright ambitious, capable of saying, "Yes, I'll go there and pull all the stops." Those who are attracted to it already have a certain profile that I find very interesting, from a dramatic and narrative perspective.

This time, the cherries are being shuffled by a far-right party that's garnering votes in Barcelona. Why were you interested in exploring that ideology?

— In the media, the far right is the one that has best understood and exploited the current situation. It has proliferated over the last ten years. They always say the same thing. There's no hint of originality or difference. And it works. The far right has gone to buy the narrative like someone who goes to buy a pre-made pizza, which is already made and just needs to be put in the oven, heated, and sold. I find it fascinating. There's no added personality or intelligence. They've been practicing the same populism for a hundred years, which could veer into fascism, but which can also be limited to what it is: a strategy to occupy institutions and divide the pie in a clientelist way, deceiving as many people as possible.

Are you worried?

— To a certain extent, because, as the novel says, it's ridiculous. We should attack the far right more for being clowns than for being fascists. We treat them like evil geniuses, when they're the bottom of the class. They've learned a few slogans and they appeal to the bottom of the class to build majorities. They tell the same bad jokes explained in other languages. The beginning of all this is Aznar's right, which began to speak like the American right. That was the pre-Trump ferment. Then came what came.

Simón clashes head-on with his daughter over a personal issue—he's unable to communicate with her—but also an ideological one, because she's part of the movement that wants to put an end to the far right.

— Mita is a more radical figure, capable of boycotting a university event to prevent others from speaking. Here, too, there's a very interesting debate about freedom of expression. To what extent should universities contribute to certain people coming to say certain things, even if they're protected by freedom of expression? And who are you to decide who can speak and who can't? These are debates that need to be put on the table, and they look very differently depending on the generation.

All of this takes place in a Barcelona with Venetian canals and mask-wearing citizens. We see the ills of the city today, such as the large masses of tourists and the lack of identity, but taken to the extreme. Why do you transform it like this?

— It's the Barcelona of today, conveniently distorted to better explain the Barcelona of today. I've emphasized certain features, such as the surrender to the spectacular, to showcase architecture. I've often heard it said that Barcelona is like Venice, already empty of Italians. If the future is Venice, why not bring the city's features here? Barcelona is also empty of Barcelonians, who can't afford to buy an apartment.

How do you experience the city?

— Exactly like Simón, with that alienation that I sometimes find amusing and sometimes exasperating. It's a place you can no longer feel as your own. It's very blurred; it no longer seems to be the capital of a culture and of a nationally structured country. Everything that's done there makes no sense from a national and identity perspective.

There are two peculiarities that stand out in the novel. On the one hand, the use of a first-, second-, and third-person narrator practically simultaneously. On the other, the dialogues from different scenes interspersed, like a jumble of voices, contribute to creating the chaotic atmosphere in which the protagonist is immersed. What formal challenges did you set for yourself?

— As a writer, it's necessary to do things that are different, unconventional. If I want to be a writer who isn't overly banal or obvious, I have to take risks and try out somewhat peculiar ways of narrating. The variation of writing the novel in the first-person present tense and occasionally addressing the character in the second person seems stimulating to the reader and makes the novel more literary. The interwoven dialogues reflect the underlying mentality of the book. That chaos of slogans and voices is, ultimately, like looking at Twitter, where one person says one thing, the other says another, and you read everything without knowing what's coming next.

What do you think is the image that the novel leaves about our reality?

— Literature, at its core, has an ideology. It must show readers that they are free, that there is room for maneuver to do things, that some things can be decided and changed. There is no fatalism that imposes itself on you. You can always decide to change something, even the smallest thing. This is where our identity, our personality, our freedom, and our capacity for life lie. Literature must continually remind us of this.