The revelation writer who has transformed the absence of her husband into a vocation
Laura Autonell has placed herself for weeks among the bestsellers with 'The bookstore of the dead hours'
BarcelonaLittle did Laura Autonell (Taradell, 1963) imagine when she started writing, convinced that this vocation would not go beyond her immediate circle, that she would have to eat her words. "At that time I thought: 'Which publisher will want me, if I have no literary career and I am the age I am, 62 years old?'", explains the writer. The path her second novel, The bookstore of dead hours (Columna), has taken has shattered all her assumptions. The book was published in May and quickly placed itself among the top 10 fiction titles sold in Catalonia. Since then, it hasn't left. Columna has reissued it and put into circulation more than 5,000 copies that have moved in the publishing market, mainly, thanks to word-of-mouth.
"With this book, what every editor dreams of happening has happened to us. Without a promotional campaign behind it, the novel has had a very good reception," explains Columna's editor, Glòria Gasch. She received the manuscript through the Pontas literary agency and saw its potential. "We decided to publish it in May so it wouldn't be buried by the flood of new releases for Sant Jordi. It is a true marvel to see how Laura has entered Catalan literature through the grand door. She writes out of vocation, she doesn't come from the publishing world and she has no track record. All this confirms the emergence of a new voice in Catalan narrative, a revelation author," emphasizes Gasch.
The bookstore of dead hours is inscribed within realism and is a story of personal reconstruction after a tragedy. The protagonist, Etna, sees how the privileges and luxury that have accompanied her all her life disappear overnight, when her father dies and, upon opening the will, she realizes he has disinherited her. What begins as a dramatic episode transforms into a search for her origins and a radical change of life: Etna will move to the Raval and there she will open a bookstore, following in the footsteps of her mother's dream. "My protagonist had to fall from very high to very low. In Barcelona, the contrast between the upper, affluent part and the Raval can be monumental. That's why I decided to set the story right here, on Carrer d'Elisabets," explains Autonell from the bookstore La Central del Raval, which served as inspiration.
The secret to the book working as it is is due to a combination of factors. Precisely, the fact of setting the story in a bookstore is one of them. "It has been published at an opportune moment, coinciding with the bookstores' campaign to assert themselves as cultural spaces — Gasch highlights—. The novel is, in fact, a great tribute to bookstores. It connects with the idea of valuing the book as an object and with the transformative power of reading, which appears here as a way of understanding the past, reconstructing identity, and opening up to new opportunities." The editor also points out that novels with a bookstore on the cover tend to attract attention. "If, in addition, the story is local, everything fits," says Gasch.
Contact with writing
For 46 years, Laura Autonell's professional career has had nothing to do with literature. The writer has run a sports goods shop in Taradell for decades — which she will leave in the coming months, as she plans to take early retirement —. Six years ago, however, she suffered an unexpected absence that led her to write: her husband died of cancer in the midst of the pandemic. Shortly after, Autonell self-published her first novel, Un polsim de sal (2021), and began working on La llibreria de les hores mortes. "If he were alive, perhaps I wouldn't be writing, but life has led me here. I feel that the hours I would spend with him, I am now spending with writing," says the author.
After that first novel, Autonell felt she "needed training," so she enrolled in the Writing School of the Ateneu Barcelonès, where she had writers Albert Jubany and Melcior Comes as professors. The classes also brought her closer to the Raval, a neighborhood "unfortunately degraded, but with good people who want to move forward," says the writer. One of the novel's characters, a homeless man named Santiago, she discovered through Google Street View: "I positioned myself on Elisabets street, in front of La Central, and I saw a man depicted who was very similar to my character. Seeing him was a shock, a sign that he had to be important in the novel," explains Autonell.
With leading authors such as Maggie O'Farrell, Jaume Cabré, and Nora Ephron, the writer will continue to grow her literary path with several projects already in hand: she wants to rewrite Un polsim de sal, she has finished a noir novel set in a flour mill in Taradell, and is also working on another story. All of this, fueled by the reception from readers of La llibreria de les hores mortes. "People write to me and tell me they couldn't stop reading it. That fills me up immensely — affirms the writer —. Experiencing this is fabulous, a dream".