When a stranger captivated Jorge Herralde with her novel

BarcelonaAlthough it may seem so, this title has nothing to do with me, but with a person with that surname – my mother's, in this case – whom this guy doesn't have the honor of knowing: Esther García Llovet. There are a lot of lovetos, and even more so of cuffs, which is how it should be written. The girl who bears that name wrote on her own, if you can put it that way; no publisher had ever asked her to write a book with the idea of making money or with the hope of awarding her a prize, since there are fewer Spanish languages than Catalan, although the population that speaks that language is much larger.

But one fine day, on December 28th, the Day of the Holy Innocents, the young woman received a call from the Anagrama publishing house along these lines: "Mrs. García Llovet, do you want to speak with Mr. Herralde?" (At that time, the owner of the publishing house.) She thought it was an April Fool's joke, because it was her day. But it wasn't. The publisher had read one of Esther's manuscripts and found it to be of very high quality. This doesn't happen often, and even less so now that many people believe that writing is a piece of cake. But the girl had written a good book, with good style, and with everything that Juan Marsé considered essential in a good novel: plot, characters, atmosphere. After that novel that sparked Herralde's interest, Esther has published four others, all successful.

Thus was born what one critic recently called "the universe of Llovetian", which has to do with the possibility that a person who doesn't know anyone in the literary world sends a manuscript to unknown people and the book ends up being separated among the hundreds of things that arrive each year to the publishing houses, from here and everywhere. Like a distant, but distinguishable star. There lovetos who haven't defined any "universe" or any special phenomenon. They're studious people, not very keen on publicity, devoted readers of everything from the Bible and Homer to the 1950s, or so, with occasional exceptions, here and everywhere. The others have more merit; writing well and saying something new is very difficult.