Xavier Mas Craviotto: "When the tongue of a book grates on me, everything falls apart."

BarcelonaIt is difficult to emerge unscathed from the stories that Xavier Mas Craviotto (Navàs, 1996) brings together in Expressionless animals (The Other, 2025). The writer, author of novels such as Slow death (2019, Documenta Award) and The skin of the world (2023), now publishes ten profound and unsettling stories inhabited by characters immersed in failure. Written in exquisite prose made of precise words and explosive metaphors, each of these stories is a journey through the human soul in its lowest moments.

What prompted you to publish your first book of short stories now?

— I had written many short stories, even before my first novel. I realized that these ten stories respond to certain concerns and share a common emotional landscape. It made sense to publish them as a book. I spent a couple of years writing them, but I kept going back to revise them. Perhaps I've been polishing them for almost three years, finally finding the precise word, the metaphor that fits what I want to say.

In almost every story there is a death: of a child, an adult, or an animal. Why?

— Death serves as a way for me to confront the characters with life. Here it has a different function than in Slow death oa The skin of the worldThe characters have reached a point in their lives where they realize they are not where they want to be. They have a kind of epiphany and realize that the life they have built is just smoke, but it is too late. The notion of life's erosion, of inevitable death, becomes present to them.

Why do you transform that vital inertia into literary material?

— Inertia makes you stop asking yourself questions, stop wondering what the point of what you're doing is. I was interested in exploring how a certain mechanization of emotions, a routine in human relationships, leads to this. We take our lives for granted. We live in a society where we're easily swept along by inertia. When you have that moment to stop and ask yourself if you're where you want to be, it can be devastating.

How do you, as a writer, delve into these lives?

— It's a book about sad people, but those are precisely the kinds of characters that make it so interesting. As they say Mariana EnriquezSad people have no mercy. Not for others, nor for themselves. I don't write to instill hope, nor the opposite. For me, literature goes beyond these functions. In the end, I place lives before the reader's eyes, and they can do what they want with them. Reading is building a foundation that helps us relate to the world in a more complex and profound way. For me, as a reader, these stories, which are sometimes harsh, help me see the world and people in a different light.

What literary references have guided you in this compilation?

— There are some more universal figures like William Faulkner and Mercè Rodoreda. David Foster Wallace was key. The title of the collection comes from one of his stories. expressionless animalswhich Ferran Ràfols translated into Catalan for a Periscopio anthology. Foster Wallace says that we look at animals and they have no expression, but neither do we humans. He says that our faces move through different configurations of emptiness. We all wear masks to relate to the world. I took this premise to develop the thread that connects the stories.

The stories avoid a macabre tone, but violence is omnipresent: a child killed by his mother, another found drowned in the river. Why do you approach these events from a literary perspective?

— The story And you told me, "There's a bird over there." It's inspired by a true story about a mother who drowned her child in the bathtub. The film also deeply affected me. Playground, by Bartosz M. Kowalski, based on the case of a two-year-old boy kidnapped, tortured, and killed by two ten-year-old boys in the UK in the 1990s. I needed to tell myself about this gratuitous violence. Writing the story was a way of trying to ask myself questions. Writing is a question that is always open. From there, this propels me to explore the short story, the novel, or the poem.

The children, in fact, appear in the stories in tense, uncomfortable, and dangerous situations. What was it like to create those characters?

— It's a book full of adults, children, and animals because they represent three distinct stages of how we see and relate to the world. Childhood has traditionally been idealized and mythologized. But, in a way, there can be a great deal of cruelty and very little compassion in childhood. It's a very interesting phase of life because you don't have to carry the burden of ethical codes and moral values. You relate to the world in a much more raw way. Narrating from the children's point of view helps me distance myself from the rigid way adults see the world.

Stylistically, which story did you have to rack your brains the most for?

— I had a huge argument with two stories: The night trapped in the rearview mirror and Empty womanStructurally, they're complex, very fragmented. I had to make sure everything fit together. Then there's another one that gave me trouble in a different way, but I also enjoyed it a lot: Statement I really wanted to capture the colloquial, village-style speech of an older woman, but in Catalan this register doesn't have a well-established written tradition. This forced me to consider how I wrote certain things and where to draw the line, because if I reflected the spoken language 100% faithfully, it would create a sense of strangeness, a distance from the reader.

Why is language so important in your work?

— In a book, language is everything: the characters, the story, the structure. As a reader, when a book's language grates on me, the whole thing falls apart. I invest most of my time in this phase of technically perfecting the language, but it's also where I have the most fun working. If I work the language well, I can get as close as possible to what I intuit, to what I have in my head. There's also the desire to generate aesthetic pleasure with language. I like to see what my language is capable of, to play with it, to push it to the extreme, to stretch it, to deform it and conquer it, generating a feeling of strangeness and, consequently, of pleasure.

This Wednesday I'm traveling to the Guadalajara Book Fair to present the Spanish translation of The skin of the worldHow do you value the fact that you were translated and what was the process like with the translator?

— This is the first time one of my novels has been translated, and I'm thrilled. Until now, only scattered poems of mine had been translated into languages like English, Albanian, Macedonian, and German. It's been very exciting to see the work Mariano del Cueto has done to translate my work. The skin of the world in Mexican Spanish, with all its dialectal features. I'd say it wasn't an easy novel to translate at all, because it's very poetic and at the same time full of dialectal expressions that I've always heard in my town, like to rachear either this message...colloquialisms and terms that refer to our sociocultural reality, but he handled it all very well. For example, he translated pixapins as out-of-place outsidersAnd I loved it. In fact, I met him recently in Barcelona, ​​and I had the opportunity to tell him so in person. Now we'll meet again in Mexico. I'm eager to present the book in Guadalajara and talk with the readers there.