Juan Tallón: "Work poisons our entire lives"

BarcelonaHe wears a sweater as gray as his hair while speaking calmly, as if what he is about to say is a matter of life or death. Juan Tallón (Vilardevós, 1975) has just published A thousand things (Anagrama), a chilling novel due to the sheer amount of reality it contains. While other books by the author abound in metafiction and defeat, in the case of A thousand things —starring a couple with a child who can't balance work and family life— is a collective defeat.

Is it more likely to commit a stupid act like the one in the novel in a big city than in Vilardevós?

— Yes, to begin with, there are no children in Vilardevós [laughs]. Big-city books are big-city books, with their alienating contemporary life, confined to urban spaces where many people subsist on their jobs, going from one place to another, hyperconnected and deeply distracted. People no longer pay attention because they receive dozens and dozens of stimuli from all sides, from every angle, and try to attend to them all. In a rural area, there isn't this hyperstimulation. The concept of hurry, the concept of time, is very different in an urban space than in a rural one.

Has this problem worsened in the current decade?

— Humanity is always accelerating. We live obsessed with speed, with getting places faster, with getting things done faster at work. In the 19th century, industrialization took a qualitative leap in terms of the speed of things; the 20th century deepened this even further; and in the 21st, the rise of the internet, where everything can seemingly be resolved with a click, is the ultimate expression of speed. We're only missing teleportation. Acceleration goes far beyond the speed of getting things done as quickly as possible; it also has to do with socioeconomic indicators. We need to accelerate to increase productivity and profits. We are absolutely driven mad by the speed of things.

Is the fact that he lives in Ourense, a small city, an attempt to escape all of this?

— Not initially. I lived in Ourense because life's circumstances took me there. My job was there, and later, my family was there. Before starting my family, I thought it might be interesting to live in Madrid. In fact, I lived in Madrid for a year. But I returned to Ourense, and I didn't regret that decision at all. I came to the conclusion that to do what I did, which was to make a living from writing, I would have much more peace and quiet and time if I did it from Ourense than if I did it from Madrid. Now I'm much more aware of the advantages of living in a city of 100,000 inhabitants, where there are very few distractions. When I go to Barcelona or Madrid, where I have many friends from my generation, I get distracted and scattered much more easily.

He always signs his books in Vilardevós, the Galician village where he was born.

— It's the least fictional thing I know when I pick up the verb beAm I Spanish? Yes. Am I Galician? Yes, I'm Galician too. But those are rather abstract concepts. Being from Vilardevós, for me, is something much more specific, something I can explain better. The first 18 years of my life in that village definitively shaped me. They are crucial in establishing the mold of your character, your attitude towards the world, your sense of humor, your passion for storytelling. I attribute all of that to being from Vilardevós; it's the most authentic thing. Being from there has given me so much, and the only thing I can do for Vilardevós is to remember it in every book, leaving it as the last line of all my novels.

?A thousand things Did it arise spontaneously from something that happened to you?

— I was writing another book, but its origin isn't a personal experience. It's a social experience, as a citizen observing how we're living in a state of conformity, the need to constantly do things and consume. When you're not producing or consuming, you have to be entertained. You have to submit to the endless supply of entertainment. What they demand of us is that we take action, even if it's just sitting at home fiddling with our cell phones. What seems to be unacceptable is stillness, tranquility, inaction, and laziness, which has such a bad reputation. As a spectator, I see that we're losing our minds a bit, that we're leading a lifestyle that leads to colossal mistakes because we've lost the ability to pay attention to things. And that's what happens to the protagonists of my novel. Sometimes, to truly understand reality, we have to fictionalize it.

One of the settings in the novel is a magazine's editorial office. You were a journalist and know newsrooms firsthand. Do you see the media as a clear example of the problems we're discussing?

— Journalism is a discipline where time has been closing in on the writer. You can rarely take things easy in journalism. A newsroom is like a pot on the stove. It's always on the stove. The newsroom thrives on a frenetic pace. And on the day of the magazine's monthly deadline, there are always so many things to do, and they only get sorted out at the last second. You look at your colleagues, and they all seem to be going crazy. That character interested me.

It's not just the deadline for the monthly issue of the magazine. It's also the last day before the stars go on vacation.

— That moment is significant because the very fact that the vacation is tomorrow makes the eve of it an exciting day. We tend to think it's so close that we can almost overlook the fact that we still have to work that last day. You face it with a very different mindset. The vacation day is the glimmer of light you're drawn to in a day that is otherwise overwhelming. In fact, the vacation day seems further and further away. The novel is also about how our work consumes everything. Or, at least, how work infects or poisons everything.

Does Juan Tallón the writer take up a lot of space in his life?

— Yes, but in my case, my relationship with writing isn't so much about work as we might understand a professional relationship. It's more of a hedonistic one. Writing demands effort, thought, and elimination, but it's profoundly pleasurable. So it doesn't bother me, it doesn't disturb me. And yes, writing is the center of my life, it always has been, even when I was far from being able to make a living from it. And when I say make a living from writing, I mean combining my literary work with my journalistic contributions. When I was a student and aspired to be a writer, that was already the center of my life.

In contrast, his relationship with journalism was more conflictive.

— The worst years of my life were the last three I worked in a newsroom [in the one of ProgressAnd I never forget it. We all have a similar relationship with journalism. We have an idealized vision of how we'd like to do things that clashes with the reality of how we actually do them. As if the ideal conditions for practicing journalism didn't really exist. There's always something that undermines your enthusiasm, your vocation, which nevertheless persists because your vocation is so powerful, but disillusionment is inevitable.

Is that what led him to change his life?

— I was living in very difficult conditions, which had also distanced me from literature because I had no quality time to write and barely enough to read. As soon as I had an opportunity to do something else, I didn't hesitate. I have to leave here. I have to abandon this newsroom because it's going to destroy me. And I left the newspaper.