Lluís Llach: "When it comes to sex, I'm completely amoral."

BarcelonaIt's been more than a decade since Lluís Llach reinvented himself as a novelist, and since he published Memory of painted eyes (Empúries, 2012), thousands of readers have faithfully followed him book after book. "Stop, stop, don't exaggerate from the beginning," Llach urged, while the audience gave him a standing ovation as soon as he appeared in the large hall of the modernist complex of the Hospital de Sant Pau where his new novel was presented, The Golden Book, in an event organized by the ARA and the publishing house Universo.

"With Checkmate to fate I was fed up with the Middle Ages, but at the end of writing that novel, I read a document that said that the Inquisition of the Catalan-Aragonese Crown hadn't killed any witches, and that shocked me, because I had been raised with the idea that mine proves that women were persecuted from the 13th century onwards, when medicine gained momentum at the university. "The women in my novel are firm, determined, and make their own particular revolt," Llach told Antoni Bassas, moderator of the event. Men need to assert themselves and submit. The pendulum swings back and forth. Let's get ready, girls, because today's world is going backwards."

Llach recalled how, in the Middle Ages, Arab and Muslim medicine was much more advanced than "that of the barbarians from the north." "They were infinitely superior to us," she said. Muhammad said that medicine was a way of getting closer to God, unlike Christians, who saw it as a danger. While here we treated with leeches, there they were already operating on cataracts."

"Where do you find the time to research all these things and to write?" Bassas asked him. "I don't know, but I find it," Llach replied with a smile.The Golden Book "He's a reader and there's also sex," Bassas added. "Heterosexual sex and also homosexual and lesbian sex." "When it comes to sex, I'm completely amoral," Llach stated. "We are sexual animals and nature distributes preferences as it wishes. I've spent most of my life trying to fight for homosexuality to be accepted. Every time I write, you have to put up with a character who has a deviant persona." "In the novel, you do it in a more refined way: you say that a character 'is overcome by the lows,'" Bassas said. "I like to use all the possibilities of language. Instead of writing soften, prefer asuavirAnd a character of mine, instead of saying I came has the habit of saying came —she continued—. I'm like this, and I don't know if I have time to change."

During the event, Llach also expressed her outrage at the fact that women couldn't study medicine until the 19th century and at the regression we're experiencing due to Donald Trump's authoritarianism. "His brain has no intelligence at all," ílvia Bel read a selection of fragments from the novel.