A few weeks ago, David Uclés spoke at the CCCB about Mercè Rodoreda with such ignorance that, with a clear masochistic tendency, I was curious to read La ciutat de les llums mortes, with which he has won the Nadal prize. I had to stop at the second chapter: I'm too old to waste time on bad literature, especially when, moreover, it is a poorly disguised attempt to de-Catalanize Barcelona.Unlike Àngels Barceló, the experience of reading a foreigner talking about my city did not make me recognize it, quite the opposite. I could only shake off the bad mood by returning to a truly recognizable past. This is how I ended up on the pages ofEstrella fugada. Sideral (Editorial Contra), the biography about Aleix Vergés, written by his friend and cultural journalist Héctor Castells.Nineties, Plaça Joan Llongueras and the nights when DJ Sideral spun records on Nitsa's rotating dance floor. Castells describes very well what made Sideral special: a self-taught musician and DJ with an insatiable curiosity for music, an eclectic and hard-to-classify selection, and, above all, an almost physical ability to feel the pulse of the dance floor and intervene at the right moment. I have a memory of a night that, at times, seems like a dream. I was going through a very bad time at home and, at one point, I stopped dancing and stood to the side, looking at the venue with a sense of alienation. Then, one of my favorite Sade songs started playing, mixed with electronic music. I raised my head and it seemed to me that Sideral was attentively waiting for my reaction. The current of empathy, recognition, and warmth allowed me to return to the dance floor and spin again on another of those nights that seemed magical.All the memories of that time are scattered for me, as if I were seeing them through water. But the feeling of freedom and belonging that I felt in that place is not erased. Looking back, I have the impression that many of us were people who didn't quite find a place in other spaces, but there we recognized each other without yet being able to put words to it. It was a world that resembled Neverland. There were many lost children (Castells explains that many of the friends were literally orphans, or with absent parents) and, like Peter Pan, Sideral was the leader. Charismatic, intuitive, capable of creating a place where everything seemed possible and where, for a few hours, the outside world and adults ceased to exist.Sideral did not want to grow

Like Peter Pan, Sideral did not want to grow up and said he would die young. Indeed, he died at thirty-two, just when neuroscience today places the end of adolescence. The myth remains fixed here, at this suspended point.The rest of us lost children had to learn to grow up. Perhaps that's why I'm surprised by the gaze with which Castells unfolds the story. The book was published when he was already forty years old and was revised a decade later, but, on the other hand, he explains that world to us as if he were still twenty. Like when he describes a sixteen-year-old girl as "another minor who could unleash eight hundred cases of pedophilia in a second, Asian gaze, strawberry mouth, and long eyelashes" (it seems that no one, neither in 2013 nor in 2023, found it problematic). Or when it presents Barcelona as if it could be explained apart from the political tensions that have crossed it in recent years, with a mental framework that ends up resembling more that of a David Uclés than that of a Barcelonian. Perhaps it is here that the Land of Nevermore ceases to be magic and fascination, and also becomes a prison and a nightmare. The bad mood, therefore, I have not managed to drive away.

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David Uclés is on his way to becoming the great champion of Rodoro's work. Elisenda Solsona is no slouch either. Within the framework of the CCCB exhibition on Mercè RodoredaHer talk this Monday before the more than four hundred people who filled the Hall, an enthusiastic audience, has become a festival of unrestrained praise. Rodoreda as a precursor of European magical realism (earlier and harsher than its Latin American counterpart), as an eternally innocent yet malevolent child, as an author of the everyday and terror, as a dreamlike and symbolic master. How could she be a not-so-good witch? It seems that in most of her texts, witches of all kinds and conditions appear...

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I've only seen David Uclés once, on the day of this year's Nadal Prize ceremony. When he gave his acceptance speech, I found that he spoke like no one I've ever heard anyone speak, that he expressed himself in a way as singular as his attire. Something unusual in our field: we're all quite original. When I was young, I used to say that I only wanted to be a "normal" writer, until, after meeting many colleagues, I realized that "normal" writers don't exist. There are mediocre ones, of course: the efficient mercenaries of the written word who churn out a book every year and produce novels like they're churning out sausages. I don't consider these writers—you'll have to forgive my professional purism, but I say this more as a reader than a writer. When I read, I want access to a consciousness, a world, a perspective on life, and an artistic work created with words and with the pieces and mechanisms inherent to literature. If I want to be entertained by stories told in a flat, soulless style, I already have afternoon soap operas. Anyway, I don't want to talk about books, since I haven't read either of the two novels Uclés has published; I want to talk about writers, the press, and all that part of the work we usually call "promotion."

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Just two years ago, David Uclés (Úbeda, 1990) led a nomadic life, outside the formal workforce. He spent his summers playing the accordion in front of the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral, and with what he earned during those months he got by for the rest of the year. "If I'm short of money, I paint a picture and sell it," he said. he said shortly after publishing The peninsula of empty houses (Siruela, 2024), when that novel about the Civil War was beginning to become a phenomenon thanks to word of mouth and the author's charisma, who speaks as readily about his literary idols as about the housing crisis or the beret he's worn for almost two decades.

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Spain is a nation-state embroiled in civil war. The problem is the Civil War. Clinging to the conflict like junkies. Pay attention to the latest narcotic. Congress has exploded. 1936: The War We All Lost. It wanted to be a sisterly hodgepodge of the war we all wagedThe writer David Uclés has said that he wouldn't sit next to Aznar and Espinosa de los Monteros. The two Spains, locked in a struggle with the sword and the bomb. Here's a microhistory of the War.

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The writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte and the journalist Jesús Vigorra, organizers of the conference 1936: The war we all lostThe conference, which was scheduled to take place from February 2nd to 5th at the Cajasol Foundation in Seville, has been postponed until autumn. "The intention expressed on social media by far-left groups, proposing violent demonstrations in front of the venue, has led us to advise Cajasol to postpone the announced debates," Pérez-Reverte and Vigorra said in a statement reported by EFE. The conference made headlines a few days ago when writer David Uclés withdrew upon seeing that former PP president José María Aznar and one of the founders of Vox, Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, were among the speakers. "Aznar is one of the people who has done the most physical harm to the Spanish people recently, and Espinosa de los Monteros co-founded a party that denies my freedom of expression and my right to exist, and that defends values ​​I do not share and against which I fight," said Uclés, the author of the novel The peninsula of empty houses and thelatest winner of the Nadal Prize by The City of Lights.

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The Andalusian writer David Uclés (Jaén, 1990), a best-seller editorial with The peninsula of empty houses (Siruela, 2024) and thelatest winner of the Nadal Prize by The City of Lights (Destino), has announced that "to be honest and true to the principles" he defends, he is withdrawing from the conference on the Civil War entitled 1936: The war we all lostThe event, part of the Letras en Sevilla festival coordinated by writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte and journalist Jesús Vigorra, is criticized because the program includes, in addition to writers, "two politicians who have violated fundamental human rights," citing former PP president José María Aznar and one of the founders of Vox, Iván Espinosa de los Monteros.

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