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About me




I was born in a Castilian city, conservative and literally abducted by its bishopric, since a French warrior bishop took it from the Arabs.

Sandstone of different shades is the essence of the old Castilian character of the city. In its most glorious times it had an active Jewish community, which, as is the tradition of this people, were engaged in finance, commerce, manufacturing and art. What distanced them from their tough neighbors, busy in farming, raising sheep and bullfighting at local parties.

Except themselves, the numerous clergy and the administrators and officials of the City Council, the vast majority were illiterate. We all received our first communion in the most feverish of possible religious environments, in which the population turned all their repressed senses into harsh processions and a vast offer of playful-religious spectacles.

The high schools had to attend the schools of the bishopric and the public were for those of the slums, usually atheists already from their tender childhood, judging by their horrible profanities and their canallesque and brutal acts. The city remained lethargish in a dream of hibernation for centuries, coined by religious chants and did not awaken until democracy invaded us, despite the many barriers and dams we set up to contain it.

Because of its proximity to the capital, someone from the Paradores of Spain came up with the idea of turning the ruins of his castle, former barracks of the Civil Guard, and formerly temporary prison of Doña Blanca de Borbón, wife for two days of Peter the Cruel, turn him into Parador de Turismo, and thanks to this initiative, plus the roast lamb and the delicious buds invented by the closing nuns , he was able to get rid of his old garments and start behaving like everyone in the civilized world.

I grew up in this environment and could never part with the solemnity of the theatrical religious rite, the Castilian austerity and the naivety of believers. It can be said that I did not discover the magical world of the senses until the end of my adolescence, and I had my first sexual relationship with a crazy British tourist (God save the Queen), as we almost all began, because the nationals were not for the work.

My family belonged to a very low middle class and most of its members were educated with correspondence courses, including my own mother, with a dressmaker. Of course, my claims to pursue higher education were ruled out. Like all misunderstood and lonely teenagers, I counted my frustrated longings and desires to scratched notebook sheets, the way most writers' literary vocations have been forged, and the best example is carmen Laforet and her novel "Nada", which became a Spanish manual at numerous American universities.

My parents put me on track of what my particular "higher education" would be: knowing the world from within and not from a faculty classroom, because they took me with them when they were forced to emigrate to Willy Brandt's tolerant and enterprising Germany. When my parents returned I was of legal age and decided to stay in that country, because my curriculum was to know the European nations, their people, their cultures, their customs, their habits, their literature, their history and their languages.

My luggage consisted of underwear, two or three novels by European classics and my faithful Italian companion, an Olivetti, Pen 22, sky blue. From Germany I crossed the Baltic Sea to settle in the "Wonderfull" Nordic city of Copenhagen, where I discovered the causes that motivated Andersen's fantastic tales and pornographic magazines. My second year was the post-revolutionary Paris of the 70's, still with the May hangover of '68.

There I discovered, following in his own footsteps through streets and gardens to Voltaire, Racine, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Proust, Dumas, Maupassant, and an inexhaustible list of magnificent writers, poets and playwrights, who captivated Europe's imagination from the Carpathians to the Pyrenees, because in Spain reading foreign novels, and especially French ones, was little less than a betrayal of the homeland that chose the chains that Ferdinand VII brought from his , after the departure from the national territory of the "Grande Armée" The third year of my private career it was the turn of disconcerting London, where everything works wonderfully well, but vice versa.

Until you have lived in London for six months, it is not possible to understand the reasons for the overwhelming dominance of Anglo-Saxon culture in the world, but it can be summed up in just two words: freedom and pragmatism, protected and promoted by a discreet aristocracy that fights its boredom by riding horses chasing innocent foxes and playing cricket, taking advantage of breaks to make three or four mobile calls to its city and wall agents , and the manager of his vineyards in the south of France, to know how the grape harvest is going. I am not a big fan of British literature, because, as good Spanish, I can't help but be an idealist, that's why I live in Berlin. I have only enthusiastically read George Orwell, who cannot say that he was very British, because communism is not compatible with the mentality of Adam Smith's descendants.

A few years later I finished my literary career with a "doctorate" obtained in New York, with one chapter written in Los Angeles and another in San Francisco. It was no longer necessary to travel anymore, with what has been seen and lived in all these countries I already had a well-formed idea of who rules the world, including the publishing world. To survive without departing from the lyrics I had to invent a few journalist credentials, and I climbed links in my career until I took the credentials of correspondent at the home of all the United Nations in New York. There I was able to enjoy its excellent menu for the discerning palate of diplomats for a third of what it cost in a modest Manhattan restaurant, with stunning views over the Hudson River and Brooklyn The rest had no interest to me.

I crossed the country twice from coast to coast, once by train from Chicago to San Francisco, where there was still some pick-up of the hippy move in the cafes near Aswury Park, and another with an immense van bought from a Jew, who promised me not to do more business with Spaniards, because it lowered me up to half the initial price. I made historic Route 66, followed by the colonizers of violent West and returned through the South, to descend the Florida peninsula to Miami, passing through the same places that Ponce de León traveled, but without dangerous marshes infected with voracious alligators, crocodiles and snakes.

As for his novelists, it is understood the motivation for Scott Fitzgerald to write "The Great Gatsby" and John Steinbeck, "The Grapes of Wrath," for the practice of wild capitalism in a country without history or traditions, which makes a version of the Principles of the Enlightenment based on a subjective reading of the psalms of the Bible.

How can we not admire Hemingway, Walt Whitman, Bukowski, Truman Capote, Henry Miller, among many other surplus writers, much more engaged than their British cousins? I resided two exciting (perhaps I should use popular, but less literary, "mind-blowing") years in New York. I lived this experience with a feeling found difficult to harmonize, impressions extendable to all this great and contradictory country.

On the one hand I knew that in their universities they taught master classes the most clear and creative minds in the field of our Western culture, but also in New York, and in all the big, rich cities, they survive in inhumane conditions thousands of homeless people, without any opportunity to rehabilitate, who spend the icy nights of the New York winter curled up inside cardboard boxes over the sewer covers overheated by the heaters How was it possible for the country richest in our field of developed countries, on the planet also have the community of people in the most abject poverty, because they are surrounded by the most extravagant wealth? The answer I did not have until I met a great person and dear professor of philosophy, dedicated to the study and dissemination of a theoretical philosopher of pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914).

I had a negative assessment of pragmatism, because I considered it a form of social selfishness, but the respect that inspired me by my good friend made me reflect and come to other more positive conclusions. It is true that pragmatism can fall into selfishness and do business with anything that can be profitable, but it can also be a social and creative pragmatism, a reflection of the natural world and inspiration of new social networks and the digital world for the most part, with enough dose of idealism not to fall into that nauseating swamp of contempt for the human condition , whose lack that makes them worthy of their poverty is their inability to meet the demands of an increasingly complex and competitive world.

The United States has fallen into this swamp of antisocial and dehumanized pragmatism for years, where, if it does not rectify, it will eventually drown. Americans have invented the perfect formula for unhappiness: excessive ambition, fierce individualism, mutual mistrust, and tolerance for social inequalities and their effects. In New York, and in this country, no one is happy, they can only aspire to be satisfied, because to be happy you have to be able to dream, and you cannot dream who is always awake.

But in my worldly education as a writer there were still some fundamental unscanned spaces: the homeland of my favorite writer Alexander Puschkin, in addition to my admired Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol or Anton Chekhov.

Because of the inscrutable mysteries of fate, in New York I met an extraordinary Hungarian woman, named after princess, and two months later we shared a small studio on 72nd Street in Manhattan.

Together with her I resided for some time in Budapest and with this emergency guide, I visited the enigmatic Romania, with its castles and fortresses intact as left by its last inhabitants, two or three centuries ago, including Dracula, and Catholic Poland, where the population queues to attend Sunday Mass, and much follows it from the street , because there is no one else in the churches.

But these countries were, culturally speaking, still far from my favorites, and two years later, thanks to the incredible social networks, another extraordinary woman, music teacher and delicate mandolin soloist, got me a week-long visa in Belarus and immediately flew to Minsk, of which there was hardly any building left standing after World War II.

That pleasant journey was just an approximation to the stage of my idols. One summer I arm myself with courage and, thanks to the relative success of sales of a history book, I was able to realize my dream and embarked on the adventure of traveling by car to the historic city of Kiev. Among the many landscapes evoked by these writers I believe that there are still the "mujics", who take their cow out every day to graze through the meadows near their villages.

On my way back I passed my long-year-old city of Berlin, where I ended up settling down. I've been living in the same apartment for 14 years, and I haven't traveled 50 miles in all this time, where. I was able, at last, to seriously begin my literary career, with the writing of 15 works, between novels, stories, short stories, poetry, philosophy and essay.

About my work of fiction

It would not be ethical if I said that my work is great, but it would not be right for me to leave it to the reader's opinion, because each reader has a different literary sensibility, and his opinions would be subjective. No one better than the author himself to value his own work; his flaws as his successes, but of course I won't make my opinion public.

At least I can say that not only have I written novels, but I have lived them, because all the fundamental characters in my novels have been inspired by extraordinary people I have been fortunate enough to meet personally, such as "Tania", from "The Stranger", based on an extraordinary woman I met in Belarus. Or Noemi, a young Moldovan I met here in Berlin.

I can also say that I have taken great care of the narrative technique and the cleanliness and conciseness of the language, eliminating the superfluous and unnecessary, a correct syntax and the truthfulness and naturalness of the dialogues.

Finally, to say that I have never written thinking about what readers want to read, but my wish is that readers want to read what I write. The only novel in which I did not respect this principle, Roland de Saracusa; a story that happens in the nineteenth century, I abandoned it when I had already written a third.


About my work of philosophy

Philosophy has a history and multiple schools. I believe that although many are obsolete, they must be known and understood, the work of teachers, but I am not an academic, but a free thinker without any limitation other than my natural capacity for reasoning, common in all humans, as Descarte says in his prologue to the Method. Not only have I not read philosophers who bring nothing new or original, but I have ignored them in order not to let myself be influenced by their ideas and systems to develop my own without influence from any of them. Naturally, I initially made many mistakes and false deductions, but after lengthy and laborious revisions, I have so polished my own systems that I have finally connected with the philosophers I had snranged. In other words, I've come to them on my own path, allowing me to better understand their ideas and systems.

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