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By Daniel Branco
I hate writing novels. It's hard, meticulous work. It’s a year or a year and a half of daily routine, five to eight hours a day, holidays included. For a professional writer, or at least the kind of professional I am - not an artist, but a craftsman who tells stories as best he can - that's no different from other jobs. It's like going to the office or the factory, clocking in and out. There's nothing romantic or glamorous about it. It's a job done routinely, systematically. And it wears you out just like any other.
What I love is imagining. Build a plot with places, situations, characters, and dialogues is the closest thing I know to happiness. It's like reading a novel where the pages, always new, always possible, unfold in your mind. Going to sleep each night thinking about the episode you'll write in the morning, reading - and learning as you read - related books, observing the world with the avidity of a hunter with an open game bag, figuring out where everything you invent fits, that's what I love about the craft I've been practicing for thirty-five years. But none of that would make sense, nor could I afford it, if the novel didn't ultimately conclude, by publishing it to justify the time and money invested in that happy initial stage. No one can live off their imagination if they don't materialize it into something that interests others.
A novelist's mind is peculiar. You live differently, focused on a parallel, imagined world, which often intersects with the real world until it acquires even more substance than this one. I could say of myself that I live more time there than here, and I assure you that this has reasonable advantages. It's like moving from one room to another when what's in one doesn't satisfy you, but the other is furnished to your liking. And there's a curious feature in this double life that unfolds between reality and fiction: when the latter precedes the former, it anticipates or announces it. I mean - even though I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself well - that sometimes reality simply confirms what you've previously invented.
It happened to me many times and it still does. If a novelist's work feeds on the imagined, the read and the lived, it's no less true that sometimes chance ends up putting you in front of places, situations or characters you've invented or read about; suddenly you find yourself under the walls of Troy, on board the Surprise, in front of the corpse of Rogelio Ackroyd, or you cross paths with Hans Castorp, with Madame Bovary, or even - saving enormous distances - with your own characters, whom until that moment you believed to be the exclusively in your imagination.
The last time was not long ago, and it was a place. A landscape. I had almost finished my latest novel and I needed to refresh memories with some situations and settings. So I took a plane to Corfu, where the plot unfolds. I wanted to make sure of the sea, the wind, the light, the vegetation, the color of the houses, the shades of dawn and dusk. Later, maybe, this translates into just a couple of lines - over the years of practice I tend to be more concise in descriptions - but it seems important to me so that the reader, and myself while I work, can better place what happens, how and where it happens. And I was there, as I say, on that island, with the added advantage that since it was off tourist season, the place was deserted. There was no one, imagine it. And since the weather was bad - which suited me very well for the novel - I could walk focused on my own thoughts.
That's when it happened again. I had chosen as the setting for my story an imaginary island located north of Corfu, which I gave the fictitious name of Utakos. I had described it accurately: small, wooded, with ruins of a Venetian fort and a beach protected from the northwest wind. And suddenly, on a rainy morning, I found myself before it. In reality, it wasn't an island but a small peninsula, but identical in every other way to how I had invented or supposed it. Every cypress, every olive tree, every stone, was exactly where it should be. And at that moment, as if it had been waiting for me to arrive, a ray of sunshine tore through the low, gray clouds and illuminated the island as if to say: here it is kid. And I give you my word that I seemed to see, or I really saw, two of my characters right there, in front of me or perhaps at my side, walking on the sand in pursuit of an enigma. And I laughed, of course. I laughed out loud, very loudly, feeling happy, because one writes novels exactly for that.
This is an English translation of an article written on September 22, 2023, by Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte about his last novel, “El problema final”. The original article can be found in https://www.zendalibros.com/perez-reverte-la-isla-de-el-problema-final/
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