“What a pleasure to be among friends,” he celebrates Luis Mateo Diez As soon as he begins the presentation of his new novel, The corner watchman (Galaxia Gutenberg), in the Rafael Alberti Bookstore in Madrid. This mythical space, which is now celebrating its half century of life, has received the writer on numerous occasions, both as author and as reader. “Since the Middle Ages,” jokes the winner of the 2024 Cervantes Prize.
It is on the ground floor of the bookstore where he tells us about his new work. The corner watchmanthrough the story of Ciro Caviedo, an “annoying and somewhat deranged” journalist who becomes involved in a plot full of conspiracies and murders that threaten the city (one of the imaginary Shadow Cities that the author usually uses in his novels). With a string of extravagant characters who go through corruption, brotherhoods, infiltrations in a sect and a possible extraterrestrial invasion, Luis Mateo Díez’s book ends up becoming a satire of the chaos in which today is mired.
Halfway between comedy and tragedy, the writer once again enters a literature “of the absurd and the grotesque,” in which the incredible hits harder than the realistic, even more so in a present “as disordered” as the one in which, he claims, we live today. your friend Ángeles Encinarprofessor of Spanish literature at Saint Louis University and expert in the work of Mateo Díez, explains in the presentation that the author likes to move in “that limit of unreality that gives meaning to what the characters, and the reader, see and discover.”
Now, both she and later the Cervantes Prize winner himself warn that the true pillar of the novel is none other than language. Luis Mateo Díez’s way of writing, whether through narration, descriptions or the voices of each of his characters, ends up portraying “a world where there are those who try to make the language unclear.” “You listen to our politicians and they all say the same thing, the same phrase, with neologisms that seek expressions that contaminate.”
With this excess of recycled expressions as a throwing weapon of politicians, of subterfuges and technicalities, or even current news, Luis Mateo Díez warns that the only thing that remains is “an ideological discredit and a deterioration of beliefs”, which in response tend towards their own limit and become “fanaticism”. “We live in a messy newstruly hard to bear,” laments the novelist.
Despite the humor and exuberance of his prose, The corner watchman It ends up being a disturbing and somewhat disheartening novel. A fact that Luis Mateo Díez relates to the lucidity that age has given him (like a poisoned apple). “Being old is one of the worst things that can happen to you in life,” he laments. At the bottom of his pessimism, there is a diagnosis of how power, through the invention of its own languages, is killing the imagination of people. “And the imagination has such great power…”.
Without the power to go beyond ourselves, to laugh and cry for what does not concern us and, at the same time, appeals to us in the depths of our being, we would be definitively lost. For this reason, Luis Mateo Díez says goodbye wishing us a reading that “entertains us, amuses us and leaves us uneasy.”
Later, when the presentation is over, we approach to ask if The corner watchmandue to its condition satire against today’s world, it can also be an annoying book for those in power and the reader himself. “Disturbing,” he corrects. “The literature I seek to create is disturbing, because in the end every good book is, if it manages to find some keys to what there is and what we are.”
