Los Caín. Enrique Llamas. Versión en inglés by Grupo Anaya, S.A.

LOS CAÍN

Enrique Llamas

Enrique Llamas LOS CAÍN

IN CONVERSATION WITH ENRIQUE LLAMAS Many Spanish writers seem to be exploring the rural world in their work. Do you see this as a trend? I don’t know if writers were already exploring the rural world in 2013, when I started writing this novel, but it’s certainly true that such settings have become more fashionable recently. To be honest, the question of whether a given topic is in vogue doesn’t play any part in my creative process; I was inspired by rural events. My family don’t come from big cities, and one of the first writers to really awaken my interest was Miguel Delibes, the prolific Spanish author, many of whose novels had small-town or rural settings. I can still visualise the death of Germán el Tiñoso (one of the protagonists of Delibes’ most famous novel, El Camino), a scene that gave rise to my obsession with head injuries, which features in my own novel. And do you think literature should advocate this return to the countryside? I don’t think we can really speak of a return to the countryside: I’m pretty sure most people would go crazy in an environment with so little stimulation. However, it is precisely because of this contrast with big city life that we are coming to appreciate it more. And I’m absolutely convinced that literature can change realities, not directly but by changing the way people think or, as Antonio Lucas put it when talking about journalism, by stirring people’s consciences. Your novel takes its title from Ana María Matute’s first book, Los Abel... Yes, and her novel also provides one of the opening quotes, along with one from Miguel Delibes and another from Twin Peaks, although I also considered using quotes from Martín Gaite and from the movie Fargo. Ana María Matute was an absolutely exceptional writer, one of the leading Spanish novelists of the 1950s and 60s. Although I don’t think Los Abel is the best book she wrote, in one way or another it talks of executioners and their victims. I wanted to write about people’s capacity to hurt their fellow human beings, sometimes simply for the pleasure they derive from it. There are often stories in the Bible that provide the perfect metaphor... not because religion holds hidden truths but because of the process that a book undergoes down the course of so many centuries, as happens with The Thousand and One Nights. While I was writing, and particularly towards the end, I was really affected by reading East of Eden, which is precisely the story of Cain and Abel, Abel and Cain, over and over again. It questions the figure of God, puts a question mark against him... in the United States of the 1950s! I really loved that. Your novel is set towards the end of Franco’s dictatorship, but you never name Franco or his regime. Why not? I don’t name them for the same reason that I don’t name the exact year in which the action takes place. Instead, the setting is signalled through details: an aftershave or cigarette brand that was popular at the time, models of cars, that kind of thing. I could have referred to the assassination of Admiral Carrero Blanco (Franco’s Prime Minister and designated political heir, killed by a car bomb in 1973), for example, but I preferred to allow the reader the freedom to float in time. I think there are lingering after-

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effects of our recent past which we don’t study, we don’t even look back on, and these can help us to understand ourselves and the society around us. Another reason why I didn’t name Franco is because he’s already present in the oppressive environment of every one of the settings where the action occurs, not just in the village but in Madrid, too. Readers are intelligent, and they know how to fill in the blanks that an author leaves. That’s what reading’s about, at least in my opinion. It’s a very intimate story: a small village, a teacher... Why did you choose a small story rather than a big event? I think, in general, we find it easier to empathise with a specific situation than with a major historical event. Any fiction is a simplification of reality, a small-scale map that allows us to extrapolate what’s happening to explore wider issues, situations that are similar but not the same. Some people will say the novel can be categorised as a thriller, particularly given many of the other titles in this collection. Were you deliberately seeking to combine genres? I never set out to write a thriller. If that’s how people see it then that’s great because I love thrillers, but very few works of fiction fit neatly into a single category. I wanted to write about those villages in Castile, the ‘deep Spain’, which feel as if they’re stuck in the 1970s, villages that we just ignore. I wanted to show how, in the villages, they laugh at city people in just the same way that urbanites laugh at ‘peasants’. I wanted to talk about that moment when you realise you’ve become an adult but that being an adult doesn’t mean you have all the answers. I wanted to talk about the child inside all of us. And including a cemetery with half-closed graves, an epidemic of animal deaths, and a past that nobody talks about is really the bait on the hook, the flower on the path to lead the reader towards what I really want to write about: how human beings have a great capacity for evil. Is your view of the world so bleak that your first novel had to be about evil? Each reader will have to reach the end to discover whether my view is really so negative. But in summary, I do think there are bad people and that it’s not something we talk about very much: people who lack any sense of guilt. I remember watching a TV report on the rapeseed oil scandal (when more than 1000 people died due to the distribution of contaminated rapeseed oil in northern Spain in 1981) and one of the participants said that, when people commit atrocities, they’re almost always motivated by one of two things: love or greed. And I also think that love can lead to evil, as occurred in Puerto Hurraco (a rural massacre in which nine people were murdered in cold blood in 1990) but you really have to dig into the story to reach that conclusion. That all sounds pretty negative… Not really. Evil can only exist because goodness also exists. And, more to the point, there is moral ambiguity. In the novel there are despicable people who sometimes save others or whose actions, which appear to have been committed for malicious reasons, have positive results. “The wolf is never as fierce as he is portrayed,” as the saying goes

a, se no rius o, ás

A small village in deepest Castile, towards the end of Franco’s dictatorship. An inexperienced young schoolteacher from Madrid who is out of his element. A child who drowned twenty years earlier. The fatal accident of an adolescent girl for whom escape was the only option. A strange epidemic that carries away hundreds of deer; the only mute impassive witnesses – silence and snow, obstinacy and secrecy; the slow passing of time in a forgotten furious place in the middle of nowhere, suffocated by bitter hatred and festering resentment whose causes nobody can even recall. Enrique Llamas sharp measured prose is as hard as the people he describes. In this first novel, with its roots in Spain’s finest literary traditions, he reveals himself to be a talent to watch, a narrator capable of producing work which will stay in our memories, with its accurate characterisation, its masterful setting, and its deep and truthful depiction of a world we believed we had been left behind but which remains at the heart of the country.

LOS CAÍN

Enrique Llamas

del ia al a. el tiar os

ENRIQUE LLAMAS: A POWERFUL, INCISIVE, NEW VOICE

ENRIQUE LLAMAS Enrique Llamas nació en Zamora en 1989, y a los diecisiete años se trasladó a Madrid, donde reside actualmente, para estudiar Ciencias de la Información. Tras formarse en el mundo de la radio en programas de contenido cultural, se ha especializado en el mundo de la comunicación de las artes visuales. Colabora habitualmente en diversos medios realizando entrevistas y escribiendo sobre literatura y teatro, y continúa muy ligado al ámbito universitario coordinando encuentros literarios entre escritores y estudiantes. Los Caín es su primera novela.

ENRIQUE LLAMAS

LOS CAÍN

ADN ALIANZA DE NOVELAS – 14,50 x 22,00 cm. – 240 pages / soft cover.

16/2/18 10:26

ENRIQUE LLAMAS was born in Zamora in 1989. He moved to Madrid to study Computer Science when he was 17, and he still lives in the Spanish capital. After learning his trade producing cultural programmes for radio, he specialised in visual arts communication. He is a regular contributor to a number of outlets, conducting interviews, and writing about literature and theatre, and he also coordinates literary encounters between writers and students. Los Caín [Sons of Cain] is his first novel. AdNovelas.com

«FROM THE VERY FIRST LINES, IT IS CLEAR THAT LOS CAÍN IS A NOVEL THAT WILL BE IMPOSSIBLE TO PUT DOWN: IT HELPS US TO SEE WHAT WE WERE, SO THAT WE CAN UNDERSTAND WHAT WE ARE.» Guillermo Altares, El País «WRITING THAT IMMERSES THE READER IN A HARSH YET HONEST TERRITORY, INHABITED BY CHARACTERS WHO ARE AT ONCE TENDER AND FLINT-HARD.» Antonio Lucas, El Mundo «PRECISE VIGOROUS PROSE. THERE IS NO MISTAKING WHEN A NEW VOICE STAKES ITS CLAIM.» Ignacio del Valle

«RURAL, DISTURBING, COLD… LIKE BEING HIT BY A STONE. WHY A STONE? YOU’LL HAVE TO READ THE BOOK TO FIND OUT...» Imma Turbau «A NOVEL OF ASTONISHING MATURITY. ENRIQUE LLAMAS IS A NEW VOICE WHO DESTROYS THE CONVENTIONS OF THE CRIME THRILLER WHILE RECLAIMING THIS STONE-HARD WORLD OF FEUDS, DUST AND POVERTY WHICH IS ALSO OUR RECENT PAST.» Elena Costa, El Cultural «ENRIQUE LLAMAS’ STYLE CONFIRMS THE NARRATIVE MATURITY THAT THE READER INTUITS FROM THE OPENING PAGES OF LOS CAÍN.» Juan Carlos Galindo, El País «ENRIQUE LLAMAS OFFERS US SOME MASTERFUL DESCRIPTIONS WHICH MAKE US AWARE WE ARE IN THE PRESENCE OF A TRULY GIFTED WRITER.» Benjamín Prado «A HARD NARRATIVE, FULL OF DARKNESS.» La Voz de Galicia

«AN OPPRESSIVE YET EXTREMELY WELL WRITTEN STORY, FULL OF DETAILS; ONE OF THOSE STORIES IN WHICH YOU FEEL AS IF YOU ARE CONSTANTLY BEING WATCHED, AS A SHIVER RUNS DOWN YOUR SPINE.» El Asombrario & Co

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