The Spaniard Javier Padilla or fiction as a weapon to reveal reality

the spanish writer Javier Padilla Moreno-Torres (Málaga, 1992), at the end of the 2022, publishes an investigation in the form of a novel in which he is responsible for describing the Andalusian alternative scene before the socialist victory. It is “Life and work of Gabriel Maceli Campalans” a text where the resonances of flamenco and rock mingle, characters like Nazario there Kiko Venenoa text between lysergic experiments there Francoist psychiatryin which the author uses fiction to reveal reality.

For the year 2019, and at only 26 years old, Javier Padille became one of the youngest authors to win the Comillas Awards with his work in “At the End of January”a price with which the publisher tusquets rewards the best biographies, memoirs and history books. In this title, with elements of an essay, he told the tragic story of three Popular Liberation Front activists in the 1960s; Now, with this new version, the still young writer radically changes his genre.

In “Life and work of Gabriel Maceli Campalans” it conceals its almost journalistic vocation under the arguments of a novel. Gabriel Macéli Campalans He is a fictional character constructed from various elements combined, a failed musician with no impact, a “Andalusian Zelig”an omnipresent and invisible, but insubstantial guy who in his youth tries to become the chronicler of the counterculture, but fails.

Gabrielle ends up becoming a politician PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) in the elephant cemetery par excellence: the European Parliament. A lot can be said about this character, but his friends know him as “the man who was there” because he witnessed it all, though no one ever noticed it, to be a short-lived musician and a lazy columnist.

“It’s a mix of real and imaginary characters, but everything the real ones say is true. There’s almost 500 tickets at the end of the book and I did a hundred interviews. The imaginary characters come, for the most part, from the universe of Max Dawnwho made a false biography of Jusep Torres Campalans. also wrote Life and work of Luis Álvarez Petreña”. Javier Padille in interview with The Journal.es.

Along “Life and work of Gabriel Maceli Campalans”the Malagan writer will revisit, through his fictional character, the high places of the Andalusian counter-culture, the crossing of flamenco with rock, and the fights with the essentialists, the journeys through UNITED STATES of the beatnik, the tragic stays in Franco’s psychiatric hospitals and the tours in dilapidated cars where alcohol and heroin abound.

“Gabrielle It was kind of a joke, because the book begins with references to parties in Brussels. In the 1980s one of the great achievements of the PSOE is that Spain to be a European country. It was turning things around and a character who was a hippie ended up working on something he never thought about and which he thinks is very boring and in a reality he never had not thought. It’s a mirror. Many people have not thought of Andalusia until the referendum question begins. The same thing happened with Europe: no one had thought of her and suddenly we were there” Javier Padille.

Gabriel Macéli Campalans Literally embodies the evolution of many 70s hippies who would eventually become socialists, those who shaped the institutions in the decade of 1980. Padilla, all the way 432 pages, will make the reader doubt, yes Gabrielle Is it a fictional product or if it really existed.

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