Love and death, pain and fatherhood, old age, travel and memory, all crossed by music. These are the themes that the Portuguese writer José Luís Peixoto (1974) has explored during his 20 years of literary career.
It is very difficult to define myself. It is a task that takes a lifetime. I guess we have to do it every day, because we never really know who we are; “That is a mystery that we seek to decipher,” he says in an interview with Excelsior.
The novelist adds that “it is more difficult to look at ourselves than at anyone else; just because we have no distance, because we are very close, involved with everything that happens to us.”
Member of the European Union delegation, guest of honor at the 37th Guadalajara International Book Fair, which ends tomorrow, Peixoto believes that literature does not have so many themes.
In my case, if we reduce it to the most essential, the two great topics in my work are love and death,” he says.
Love carries all that vital energy, the most positive sides; and death, all the pain, what we can identify as negative. But it’s not that simple. There is not only negative in what we see as negative, nor is there only positive in what we see as positive. Things are more complex. That is the mystery of life and of the human being,” he explains.
Who studied Modern Languages and Literatures at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa adds that, over time, “one writes about certain topics that are like a vocation, because they touch you in a particular way due to the experiences you have had. And that happens with love and pain, which are so broad, so multiple, and have so many possibilities.”
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Peixoto presented the Spanish version of A house in the dark. “It was originally published in 2002 and, curiously, there are two books: a novel with that title and the collection of poems The house, the darkness”, he details.
They went out in Portugal together for the first time, because they are a single concept. One is a novel and the other is a book of poetry; but they share a structure, characters, episodes, themes. “However, they were not republished together. They came out in different countries, they have had a lifetime of separate editions and only now, 20 years later in Mexico, will they appear together again,” he indicates.
The author of you died on me y piano cemetery He recalls that two decades ago “September 11, 2001 (the attack on the Twin Towers in New York) was recent.” We had the feeling that the world was changing and that impacted the writing of those texts, especially the novel. Two decades later, we also feel it with the wars that there are, with the pandemic we are experiencing. Therefore, it is a book that, curiously, in a way that I did not imagine, is quite current,” he assures.
Who published his first novel in 2001, Nobody looks at us (José Saramago Literary Award), highlights that “it is very curious that one is presenting a book that he wrote 20 years ago, because I am really no longer the same person who wrote it. Writing a book requires very personal, very intimate work. And, therefore, when visiting that title (“A house in the dark“), I find many aspects that are already very different from who I am today. But it is also true that I am the same person and I continue to find reasons to defend it, and it seems to me that they are part of that path that has brought me to the latest books,” she expresses.
The author of in your belly just finished the novel Sunday lunch.
I wrote it based on conversations I have had with a person who shared his experience with me: a 90-year-old man who died months ago. It has been very impressive for me, because in different books I have been working on that idea of self and others, fiction and autobiography. And I’m also writing a novel that will close that moment with real characters. It is very ambitious from a structural point of view, because it crosses the lives of six real characters, six people who are characters in the book.”
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