In just three pages, the first ones of the book, the protagonist (and narrator voice) of I, a lie, the marvelous novel that the Sevillian Silvia Hidalgo has published with the Transito publishing house , asks herself a couple of truly shocking questions: how do you speak to her
to a son, she questions herself before, while she observes her child, and as she speaks to a husband, she questions herself afterwards, while the GPS that marks the route seems to be the only one that gives conversation that morning. Soon the reader knows that this woman has apparently conquered everything, at least those modest daily victories.to which someone aspires – job and family stability – but instead of feeling like a powerful person, a diva dressed in “a silk robe with large embroidered dragons”, for example, harbors a certain impression of having been swindled, or even of being the scam herself, perhaps. So many years after Virginia Woolf, the character does not have a room of her own either, and sometimes she stays locked in her car to organize her ideas and gauge there if there are any hopes, illusions, within what others would call prosperity.. “It’s been a while since I stopped thinking about my options. In my mind there is a door painted black behind which I keep the images of what I was going to be,” he says. Because she is already at an age in which “everyone is younger than me”, she confirms, and this position may imply a balance, the verification of a paradox: that her life does not change, and yet her encouragement “follow the lunatic pattern of the tides”.
“It’s not exactly an autofiction,” says Hidalgo about a work that has deservedly become one of the sensations of the year – Alberto Olmos defined it a few days ago as “an extraordinary book” – “but it is, I think, a collective autofiction“, adds the Sevillian, also author of another novel, Let yourself bangs, which was published in 2016. “If you look at the mothers of the school, in the mothers of English class … They are like swarms, like anonymous groups, women who talk about their families but who are shy about expressing themselves, telling about their efforts. And I include myself there, many people in that environment do not know that I write, or that I have published a novel. It is a context in which we relegate ourselves, in which you hesitate to put yourself as the protagonist, “he says. “And I wondered what happened to those women to whom nothing apparently happens. Either they are housewives or they work somewhere, they are married, they have children… but if you look at a whole world, a whole universe, our society goes through there. I wanted to portray that routine, those situations that we don’t usually pay attention to. What happens in a supermarket queue, when you pick up your son from school, when you enter a work meeting. What do you have to contribute that you keep quiet
My protagonist feels isolated from the world, and maybe that’s why she tells it in these pages.”
And what happens to that woman, whom Hidalgo gives a powerful voice, “a bit of a bastard “, admits the author, ruthless with others and with her, it is that meeting expectations did not silence the demons. “They all feel fat, hairy and tired. They all hate themselves. As much as I do,” says that character, about other women, on his son’s birthday. “The actresses of the moment”, he wrote later, “who greet me from the bus shelters in their perfume advertisements, all with ecstatic gazes and half-open mouths like painful virgins. What will they feel when they see each other
” And this restlessness is followed by an uncomfortable certainty: it is easy to blow up the stability that has been conquered. “In the neighborhood,” Hidalgo defends in person, “people of my generation were told to study as much as possible to get a job and be independent, to fall in love with a good person, the myth of happiness associated with those concepts , which are important, of course. But, what happens when you achieve it, and you have burned all the stages
You have already reached your goal, now that
All that stability that seemed immovable is very fragile. It is enough for you to make a decision that nobody expects
so that everything gets screwed up. I’m not talking about big fractures, but about small explosions, about small lies that you put in the way. And there’s another situation: if you’re a woman, and you decide to take a step to feel fulfilled or satisfied, there will be someone to whom you break the schemes,who you offend At work, in the family, there will be someone who has you in a certain role and who will not understand you”.
Among other questions, Hidalgo explores how desire is managed when that attraction collides with the role of a married, monogamous woman, which society has reserved for you. “I was very interested in Las ninas, by Pilar Palomero , because it spoke of my generation: when we were adolescents we did not talk about sexuality, in our house we were restricted a lot with respect to that subject and we were afraid of losing Virginity. All those taboos, added to the complexes, to the pressure that there is about how a woman’s physique should be… they had us very confused. I have been seeing that with maturity, also with the advance of feminism,We have been learning to take care of ourselves, to love ourselves , and to have another relationship with our body, with our sexuality. Sex is communication, and if you understand yourself it will be easier to express yourself and connect with who you want. I was interested in approaching that through my protagonist”.
The book is written in agile chapters, crossed by a sharp humor –his statements about the appreciation of the culture of Europeans are brilliant, that we “believe something centennial and sacred”–, and sarcasm lightens the load of depth that its pages hide. “I am a reader of short novels, of brief episodes. I suppose that my way of reading has conditioned my way of writing”, he points out, before pointing out another important feature of his work. “For me, the crucial thing is the construction of characters.I could work for Isabel Coixet , but not for Christopher Nolan : the action doesn’t matter to me, what motivates me is an anecdote, an experience, something intimate”. that it is so easy to recognize
