Andrés Neuman presented his book about the unknown life behind María Moliner

Andrés Neuman (1977) is the son of musicians exiled during the last Argentine dictatorship. He settled in Granada, Spain, at the age of fourteen and earned a degree in Hispanic Philology from the University of that Spanish province. The author of novels and collections of poetry that brought him international prestige from a very young age— his first novel, Bariloche (1999), was a finalist for the Herralde Prize —he found himself, somewhat guided by his education, with a question: Why did he know almost nothing about the author of his favorite dictionary? That woman was María Moliner , the librarian who was rejected by the Royal Spanish Academy and achieved fame almost at the end of her life when she published, at the age of 66, her now emblematic Diccionario de uso del español .

That was the trigger for the writing of Until It Begins to Shine , Neuman's latest novel published by Alfaguara, which he presented yesterday afternoon with cultural journalist Maxi Legnani in the Carlos Gorostiza room at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair .

The presentation began with an interspersed reading of excerpts from the book by the author and the journalist. There, Neuman read a sentence that summed up the spirit of this work, which would take the librarian and lexicographer more than sixteen years of her life to complete: she wanted to write "The dictionary she would have needed."

Smiling, they began a conversation where the writer elaborated on the life of the protagonist of his novel, whose biography was overshadowed by the writing of his dictionary. “ It's the work of a lifetime. The last thing she did, and thanks to it, she went down in history, but in an amputated way, as if it had swallowed the author and erased everything that came before. It's just one of many adventures,” Neuman commented. Legnani defined Moliner's work as “an act of love for the word. A return to the zero degree of writing.”

"It's a linguistic biography," Neuman said, adding that the author's home was filled with half a million handwritten index cards while she was working on the dictionary. "At the time, she was proposed for membership in the Royal Spanish Academy but was rejected because she was a woman. For three centuries, there was no female member of the RAE," he emphasized.

She also spoke about her political past: "She herself avoided it, out of self-preservation," as she had worked as an Inspector for the Board of Pedagogical Missions in Valencia during the Second Spanish Republic.

Throughout her presentation, interspersed with Legnani's reflections, Neuman provided more details about Moliner's little-known biography : "She tried to study philology, but it wasn't available, so she studied history. She became a lexicographer." Suddenly, a microphone feedback interrupted her presentation: "This is the RAE (Spanish Royal Academy of Fine Arts). We're going to combat academic noise," she exclaimed, sparking a few laughs.

She also shared details of her private life , something central to the production of the dictionary. Her husband, a physics professor, had an office. Although it remained empty from Monday to Friday due to work, Moliner didn't occupy this space but rather the rest of the house: thus, the index cards she wrote and stored in shoe boxes would end up invading even the bathroom medicine cabinet . Neuman told a humorous anecdote in this regard: "When asked 'the bathroom or me,' Moliner replied: 'Let me think about it.'"

Legnani and Neuman read definitions from Moliner's dictionary and compared them with those from the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), interspersed with comments the writer included in his novel. It was interesting to observe how the author reflected her own personal history in the usage examples.

For example, in the definition of love, the RAE's example was "Parents punish with love." Moliner replaced "punish" with "correct." " There is a beauty, an incredible generosity. She also tried to be precise, astute, and oblique so that Franco's censorship wouldn't repress her," Neuman added.

In less than an hour, Neuman and Legnani dissected the novel: they highlighted parallels with Borges (the immeasurable nature of language, like a book of sand, hypertextual thought, like the Library of Babel) and pointed out that his dictionary had “a lot of street, everyday life, emotional intelligence.”

The writer added another little-known fact about the author regarding her work as a librarian : “She wrote a pamphlet with recommendations that said, for example, what materials to use on the shelves so they wouldn't burn in fires or bombs.”

Given Legnani's interest in learning a little more about the "Neuman novelist", the author explained how he wrote in different registers : "There is picaresque in his childhood, then there is the adventure novel in his time as inspector of rural libraries - he founded more than 200 - then it becomes darker at the end of the civil war, it is a tribute to the costumbrista novel and finally the metalinguistic novel about the creation of the dictionary."

She emphasized that " everyone who thinks about dictionaries is crazy . The Oxford Dictionary was written in a psychiatric hospital" and cited a book by Argentine author Rodolfo Wilcock ( The Synagogue of the Iconoclasts ) that tells the story of a lexicographer who tried to write a dictionary that had enough suspense to read like a novel. He said that was the problem with dictionaries: no one ever made it to the end . According to Neuman, María achieved just that: her dictionary can be read like a book.

At the end, Neuman commented on how he narrated Moliner's final days : "After a life dedicated to words, he runs out of them. It's a tribute to Beckett, like in his novel Malone Dies. I tried different approaches to storytelling, always based on someone's passion for words," he added.

After listening to it, it was possible to draw a parallel with the author's own linguistic obsessions , who concluded, moved by the author of this emblematic dictionary: "If that isn't an act of heroic love for our language, I can't think of what would be."