Juan Cruz Ruiz: "There's a process of memory that Spain didn't undertake, but filmmakers and writers did."

Happy, grateful, and free of jet lag, journalist and writer Juan Cruz Ruiz looked happy, grateful, and free of jet lag on Saturday afternoon, during another visit to the Book Fair, where he is already a distinguished visitor . The reason for this new meeting was to present his latest book , *Secret and Passion of Literature. Writers in the First Person, from Borges to Almudena Grandes* (Tusquets). In conversation with journalist Matilde Sánchez , editor-in-chief of Ñ magazine , at the Clarín/Ñ cultural space , the Spaniard Cruz explained the meaning behind this new book, which brings together and rewrites historic interviews with key figures in 20th-century Hispanic American literature. The entire conversation had a certain emotional tone, one of confession and homage.

Matilde Sánchez introduced Juan Cruz through his uniqueness —perhaps like few others in Latin America—his work in every aspect or department of the book industry: he was an editor, a journalist, and an author himself. In addition to having been director of the Alfaguara publishing house, he was one of the key figures in the golden age of El País in Spain .

This experience was captured in books such as A Memoir of El País: Life in a Newsroom , the aforementioned Scrambled Egos: A Personal Memoir of Literary Life , Journey to the Heart of Football: Confidences from Passion or Admiration about the Great Guardiola's Barça , A Crazy Job: Fundamental Editors , and Endangered Species: Memoirs of a Journalist Who Was an Editor . "If all of them employ the sieve of memory , through the first person, in this latest one, we must add the buzzing seasoning of gossip, the braid, the thread, all the backroom, the backstage," commented Matilde Sánchez.

"Unlike Egos revueltos ," Juan Cruz confessed, "this is a book written with the desire for readers to appreciate those writers as people . That one was more a book about characters, whereas what I wanted here was for people to see Almudena Grandes, Jorge Semprún, Severo Sarduy, Juan Marsé, Vázquez Montalbán, to see the extent to which they created a literature that also created them. That what they were trying to tell was their own life."

And he emphasized: " They are all unforgettable writers : Mario Vargas Llosa, Cabrera Infante, Gabo, and Borges, a writer who has never ceased to exist."

Juan Cruz and Matilde Sánchez agreed that it seems difficult to convey to current generations the extent to which, at that time, everything breathed literature : it was forty years of great cultural hegemony for the book. "People lived to read; if you didn't read, you couldn't have conversations," Sánchez noted.

Perhaps for this reason, beyond the dramatic moments, the editor of Revista Ñ emphasized that Juan Cruz's book has "a rare joy," like the one she also finds in the chapter dedicated to Almudena Grandes.

Regarding the work that made Almudena Grandes famous – Las edades de Lulú, winner of the La Sonrisa Vertical award – Juan Cruz underlined to what extent the War she recounts was "a broken mirror of a country, Spain , that still hasn't healed – it seems unbelievable that it hasn't – from a terrible history that we had to live through in the immediate post-war period and I am part of that post-war period."

That's why she thinks what she has written could be an antidote to what could happen in Spain and Europe again, that is, war.

To Matilde Sánchez's question about whether it was writers who rewrote the official history of the Civil War, Juan Cruz responded that " there is a process of memory that Spain did not undertake, but filmmakers and writers did , especially in the last thirty years, during which the moral geography of the Republic has been recovered."

And he added: " Almudena was and is for me the metaphor of a different country , she recovered the ashes of a devastated country so that later life could be proud of the republican era, which had been destroyed, or at least banished, by the Spain that wanted what Vox wants now. Because yes: I am scared of what Vox there is in Europe and here too ."

About Fernando Aramburu , author of the novel –and literary phenomenon– Patria (Tusquets), he said that " it is the recovered identity of a pain so that the pain is not forgotten . Patria is perhaps an embrace of the suffering that Spain suffered while it had democracy and even in democracy it suffered the scourge of the era and that scourge was in a certain way a disaster for Spanish life and for the future of Spain." He concluded that Aramburu should have a monument in Spanish life because, thanks to him, the end of ETA was consolidated.

Asked about the reasons for the open secret surrounding the brawl between García Márquez and Vargas Llosa —who were also colleagues from the boom, friends, almost family—Juan Cruz refused to budge: "For me, the two greats of 20th-century Latin American writing never turned their backs on each other . They slapped each other. But they never turned their backs on each other."

The Spaniard quickly shifted the focus: "I think Latin America still doesn't realize the treasure it has . The great Latin American writers—especially women writers—Argentine, Chilean, Peruvian, are the continuation of the boom. The boom has never ended. The boom is part of Latin American syntax."

To illustrate the extent to which "Latin American syntax—the culture of writing—is far superior to Spanish syntax," Juan Cruz shared an anecdote from his time as director of Alfaguara. At that time, he discovered that the Argentine's books were not on Spanish shelves. When he asked the publishing house manager why, he was told "that it would have to be translated."

" The immense rage that he caused me led me to do everything I did for Cortázar , and Cortázar was for me the touchstone of what I worked on for Latin American literature as director of Alfaguara. And Cortázar was the touchstone that led Vargas Llosa to come to me after a while and say: I want to publish with the publishing house where Cortázar is located."

Juan Cruz will present his book , "The Secret and Passion of Literature: Writers in the First Person, from Borges to Almudena Grandes" (Tusquets), alongside Claudia Piñeiro, on Thursday, May 1, at 5:30 p.m., in the Alejandra Pizarnik Room (Yellow Pavilion).