Home » World » Manuel Jabois: “I have a quite conflictive relationship with myself” | Culture | ICON

Manuel Jabois: “I have a quite conflictive relationship with myself” | Culture | ICON

“The past is just a story that we tell ourselves,” Scarlett Johansson’s voice assures Joaquin Phoenix in Her, a film that in 2013 blurred the boundaries between love and technology. And the past, more specifically that of its protagonist, the unfathomable Mai Lavinia, is about Miss Mars. The second novel by Manuel Jabois (Sanxenxo, Pontevedra, 1978) takes place in the Galician Costa da Morte in two time frames: the mid-nineties, when a girl disappeared, and twenty-five years later, when a journalist went to the scene to shoot a documentary. The author takes the reader back to that decisive summer and proposes a reflection on the weight of the past in the present and the ability of some people to leave a deep mark on others without even trying to do so. “Mai falls for the charisma of her pocket,” says Jabois of her protagonist. “There is a moment in the novel when if he took a flute everyone would follow.”

Miss Mars was inspired in part by the third season of True Detective. In the series, two children go missing in a small Arkansas town and decades later a reporter reopens their case. The novel, whose narrator -remembers in many elements that of The great Gatsby, Nick Carraway– tells the story in a subjective way, part of a moment of plenitude, the wedding of two young people who love each other, but very soon descends into the hells of tragedy and absolute evil. Jabois admits that he wrote the first chapter in a row, but that he got stuck afterwards because he did not have an ending to his story. “I didn’t know how to follow the plot. It was the first time I had written a novel in which a story had to be released, so I chose to trust my characters. He told them: ‘Come on, kids, all together, we have to get this book together, ”he says. The proximity of the delivery date was what gave him the final push. He attributes the vice of procrastinating to his profession as a journalist. “If they ask me for a theme for three days, I’ll wear the last one. When I have time to think, things don’t occur to me, I have the best ideas under pressure ”.

In just under two years, the Galician writer has published two novels, both with Alfaguara. The first, Malaherba, appeared in 2019. It could have been before, but its author, who had wanted to write a novel for many years, “gave priority to anything else” before starting to do it at once. “There came a time when I thought that I had already had enough beers with friends, that I didn’t need many more either. It was time to focus on the novel. Now my body tells me that I like the feeling of having written and being able to check people’s reaction. If I go out, the next day I have a hangover, but if I keep writing what I have is a queue of people who come to see me at the book fair. That encourages me to sit down and write instead of playing the console. Without the presentation of Malaherba In that pre-pandemic world where you could put people in bookstores like canned sardines, surely I would not have written Miss Mars, because I already have my job and many other things to do ”.

Jabois began to write professionally at the age of 19, but it was not until he was 30 that he found his own voice that characterizes him today and allows him to read himself without shame. “I have a very conflictual relationship with myself. It happens to me when I listen to myself on the radio, when I see the photos I post … I still have that principle of shyness, of looking away from myself, which is something very poetic: ‘Don’t let this asshole look at me.’

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