There is a story that interests me a lot about a puppet show. I read it so long ago that I don’t remember its author, maybe it was Hoffmann or Maeterlinck. I remember, however, what it was about. Two children watched with their father a performance where Pulcinella probably questioned Arlequino and the two ended up beating each other. The fact is that in the middle of the mamporros the children were intrigued by the possible mechanism that made the puppets move and talk, and they asked their father to take them to the back of the stage to see who was hiding there. The three acted as secretly as possible because they wanted to catch potential cheaters. in fraganti. To the surprise of the three, behind the stage they found no one except the puppets, levitating and talking alone, without help.. Those mechanical organisms had a life of their own, as if they were Frankenstein’s monsters or replicants in an apocryphal version of Blade Runner.
Having said the above: Who has not fallen into a similar temptation? Who hasn’t tried to dismantle a trick? Who hasn’t wanted to see the face of the Wizard of Oz, no matter how disappointing it was? I suppose we have all wanted at some point to reveal what is at the heart of the machine, to make it clear that we are more intelligent than it. The problem is that until now no one has been born who has achieved it. Franz Kafka explained to us in the castle y The process that there are impregnable doors, guarded by guardians impossible to circumvent. Only death allows us to cross the threshold, surely because in this way we take the secret to the grave, allowing reality to continue without falling into anyone’s hands. Dying, according to Kafka, is when we understand everything at once: the what, the who, the where and the how, too late to tell it or too soon for anyone else to understand it.
“Mario Muchnick speaks with his mouth wide open, probably because he was a big mouth as well as a good editor, while Enrique Murillo in no way gave me the feeling of falling into boasting.“
Enrique Murillo’s book is about those doors and those thresholds, about the mechanism of literature. secondary characterwhich has as a subtitle The dark backroom of publishing and that many people have confused with a magazine of the heart, in this case a magazine of the literary heart. Words and expressions such as “reckoning”, “revenge” or “not leaving a puppet behind” have been mentioned in many reviews. Certain names have also been used, assuming that the book was about them or that its ultimate objective was to make them ugly.. However, the most abject character one encounters in the book’s 544 tightly-written pages has no name; Regarding Jorge Herralde, Enrique Murillo is very careful not to discredit or ridicule him, perhaps because he is aware of what he owes him, beyond what he believes Herralde owes him or owes him; and in general it does not say anything that one does not take for granted, such as that literary awards tend to be almost all rigged or that in the world of publishing there are more economists than readers, people more interested in money than in literature. Murillo, in that sense, almost never falls into banalities or, if he does, he goes through them quite quickly. Unlike Mario Muchnick, whose memoirs The worst thing is not the authors It seemed like a gastronomic catalog of good dishes, wines and restaurants, and of more or less excessive whims on the part of the authors, the author of secondary character He barely notices that type of thing, more concerned with literary issues, such as style corrections and co-writing with certain authors, in some surprising cases. Of course, Mario Muchnick was the son of a good family and Enrique Murillo is the son of a middle class family.. The first was known for sometimes publishing without thinking that the world of publishing needs to generate profits to continue existing, and the second repeats on several occasions how important it is not to forget that a book must be good and at the same time it must not cause losses. The ideal, in fact, is that it produces profits. Mario Muchnick speaks with his mouth wide open, probably because he was a big mouth as well as a good editor, while Enrique Murillo in no way gave me the feeling of falling into boasting, at least in an overly ostentatious way. Furthermore, Enrique Murillo does not project the protective and paternalistic image that Mario Muchnick projected on the authors of the catalogs of his different publishing adventures, always with an attitude above that of the living and the dead, Spaniards and foreigners, except for Elias Canetti or Primo Levi, Jews like him and writers whom he seemed to treat as equals.
“The book does not remain in the capitalist structure of literature and enters fully into the literary, alternating both planes, because unfortunately there would be no good or bad books without money.“
There is something that seems very interesting to me about secondary character, and it is how close it places many executives in the publishing world to that world of rich people or aspiring to be rich, with no more talent than having money that Murillo never had, which allows them to carry out crazy operations, sometimes with luck and other times without luck. For Jorge Herralde, for example, Arturo Pérez-Reverte got out of hand and with him he lost a goose that laid the golden eggs, although he found others along the way.. There is no one who always wins and loses, there are only those who can play a single hand and those who can, thanks to their families or their inherited wealth, play and take risks on multiple occasions. Nowadays we are used to dealing in the media with characters who do not reach the secondary level that Enrique Murillo reached, but do become presidents of the United States or are the richest people on the planet, just because from one day to the next they bet that the value of artichokes would go from being 25 cents to being half a dollar and they became multimillionaires. The game is over, nothing is going well. The problem is that, after becoming immensely rich through a stroke of luck, the money then allows these little characters to gain disproportionate power, monopolize the media and have a lethal effect on many people who are less interested in effort than luck and are also more interested in the possibility of speaking without thinking than thinking before speaking.
Thank God, Enrique Murillo’s book does not remain in the capitalist structure of literature and enters fully into the literary, alternating both planes, because unfortunately there would be no good or bad books without money. If in the field of money finding a companion whom you remember over time was not easy, in the purely literary field your connections are multiple.: with generation colleagues whom he admires (like Javier Marías), with readers whom he trusts (like Félix de Azúa), with authors whom he supports and helps improve their books or their style (like Javier García Sánchez) and authors whom he guides with their own novels or short story books (like Ray Loriga). Perhaps because Murillo could not start either at the top or in some intermediate section and had to do so from well below, his progression in secondary character It helps us understand how he became a mediator between forces, in his case capitalist and literary. Unlike many established editors, accustomed to reading only high literature, Murillo moved with ease in almost all areas, something that allowed him to translate, correct, advise and write, a set of things unthinkable, without going any further, for a person like Jorge Herralde.. Of course, Murillo, over the years, was more than aware of this and believed that his versatility would ensure him a position with better conditions wherever he was. He was wrong, of course. In a world like ours, everyone is replaceable except money.
“secondary character It is an inciting read. My first desire, while reading it, was to buy The center of the world y The secret of artboth in Anagram“
At times, the book pretends to be describing a possible forger of the new or the newest or the latest Spanish literature, but stops short of falling into grandiloquence and ridicule. Go ahead: many of Murillo’s triumphs as an editor were due to his Stakhanovite work and not to pure speculative luck. It is surprising, however, to see how for decades Murillo could hardly go out partying with friends, always two steps away from precariousness, and how then in less than fifteen years his salaries must be multiplied by three, four, five or six, and that allows him to buy a house. His private life, however, is barely addressed, or very little, except for the monetary issue. He hardly talks about his first wife or his children, and he stops a little more about the second, generally to give small touches, more than anything to vindicate her talent as a painter. This takes away a certain plasticity from the book as a whole, although it frees it from falling into ridiculousness or kitsch. It is not, therefore, a title comparable from a stylistic point of view to the excellent Senior Service, by Carlo Feltrinelli, and not similar to the plúmbeo Memoirs of an editor, by José Ruiz Castillo. It is less intense, while remaining constant and fluid.
What I can promise is that secondary character It is an inciting read. My first desire, while reading it, was to buy The center of the world y The secret of artboth in Anagrama and today somewhat difficult to find (something that makes them even more attractive). I also had the need to read Marina Perezagua with more effort, one of the authors on whom Murillo has invested the most throughout his life. I was surprised about Murillo as an author, because he is not simply good, but very good, very good.. And about his discoveries and protégés, except Marina Perezagua, I knew them all, but that did not stop me from admiring that he was behind a generation like that of Ray Loriga or Félix Romeo, who was a real breath of fresh air for Spanish literature from the nineties onwards, or behind writers as extravagant as Álvaro Pombo or Javier Tomeo. That, in my opinion, makes him a more broad-minded reader than, for example, Félix de Azúa, whom I only see capable of applauding writers who cultivate grand style and to the consciences of the West, sensibilities that closed an idea about the past but that had very little to do with the construction of the future, which Ray Loriga, Félix Romeo or Benjamín Prado did contribute to designing, with cultural baggage not only bookish or referring to classical music and auteur cinema, but also to culture pop in all its amplitude.
“As in crime novels where there is an enigma and an investigator who tries to decipher it, we know that the endings are never on par with great investigations, and that explains why this book is a work in progress“
On the pages of secondary character there is a huge battle. Literature is not only a succession of masterpieces, it is also a succession of secondary books (let’s avoid calling them mediocre) without which the eras in which they appeared would not be defined. Let us remember that great books are great because they are timeless and adapt and explain any place and any time as if they were actually space rockets; The secondary books, for their part, are less expansive and may not be remembered more than a few months after appearing on the news tables, but they are the ones that accurately describe the weaknesses and strengths of the eras, they are their Zeitgeist. Félix Grande explained it very well in a conference I attended in Mérida some time ago, when he said that the history of literature is a great war where there are field marshals and captains without whose orders the final victory would be almost impossible, and where, however, it would be immoral to forget the soldiers and their shed blood so that someone would later award those who led them on the battlefield. Enrique Murillo was a soldier and field marshal, and he knows what literature is much better than most. His memoirs are about a modern Quixote, who — like all Quixotes — when he leaves his library discovers that deep down reality is badly done and that, if he returns to the library and reads a few more books, he may then definitely be able to go out into the world again and repair it. Repair, of course, is the least of it. As in crime novels where there is an enigma and an investigator who tries to decipher it, we know that the endings are never on par with great investigations, and that explains why this book is a work in progressa book that never really ends, a book that all of its readers, upon finishing it, will continue in a bold and mysterious way.
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Author: Enrique Murillo. Title: Secondary character: The dark back room of the edition. Editorial: Plot. Sale: All your books.
