Juan Gómez-Jurado: “My job is not to elevate literature, but to invite more people to the party” | Culture | EUROtoday

Juan Gómez-Jurado (Madrid, 48 years outdated), one of many best-selling Spanish writers on this planet, is afraid of “everything”: vehicles, metals, demise, not being cherished. “It is important to fear things in order to be able to portray them. It is insecurity, too, eh? It is more of a character defect than a strength. I cannot avoid the incontrovertible fact that my mother left me abandoned on the stairs of a hospital,” he stated this week in a resort within the middle of Madrid. For greater than two hours, the creator of thrillers as the whole lot burns he expands, makes use of anecdotes, resorts to the confessional story, pulls a rabbit out of the hat, speaks furiously about his work and acknowledges with out embarrassment that behind the whole lot there’s a character: “There is an armor. It’s like a wizard king’s suit. If you put it on and go to a school or a hospital and children approach you, you are in character mode. Because you are aware that at that moment and in that place you are making someone happy. And that’s what I do when I get on the scenario: I put on a suit that has ‘reading is so much fun’ written all over it.”

With his new book, Lie (Ediciones B), Gómez-Jurado has fled the universe Red Queenthe set of novels, including the one that gives the series its title, which made it an extraordinary commercial phenomenon. According to data from Penguin Random House, the parent company of his publishing house, he has sold four million copies, to which must be added the half million children’s adventures he writes with his wife, the psychologist Bárbara Montes, and translations into fifty languages. “I’m going to tell you the truth, I needed to get out of there,” he says before stopping for a long time, as he will do several times throughout the conversation, to trace the answer in his mind, looking up. Afterwards, he looks for a moment at the yellow Casio watch he wears on his wrist (like Eva Ramos, his protagonist), crushes a metal cap that he moves nervously between his hands, drinks water, sighs and tells the story of Eva Ramos, the real one, his friend, the woman who saved his life, he says, who died of cancer at the age of 41 just before he started to write Lie. “I’m what I’m and the one option to do justice was to call a personality after him. I did it with concern and I do not know what else,” he concludes.

Lie it’s a thriller which presents us with a woman of action in serious trouble, after a criminal career led with skill and suffering since adolescence. After more or less 100 pages, of its almost 700, the matter becomes complicated in every way and the door opens to another type of scenario, and a novel. To say more would be to spoil it, and those who frequent this genre will understand this quickly. Lie It will be a good book, very good for some, or mediocre, perhaps downright bad for others, it depends on what each person wants from reading; one, yes, in which each mechanism works to go to the next page and the next. But this is not a criticism, so let’s see what its author thinks of his place in the publishing world.

—Would you exchange a million copies for the National Fiction Prize?

-No. Each one of us in this beautiful universe of literature fulfills a function. Some of us have the job of contaminating the passion for literature to others. Our job is not to elevate it, but to invite more people to the party. And I proudly accept. I couldn’t receive that award, because I don’t deserve it and I wouldn’t change those million copies for anything, because there are many people hooked on reading. The only prize I want to win in life is to promote reading, I do deserve that.

—What is success, then?

—The recognition of your professional colleagues. Behave as best you can and not be an asshole, that’s my moral compass.

—What would the Juan Gómez Jurado of 2026 say to that of 2018, before his career took off?

—Keep working. It’s the only thing that gives me happiness.

Gómez Jurado’s new book mixes several subgenres with tributes to classics such as The mysterious case of Styles of Agatha Christie and what the author describes as “several triples” that have been played with the complicity of his followers. For example, appeals to a hypothetical reader that interrupt the action to get their attention, explain the duration of a flashback or ask forgiveness for the poverty of a metaphor. There is play, irony and perhaps something more: “I am immensely lucky that people let me do things that others don’t, they accept my narrative voice, even with things that can break the magic,” he assumes with a smile, the same one that returns to his face when he talks about Stephen King, some friends and collaborators like Rodrigo Cortés or his editor Carmen Romero.

With her character Eva Ramos, Gómez Jurado travels a well-known path, that of the conflictive and powerful heroine, with a certain vulnerability and an irritating point, described in a tone close to a comic book superhero story, a woman, in this case, whose profession is lying, but who will only be saved by the truth. When the author met his wife Barbara, she dedicated some “highly offensive” adjectives to certain female characters he had created. It was before Antonia Scott and Red Queen. From then on the changes in his life followed one another. “There is a lot of intentionality, but no moral,” he warns, already in another box, when he develops a little more the conflicts, fear and hatred that populate the novel. Ramos’s boss, the Baron, is a ghost, a James Bond-style villain. “The genre is good for bad guys who personify things,” he says.

Gómez Jurado participates in two podcasts very successful (Almighty y here are dragons), has a contract with Amazon for the development of visual content, has presented an outreach program on TVE and has even ventured into university teaching. There is the character, the armor, varnished with an intact, overwhelming enthusiasm, like the one he spends on the tour he promotes. Lie all over Spain while responding to every email from every reader, and every Instagram comment, and spending hours signing at each stop. However, the author slips through a crack. What is left for you to do? Breathe: “Every time I put myself in entrance of a manuscript it’s the first time. I need to provide you with one thing totally different in every e book, till I die, as a result of I used to be born to inform tales. I wrote my first thriller with 5 years; and till at the moment.”