Science popularizer Pepe Gordon and Mexican writer Ignacio Solares. Belinda Garen / Paola García
Reading Novelist of the Invisible is like entering a book that has many books in it. It means walking with your eyes wide open through the nocturnal landscapes of the Sierra Tarahumara in Chihuahua – the mystical scene of the author Ignacio Solares’ fondest memories (Ciudad Juárez, 1945) – and continuing along the paths of Nicolae Ceaușescu, towards Dracula’s Castle and reluctantly by the Presidential Guard. Or, learn the story of Elie Wiesel, the American writer who survived the Nazi concentration camps and to whom José Gordon (Mexico City, 1953) at the age of 17 spoke about the presence of God in horrors like the Holocaust to understand. That’s what this compendium of conversations between the popularizer of science better known as Pepe Gordon and Solares, author of dozens of historical novels and cultural journalist, is all about in this compendium of conversations that summarizes the literary complicity and mutual interests of a friendship that has endured for more than 20 years four decades. .
The Novelist of the Invisible is Pepe Gordon’s attempt to narrate everything that his friend Ignacio Solares has been telling in his historical novels, his journalistic texts and his fantastic stories for almost 50 years. Marked by a childhood full of defects and the presence of an alcoholic father, Solares follows a very personal path towards the themes of his interest, which run through his entire literary work and converge with the ceaseless search for faith, for God and meaning through the invisible connections between people.
The images he leaves behind are as sad as they are extraordinary and entertaining. Like the memory of his mother tearfully telling him they didn’t have money to feed her and how he borrowed a few pesos to help when he was eight or nine years old. Or his memoirs about his friendship with Erich Fromm and the fact that the first interview that the German psychoanalyst gave at his home in Cuernavaca was given precisely to himself and that it was later translated with great anticipation and published all over the world.
Reading the book seems to be a fertile field for the imagination that grows with each page, because the voice of Pepe Gordon, an exceptional interlocutor, is always present as an interviewer and, in addition, he brings various ideas from his work as a journalist and popularizer. It is no coincidence that the book begins with an account of how Gordon was immediately associated with the ideas of Solares when the former gave a course in Transcendental Meditation at the Reclusorio Oriente in Mexico City and the latter was able to attend. Upon their arrival, there was a special event for the prisoners, who danced to prison skirts in ecstasy. After the session they both returned home and talked about the readings and the authors they had in common, confident that they had already found a friend in each other.
Pepe Gordon and Ignacio Solares.Grijalbo
For a number of years, Gordon and Solares met every two weeks to set up their live rehearsals, which they had previously talked about so much. “In these encounters, Ignacio Solares became Nacho, my friend who opened up to me his world, his chiaroscuro and the invisible keys to his quest as a human being and as a creator,” says Gordon in the prologue, adding: “And we speaking without prejudice, like two friends who meet to perform this mysterious ritual to witness what is happening to us.
In an interview with EL PAÍS, both authors recall the long conversations that shaped the novelist of the invisible. Their stories intertwine and are again a tangle of ideas that blossoms in their voices: “The key to the book is to keep the kind, deep and loving tone of a conversation between friends in which we have to vouch for what they thought. He lived, explored the other. From this freedom we meet. What happens is that you open the shells, and when you don’t realize it, something happens: the possibility of a confession, and I think that the confession is one of the most important moments in communication, when suddenly you open your heart to that other people and it is received without prejudice,” says Gordon.
True to his fondness for decoding history with his texts, Solares compares this dynamic of exchange and complicity and transfers it to the field of creation. His examples reveal his greatest hobbies and passions: the spiritual world. When he was young, he had the opportunity to frequently visit the home of one of his uncles, who was financially better off than his family, and it was in this home that he discovered and explored séances that led him to connect with the world of to be interested in occultism. and fortune telling.
Solares speaks of former Mexican President Francisco I. Madero with almost the nostalgia of those who miss a loved one who is no longer there: “There are none in the book.” It’s not only my experiences, but also those of my characters. I like that they live alone. I’m interested in your world because it aligns with your world. You can appreciate the glimpses of reality that hide behind your characters. I have infinite sympathy for Madero. He was very naive, he wasn’t ready to rule and he didn’t want to rule. He wanted to be a mystic. He did retreats in the desert. Then there came a time when I didn’t know what to do. He had no sense of power, of command, of control,” he recalls, alluding to the research he did to write his book Madero, el otro. The intimate and spiritual dimension of the revolutionary.
An interest in what is invisible to the eye has been shared and debated by both authors for many years, but a key moment that might encapsulate this complicity fits into a story that Gordon confesses and unfolds during talks for the book happened: “There was a…” A moment when, simply because I’m so connected, because friendship, almost like the work of a novelist, involves sensing what the other is feeling and almost dreaming what the other is dreaming , in which I vividly had a dream in which I saw something new novel by Ignacio Solares. I saw it there and it had to do with Plutarco Elías Calles. I even saw the cover of the novel and called him on the phone and said: Nacho, I dreamed that you had a new novel with passages about Calles. Nacho remained silent, and some time later, when his novel about Calles was actually published, Nacho wrote: “There was no other way, it was a clear sign that he had to write this novel.”
While promoting Novelist of the Invisible, Pepe Gordon repeats the reference to writer Aldous Huxley in his essay Why Gems Are Precious, reflecting: “It turns out there’s nothing harder and more opaque than a stone , and when a powerful rock becomes transparent and crystalline and filters the light, reminding us that maybe we too can filter light. The same light that Nacho sees in the Sierra Tarahumara when he looks at the stars and realizes that the stars are also like gems that tell us that we have an immensity that dwells within us and that we do not suspect . What most resembles a gem in our body are the eyes. If someone closes your eyes and you don’t see them, then you don’t see the other person. In the background, the voice of Solares asks for a final note, and, looking excited and full of certain enlightenment, he concludes: “Remember that the eye is not an eye because you are looking at it, but because it sees you.”
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