Tapas Interview | Arturo Pérez-Reverte: “In war there is no gastronomy, there is survival. I’ve seen people fight over a piece of bread, but fight with blows, or over a drink of running water”

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The fall of 2023 began as an atypical autumn due to higher than usual temperatures. That of being well into October without the need to throw a ‘rebequita’ over the shoulders has been a headache for more than one of us. Fortunately, there are things that never change and that help us maintain a healthy routine, such as the punctual arrival of each new Woody Allen movie or the latest novel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (Cartagena, 1951).

Although he has always been a prolific author -37 novels in 37 years-, since 2016 it is already a fixed appointment with his readers every September, and this year has been no exception. The Final Problem is the title of the work with which the Cartagena native has this time immersed himself in the world of the classic crime novel, that of the “locked room” cases, and has taken the opportunity to pay tribute to some of his childhood and youth passions, from classic cinema to the novels of Agatha Christie or, above all, the adventures of detective Sherlock Holmes and the most famous actor who brought him to life on the screen, Basil Rathbone.

A transcript of the famous interpreter of South African origin is the protagonist of the story. Hopalong Basil, as he is called, is a British actor in decline who became popular for playing the character of Sherlock Holmes in the movies. Chance will lead him to an island where crimes begin to occur, and in the absence of a more competent authority, those present urge him to use the knowledge acquired after working so thoroughly the work of Arthur Conan Doyle to solve the mystery. Thus, the actor brings the popular fictional creation to real life.

That the novel is full of personal winks is more than evident, but perhaps the most obvious of all is that circumstance, that of the creator emulating the character. After all, that is what Pérez-Reverte has been doing for all his years as a reader and writer: living the life of a novel. “When I leave home with a backpack, at the age of 18, I leave wanting to be one of those characters I had read about,” evokes the author: “I want to be Lord Jim or Jim Hawkins? I want to meet women, I want to meet friends, I want to have adventures? I go out to see if the real world corresponds to the world I had read about in my grandparents’ and my father’s library. And then, in that process of exploration, I end up behaving like those characters. That is to say, I, who am impregnated with those readings, project in life that I am living that world of the novels, and thus, the border disappears”.

In this sense, Pérez-Reverte assures that he feels like a character from the books he has read, he even tries to behave like them, imitating their actions and attitudes. “And in the end, of course, when you do that for 20 or 30 years, it is already part of your life. As an adult, I conform myself to the pattern of the books I had read as a youngster, and in the end I end up being that. Not an imitation, but I really feel like one of them. Now, when I look back, I see that evolution, but it all started with the books. It all started because I wanted to know if the books were true. And they were true,” he explains.

For Arturo Pérez-Reverte, books are family and home. According to his last census, he has some 34,000 books at home, but he has never considered this passion with bibliophile or collector concerns. “The library is a living place, where I live,” she points out, “When I’m not browsing or traveling, I’m at home working or reading. Always in the library. That’s why it’s my home. The books are there, all around me. There are books I will never read, I won’t have time. Others I have read many times, I consult them, I turn to them when I have doubts. I open a book, I spend some time with it…. For me, the library doesn’t have a collector’s sense, it has a companion’s sense. I have some rare or curious editions, even some signed by authors who have been dead for a long time. But it is always with a practical sense, never merely contemplative or aesthetic, of collection. I’m continually going in and out of books.”

The academic recalls with tenderness that, in addition to his father’s library, his family had two great libraries, that of his paternal grandfather, which was a classic library – “with Thomas Mann, Dickens, Balzac, Galdós, Homer, Dante…” – and that of his maternal grandmother, “who was a very modern woman, very active, and a reader of best sellers of the time and of detective novels. Pérez-Reverte attributes the essence of his success to this literary duality, which allowed him to enjoy El asesinato de Rogelio Ackroyd or Diez negritos as much as Crimen y castigo and La montaña mágica.

He assures that, when he debuted, and especially in the 90s, when the fervor for his works was unleashed, “the literary universe was in the hands of a group of snobs who didn’t care about literature but about the ‘intellectualoid’ stupidity of four. They thought that literature is for four privileged people, the rest is just a joke”.

Then he disembarked, free of complexes and prejudices, and began to combine in his novels classic and modern airs, popular literature and other more profound literature; as he himself defines: “The Three Musketeers with The Magic Mountain. Maybe that’s why, at that time, my novels were such a success, because that wasn’t done, because it was either one thing or the other. My novels have both worlds, and so they enter a space shared by many different audiences. I have never been an author for men, for women, for young or old; I am read by everyone. And the same in Japan as in Russia, in Colombia or in Krakow. And that is precisely why, because I write from the lack of literary complexes. I have never had them and I still don’t have them.

LIVING WITH THE CHARACTERS

It is in the bookstore at his maternal grandmother’s house that the author of The Dumas Club had his first contact with Sherlock Holmes, the leitmotif of his latest novel. “I read all of Holmes when I was eight or nine years old and I was fascinated. It’s been with me all my life. I went back from time to time to read it. References to his universe sometimes even appear in my novels, as in The Flanders Tablet.” And one day, suddenly, all that world, all that reading, plus the life he has led, ended up shaping this new novel.

He qualifies that this “suddenly” is more a way of speaking, because he doesn’t believe that no novel is born, just like that, suddenly. “When you are a professional writer who has been in the profession for thirty years and has a reading life like mine, novels are not born suddenly, they are the result of an accumulation of things in life, readings, films seen, things observed that one day take shape and take shape”.

They take shape slowly, of course, like a puzzle being drawn in the imagination. And, of course, there is nothing improvised: “A novel, for me, is a deliberate act, it is a plan. I have to live for a year and a half or two years with a story, with characters. I have to read, eat, walk, look, in short, live in that world. So I need a world in which I feel at ease, a universe in which I feel comfortable. That’s why each novel is an act of deliberate and cold planning.

With these resulting books, Pérez-Reverte has a clear objective, and it is not to save anyone. “I don’t write novels to make the world better, I write novels to make me happy. Everyone can look for what he or she needs, I don’t get involved in that. I am not an apostle. I don’t care if people read or don’t read, let them do what they want. As long as they read me to justify my continuing to write, I don’t care. In fact, I have had friends, like Pepe Saramago, for example, who wanted to make the world a better place through their novels. And that’s fine, but it’s not my goal. I want to be happy telling a story and I want people to be happy reading them”.

A MATTER OF SURVIVAL

The literary father of Captain Alatriste recognizes that we cannot consider him a “Tapas man”. By that he means that gastronomy has never been one of his pleasures. However, following the game of the name of our magazine, he reveals that, for him, the perfect tapa is a glass of red wine and Iberian ham. But in tacos, “although my Sevillian friends get angry, but I’m from Cartagena”.

This lack of interest in gastronomic pleasures may have been induced by his many years of experience as a war reporter. Far from the romantic image of the grandmother preparing the family stew before the son’s departure to the front line of battle, the author of Territorio Comanche states bluntly, with a stern voice: “In war there is no gastronomy, there is survival. I have seen people fight for a piece of bread, but they fight with hostilities, or for a drink of running water”.

That’s not to say that the old reporter doesn’t treasure memories. Like the taste of warm bread in the Balkans – “when we could find warm bread” – or the smell of tea or couscous during the Gulf War. “I have gastronomic associations, but none have to do with pleasure, with delicacy…. They all have to do with concrete situations. When everything goes to hell, people just want to survive. There is no time for other things. And a can of sardines eaten in Vukovar [Croatia] can be the most exquisite delicacy in the world. For the simple fact that you have it.”

As a journalist in dozens of conflicts, Pérez Reverte recalls the great contrast of being on the front lines – “in El Salvador, in the war in Nicaragua or in the Balkans, for example” – seeing people who had nothing to put in their mouths, being themselves without a bite to eat for one or two days, “and then you went back to the hotel and there you had everything. That contrast between the misery of the front and the luxuries? Of course, with dollars everything could be compared”.

But the sensations did not stop in hostile territory. The strangest ones assailed him when he returned home: “For 10 or 12 days I felt like a Martian. It was very difficult for me to adapt. Not only because of the food, but because of everything: the music, the people, the behavior of the people? I came from a place where eating a fried egg was a luxury, it cost eight marks! There were huge contrasts and it was very difficult to adapt to them. But well, in the end my life was like that and I ended up accepting it”.

Talking to Pérez-Reverte is a luxury and a pleasure, especially about literature and cinema, which are two of his great passions that now go hand in hand in his novel El problema final. But we are Tapas and we wanted to know how the literary man would do if we took the keyboard out of his hands and gave him a ladle. And as he already warned us that gastronomy doesn’t drive him crazy, we decided to take him to another of his natural territories, his boat, to ask him what we would eat if we went with him as cabin crew. The answer came quickly and directly: pasta and canned food. “On board I always cook and I’m good at combining canned food. With one of those microwaveable rice things and half a dozen cans and Indian and non-Indian sauces, I can make a pretty reasonable combination. And I also make a lot of pasta on board. That’s what you’d eat.”

Considering his gallery of characters and his own vital attitude, we had imagined him with a fishing rod at the ready to prepare a good dinner, but he surprises us with an unexpected confession: “I haven’t fished for a long time. I don’t like killing animals unnecessarily, neither hunting nor fishing. I respect those who do it, but I don’t like it. I don’t know why, old age has given me that. So there is never fresh fish on my boat. The sea for me is a different thing. So sardines, canned, and squid, too. Over time I’ve become a bit sentimental about that kind of thing.” We don’t know if Captain Alatriste would share those views, but it’s certain that Hopalong Basil would respond with “Elementary.”