“Unreality is the authentic state of art.” This is what the writer and academic Luis Mateo Díez (Villablino, León, 1942) declared when he left the hands of King Felipe VI today. received the Cervantes Prize, the highest honor for Spanish literature. The solemn ceremony, which took place in the auditorium of the University of Alcalá de Henares, was filled with allusions to Cervantes and the characters in the writer’s extensive work, to whom he owes everything and who strives for “nothing.”
“I live dedicated to them, because they are the ones who save me.” “Nothing interests me less than myself,” he repeated sparingly about characters who do not have so much Cervantine nobility, “but are aware of a heroic example.” “Their adventures culminate when they come around the corner where fate awaits them.”
“They are them, they are others, they do not belong to me, and in the assertion they test my ability to invent them, a kind of red thread that comes and goes with no other obligation than that of writing,” said Luis Mateo Díez, academic, author of “The Kingdom of Celama”, “The Sidereal Elders”, recognized with this award, the highest institutional recognition of Hispanic literature.
He returned to his childhood as a child of war, a time that “clouded his memory” and explained how listening to stories in the heat of the fire led him down the path of storytelling “and guided my destiny as a writer” and his first reading of Don Quixote, which lies in the basement of all its characters.
“Don Quixote was not a hero that I could count alongside those in the comics and in the few films I was able to see at the time,” he said. A Don Quixote who returned as an anti-hero and a loser, “to stay with me as a hero who is no less disturbing than he is lovable.” It was not for nothing that he was awarded the Cervantes because he was “one of the great storytellers of the Castilian language, heir to… “Cervantes spirit”.
A writer against all odds, creator of imaginary worlds and territories, he is the only author to have been awarded the National Prize for Fiction and Criticism twice. He is also a recipient of the National Prize for Spanish Literature and has held Chair I at the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) since 2000.
Celama
With his imaginary territory of Celama, Luis Mateo Díez created his world in the footsteps of Faulkner, García Márquez, Onetti and Benet. “A universe,” he said, “that has its only reason for being in what is written, in what Manuel Longares calls the life of the letter, exclusive material of the same imaginary life that owes its literary and verbal essence to the letter.” .” ».
Already in the “twilight phase” of his literary life, “I now find myself literary, with the anxiety of an octogenarian in reasonably good health and the awareness of the corresponding absences as old age, which at the same time seeks survival, takes its course.” Disappearing ” , he said. “At some point I find myself at a point in a work that, because it is productive, can illuminate what, through repetition, enriches the world it contains.” “When that world becomes more complex, as I hope it will, without repetition “If we were to imply repetitions in any case, it would be a sign of perfection,” said a prolific author who today strives for the “harmony of totality” “to nothing before posterity.”
“In an unparalleled Cervantes tradition, the work of Luis Mateo Díez stands out for its artistic quality, with a mastery of language, as evidenced by his writings, that bring us closer to the enigmatic behavior of man in multiple situations,” he praised King Felipe VI. to the winner. In each work he presents new challenges and expands his original imagination, enriching the legacy of the great storytellers of universal literature,” he added.
The king recalled “The Fountain of Age,” which Díez described as “an extraordinary novelist.” He said that “among its narrative features, humor stands out,” which, as the author explained, “is the best means of putting everything that happens into perspective, dealing wisely with skepticism and ensuring that the tragic is as far as possible possible turns tragicomic.” ” ».
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, also took part in the event. For the first time, acting Minister of Culture Ernest Urtasun took part in the ceremony and described the winner’s career in detail. He praised him as a great conversationalist, “gifted with the ability to tell stories in the heat of the Filandón fire, and as a die-hard film fan.” “He is more interested in fiction than in life itself,” he concluded.
