Paul Murray (Dublin, 50 years old), the most twistedly brilliant Irish writer of the moment, which is to say a lot taking into account the moment of grace that crosses his country’s literature, he loves bees. “It could be said that I am a fan of bees,” he says, smiling ironically. Because it is not that he is interested in the insect in question, but what he has in common with the drift of the contemporary human being. And what can a bee share with any of us? They will ask. Very simple, Murray replies: like us, the bees “technology is atrophying the brain. They had a fabulous memory, but the pesticides are erasing it. They are preventing them from returning to the hive and remembering the flowers that must polline,” he says.
It is a Friday in March in the afternoon. Murray is at home, in Dublin. When the video calls, he asks for forgiveness because maybe, he says, he is a bit thick. “It’s Friday afternoon,” he says below. The idea is to talk about The bee stingthe novel for which he was the finalist of the prestigious Booker in 2023, newly published in Spanish by Anagrama. It is the story “of a family that has forgotten how to be a family”, a little in the manner of Jonathan Franzen but the European. “Bees are an evolution of wasps, which have always seemed to me a very sinister, disorganized insects, without a clear objective. The objective in bees is very clear. In addition, they have a communal way of life, individuals as such do not exist for them. That is why it is so horrible what is happening to them. That deletion of brain himself? ”, Asks the writer. Meanwhile disconnected individuals, bees are lost. As is the one that is entangled in the veil of the bride on the way to the church in the novel, as well as its four protagonists.
The protagonists are the members of the Barnes family. Dickie, the father, owner of a bankruptcy concessionaire for his own fear of the future; Imelda, the mother, a frivolous and cold compulsive buyer obsessed with her appearance and status; Cass, the teenage daughter dominated by a toxic friendship; and PJ, the almost teenage Benjamin who has stopped feeling understood by all those who are out of his phone. “What united them as a family no longer exists. They feel nothing for each other. And only PJ affects him, because he misses the time spent with his child’s sister. He is the only one who remembers that things were different at some time,” says Murray. “They are a clear example of what happened after 2008, when the economy sank, and the false idea of society – and even family – that had been created during Celtic Tiger sank with it.”
The Celtic Tiger is how the bonanza period that began in Ireland in 1995 is known and ended in 2008, abrupt and terribly, with the world crisis. It is an element that makes sense to the entire work of Murray, including the essential Skippy dies (Ed. Pale fire). That is, the effect that the years of the economic bum had in Irish society.
Murray grew up in a house full of books. “My father was a theater teacher and not only bought books, but we were going to the library every week,” he says. From the beginning he considered writing as “a natural extension of reading” and, nevertheless, he is still surprising to devote himself to it. “I am lucky,” he admits. Reading Thomas Pynchon “the second year of university” changed him completely. “Growing in Ireland, the land of James Joyce, and being the son of a teacher can make you believe that literature is a system tool. But when I read The rainbow of gravity It seemed dangerous, punk, colorful, angry, completely antiestablishmentand my attitude regarding literature changed. It could also be all that! ”He recalls. And his is. In fact, perhaps the book that looks most to Skippy dies sea The system broomby David Foster Wallace, as an artifact that battle against the absurd of the world.
Skippy is a good boy. Take good grades. It always behaves well. And yet, nothing goes well. Murray states that it is because Skippy is what happened during The Celtic Tiger, that is, the reverse of what happens to the barnes of The bee sting. “When I was a child and teenager, Ireland was a place that you left, but then it began to grow in an unasumable way – until 229% – as in a fairy tale in which the poor boy becomes a millionaire. And it went from a miserable theocracy to globalized and rich country, a postmodernity that we could not understand. It was a great drunkenness. People bought cars and versaces, And it was said that it had to be rich without knowing how. At the same time we wanted to remain ourselves, but it was impossible. In 2008 it all exploded through the air and all those people, such as the Barnes, who had used money to flee from the past, returned to the past, ”explains the writer.
Murray is convinced that the system “always lies” and that it is not true “that if you hold the norms” you will have “a good life.” “Skippy is the perfect example of this. We are trapped in millionaire prisons and we don’t have the tools to get out of them,” he says regarding the world in the middle of Trump era. “The tragedy of being a person in the 21st century is that you think you can live pretending that you do not need anyone, but it is not true. Think of a traffic jam. It does not work that there are eight billion people being individuals who are not heard. We are alone within our phone. The more time you spend with it, the more you think to be connecting, but further you are to see the world in which you live. The real world begins to be an anachronism The non -real, the digital one, where all your neurosis are reaffirmed. And so lost, he adds. Like bees.