Stories within stories: that of the scene that a painting tells; that of the artist who captured that image; that of the materials he used; that of the object itself, be it a board or canvas, and its frame; or the one that has traveled a work of art from the workshop where it was made centuries ago to the rooms or warehouses of the Prado Museum. All these stories have captivated the author Mathias Enard (Niart, France, 53 years old) in the six weeks he spent in the residence for writers at the Madrid art gallery, a program, Write the Pradowhich is now in its sixth edition and has the support of the Loewe Foundation.
The museum of his childhood was the Louvre, which he visited with one of his grandparents, the same one who wrote essays and introduced him to Marguerite Duras as a child. His other grandfather, a paratrooper, fought in World War II, in Indochina and Algeria, and brought the mystery of violence and action to the creative world of Enard, winner of the Goncourt Prize a decade ago for Compass and five years before the Goncourt of the students by Tell them about battles, about kings and elephants. At the Prado Museum, Enard recalled that he arrived in the 2000s, when he moved his residence to Spain, specifically to Barcelona, where he still has his house and a Lebanese cuisine restaurant, Karakala. But this author studied Persian and Arabic and has lived in Germany, Italy, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Iran. His calm air hides a love for adventure that he knows how to transfer to the page.
“I have never spent so much time in a museum as I do now,” he reflected on the eve of concluding his participation in Write the Prado. “I have tried to store as many stories as I could. In my way of writing there is no pictorial element as a starting point, but images inspire me in their aspect of stories, from which you can develop a fiction,” he noted. “Landscapes, memories, cities, that’s what interests me. When you look at the paintings you see that our lives have already been painted by others. There are places that we know and even the faces you see in the paintings are sometimes familiar, so you establish a dialogue with them because you know them.”
This confessed weakness for stories—“the possibility of traveling within the paintings is infinite”—led him to visit warehouses and restoration rooms and to return daily to the rooms of 19th century Spanish painting, during his residence. The drama described in the scene portrayed by Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz in Juana the crazy (1877), Moroccan listening (1879) by Antonio Muñoz Degrain, the emigrants (1908) by Ventura Álvarez Sala are among his favorites. “I also have a passion for still lifes, which are pure matter, and give life, color and shape to something that is not alive,” he noted. Rubens has been another of his fascinations.
The echoes and reflections that he has recognized in the paintings (landscapes that repeat themselves, buildings that emerge, for example, in several paintings by Rubens) have fascinated him and also reverberate in his life. In the Villa Medici that Velázquez portrayed in two paintings, Enard spent a year invited by the French Academy in Rome. And it was there that he found the germ of a story that led him to tell a story about a commission from the Ottoman sultan to Michelangelo Buonarroti in the award-winning novel Tell them about battles, about kings and elephants (Random House, 2010). The temporal or geographical overlaps that Enard maintains with a good hand have led him to talk about the emigration from Tangier to Barcelona (Thieves Street); of the trip from Paris to the Orinoco undertaken by three young people entangled in a triangle (Going up the Orinoco); of a suitcase full of wars and secrets with which the protagonist of Area from Milan to Rome; or the parallel journeys of a World War II soldier escaping from the battle front and a group of mathematicians along the Spree River in 2001. Desert. His talk in the Prado auditorium this December was titled The motionless journey. “Finding problems and looking for solutions, that is novel writing for me,” he explained then.
The Nobel Prize winners JM Coetzee and Olga Tokarczuk, Chloe Aridjis, Helen Oyeyemi and John Banville have preceded Enard in this stay for writers in the art gallery that concludes with a story or new which is published a few months later. The painter’s eye de Banville Refugio by Tokarczuk are the two new titles in the collection in which an imaginary interview allows the Polish woman to create a science fiction story, while the Irishman places a room guard at the center of his story. Thus, the Prado continues to be written.