Yesterday, the Planeta group awarded the Nadal prize to David Uclés. In the morning I went swimming.
No, the above is not true. Given that the media force that the name of Uclés has taken on is colossal, today I had to write these lines as soon as I got out of bed. Goodbye pool, current events rule. However, the temptation to start the article with that phrase (a parody of a famous note by Kafka in his diary, “today Germany has declared war on Russia. In the afternoon I went swimming”) is due to two reasons: the first, that the award is another episode of the editorial war in Spain. Right now, Uclés does not need the prize, the push of his personal brand is enough to turn a new novel into an event, and although Nadal’s numbers will do great to join the victorious car of The peninsula of empty housesthe real explanation for the verdict lies in the signing of a competing star. In this case, from the Siruela label, where Uclés published his famous novel. We all know this and the evidence only provokes in us the classic pang of skepticism that doctors prescribe for these cases.
The second reason why I have remembered that Kafkaesque counterpoint is a preventive fatigue, a muscular empathy: as soon as I understood that another promotional campaign for Uclés is about to start, the second without a break in continuity, I immediately felt sore and wanted to take a week off. But this man hasn’t had time to rest! And the love story of the writer with the mainstream It is not a coincidence or a stroke of luck, but the result of work that must be exhausting, two years taking his book and his own character to every corner of the country, playing the piano, singing a capella as soon as the audience becomes careless, spreading smiles left and right, his indoor beret, his definitive appearance of a good person and his outfits of hipster slightly rural, a device generating feel-good-reels in social networks whose acceleration (perhaps, perhaps, ahem, between us, alas) has ever dragged it to the doors of memeification, that is, of conversion into a meme.
In any case, successes like yours are not explained nor fail to be explained by the literary (or musical, cinematographic, etc.), but by the construction of a public presence. This is not exclusive to Uclés, but a sign of the times, and says as much about us as it does about its protagonist turned mirror. At the end of the day, we don’t know who is really behind a celebrity beyond what their character lets on.
But we do know that overexposure is the price to pay to acquire that status (enthusiastically embraced, this is undoubtedly, by Uclés), and we recognize the tendencies that latent in each reaction it provokes: envy or cynicism in the worst sarcasm, so different from the realistic and legitimate lucidity of the most rational preventions, even if these are expressed with humor; the aspirational nature of some forms of admiration, with their extremely exaggerated praise, in contrast to the genuine happiness and generosity that we perceive in others; political use or symbolic capitalization by third parties. A whole range of emotions and strategies that often happen, more than because of the 700 pages of a novel or its literary value, because of its simplification in the form of viral content. A lot of noise around a person who dedicates themselves to something as quiet as writing.
Then there are the insults and fascist threats on social network X, another sign of the times, in this case brutal, and even more devastating if we add that Uclés does not even have a radicalized discourse. Without denying that they are slightly, neatly tilted to the left, in less gloomy times their political positions would be accepted without problems as a general and white consensus, minimum civic norms for the entire family. Unfortunately, we are where and when we are, and in the face of battles like this none of us should note in our diary that we gracefully went swimming.