The writer Javier Pastor has died this morning because of cancer. Born in Madrid in 1962, his novels earned him an author’s author status, that is, prestigious, but also risky, a second requirement that met Rajataba, to the point of disconcerting or irritating one part of the criticism while another surrendered to his feet. His great courage was always Juan Goytisolo, and not by chance, since his literature enrolled in the wake of Carajicomedia: Pastor’s books, deliberately allergic to the conventional plot, had much to do with that arborescent, linguistic and caustic humor. Ideologically, the connection with Goytisolo was no less natural in a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy who learned in the shadow of Javier Sádaba and was a professor in schools from the free teaching institution.
I met Pastor’s literature in 2006, when Bruguera published That cityperhaps his best book, although not the first, since before he had already announced, in addition to some initiatory work, the novel Fragments (Lumen, 1999). Pero That city He managed to get the attention of the press and the most literary readers. As soon as I know the news of his death I have dusted (literally: I keep the cuts of that time, disappeared in networks, in a box) the review that I dedicated then. It shows that I had a bomb with the book, which I found similar to Quevedo or Gracian but also with the toponyms, anthroponyms and insults of Mortadelo. And although then I wrote fatal, I did drop an idea that makes sense, namely, that Pastor shows that “reality surpasses the plot, but not to fiction.” Anyway, for those pages they paraded the “Opus Gay”, Basque nationalism (to which it bounds beautifully), terrorism, and a fairly liberating eschatology.
Then came Matte Hallwhich in 2009 meant its landing at the Random House publishing house (at that time, Mondadori) and a kind of consecration on the map of the demanding Spanish literature. It is a brief novel, even more disconcerting than the previous one, also more pessimistic, at times even cruel, that revolves around a couple and uses the rules of chess as a compositional resource and interior monologues as a strategy to blur the contours of how much it happens in it. The immersive and much less humorous memory, although wrapped in some blackness, not exempt from sarcasm. In any case, he confirmed that Pastor was an author against the trend that at that time had already taken the assault the narrative of the 21st century, that is, the preeminence of the subject about language. Just as in Matte Hall.
In 2016, Mondadori was already Random House and Pastor returned to libraries with Common pitthe closest thing that the author ever made to a book “Fashionable” (they are not created that much): it was the time of self -fiction and, a little like Miguel Ángel Hernández would do a few years later with EThe pain of othersour novelist rescued a crime that affected a childhood friend to investigate her own memory, which immediately linked to that of the country (the book travels to 1975), and that she had a complex stylistic translation, say that baroque, of course grotesque. It is the most irregular of the three books I comment here, but be careful, the Pastorian overflow maintained its ability to drag.
Now, Pastor’s death has coincided with the appearance of his new novel, The absurd. It is published by a small editorial, Editions of Azar, thanks to the work of his friend, the translator Enrique Gil Delgado. It was about winning the race to the disease, and it has been achieved: the author came to have the book in his hands. His distribution is already underway, and Pastor said that Goytisolo would have been laughing with him. Predictably, we too. In the drawer (it is a say) there are more unpublished materials, including another novel.