With ‘Physical Education’, an initiation novel that sketches a generational portrait through a 16-year-old adolescent
The writer Rosario Villajos (b. Córdoba, 1978) is the winner of the Biblioteca Breve Novel Prize, which received 30,000 euros and which was canceled this Monday in Barcelona for the 65th edition. He was unanimously awarded ‘Physical Education’, an initiatory novel starring a 16-year-old girl portraying a generation and presented under the pseudonym Bombyx Mori.
The jury emphasized in its decision how the winning novel “uses a narrative that explores its own identity through the body, capturing the feelings of a generation and making it a unique and universal experience”. Also love the winning story “in keeping with this moment of necessary reflection on gender issues.”
Set in the early 1990s, Physical Education is “a novel about the discovery of one’s own body, about the education we inherit but also about the education we don’t receive”, expects the author, who had previously published three other novels, one of them graphic.
For Villajos, “writing is a reckoning with the past, a way of detaching myself from what hurts me.” “In this case, from the resentment built up, not only towards men, whom I considered obstacles as well as the goal of my well-being, but also towards myself for placing them at the center of everything during my childhood, as if they were walkers of life and luck.”
“I don’t believe in autofiction,” Villajos warns, dispelling doubts and clarifying that there is no autobiography. “I think everything is fiction, even what seems most autobiographical. Memory is selective and deceptive. I believe that the interpretation made of the memory is more important than the memory itself.
According to the editors, Villajos’ novel “draws the portrait of a girl marked by a complicated relationship with her own body and by resentment toward a world determined to make her guilty of being a woman.” of an entire generation”.
“From its title, it brings to the table one of our society’s pending subjects, and it does so from the narrative voice of an adolescent who explores her identity through the body, collecting the feelings of a generation and making it a universal experience” , editors stand out.
The novel is also the portrait of a working-class family in provincial Spain, made through the eyes of Catalina, who at the age of 16 «sees how her entry into adolescence presupposes an unexpected source and comes into conflict with others, especially with her parents , who insist on treating her like a girl because they understand becoming a woman is a problem and choose to keep tight control over everything their daughter does.
Men consider Catalina an object of desire when she tries to appear as less sensual and “feminine” as possible so as not to arouse desire in anyone. Even among her own friends, she considers herself “weird.” They all seem to demand something that Catalina can’t offer them. No matter what she does or doesn’t do, she never lives up to what is expected of her.
The jury praised “the literary expertise” with which Rosario Villajos “transfers in this novel that sentimental upbringing with which Flaubert portrayed the life and times of a young bourgeois of the 19th century to the field of the physical and defends that the body is the field .” where all battles are liberated, where who we are is established and also where the fears, tensions and violence of an era are reflected».
“I’m not so bold as to wink at Flaubert and I’ve never given much thought to the content of his novel, but I did think about the title and the sentimental and emotional label women are culturally placed on,” specifies the author. .
“There’s a lot of talk about men’s little emotional education, but there’s hardly any talk about women’s physical education and I wanted to know where all that modesty and all that ignorance came from, which doesn’t stop us from putting a penis on a wall drawn, but knowing the shape of your own vulva,’ he adds.
Trained in fine arts, Villajos devoted her childhood “exclusively to drawing, reading and watching movies”. “My superpower is taking pictures with her in the shower. Much of my artistic work has the hallmark of the ephemeral and scatological; of what cannot be recycled or recovered”, the writer and visual artist says about herself.
“I was one of those teens who repeated the year and didn’t get good grades. And if I ever knocked them out, they would suspect I was cheating since no one had seen me take notes in class, ironically Villajos. He has worked in the music, film, artistic, cultural and hospitality industries. His first published work was the graphic novel ‘Face’ (2017), followed by the novels ‘Ramona’ (2019) and ‘La muela’ (2021).
Student and nomadic worker, like so many members of her generation, Villajos has lived in Córdoba, Seville, Granada, Barcelona, Montpellier and London. He currently lives in Madrid, where he combines writing with a job in information technology.
The jury that awarded Villajos was made up of Pilar Eusamio, Pere Gimferrer, Inés Martín Rodrigo, the editor Elena Ramírez and Isaac Rosa, winner of the last edition of this veteran award, which awarded a total of 702 originals.
Source: La Verdad
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