With ‘Los seres queridos’ he explores the reasons for suicide, “which can be murder or murder in another way”
Journalism and literature are the passions of Jorge Alacid (Logroño, 1962). The former, to whom he has devoted his entire professional life, is also the driving force behind his first novel, ‘Los seres queridos’ (Los Aciertos & Pepitas). A “highly literary” plot centered around some disturbing suicides that explores the director of a provincial newspaper with both commerce and nose, Viberti, during the transition. “I wanted to represent the moral backbone of Spain at that time, of a country in black and white, a borderland with its own story, so it was good for me not to be too specific,” he justifies his decision to place the novel set in a Castilian town that is never mentioned.
After a life in the newsrooms of El Correo, La Rioja or Las Provincias, Alacid debuts in storytelling with this exciting story, “which is more gray than black, like the inhospitable and precarious Spain it depicts, and that avoids red to be.” It relies, yes, on the police canon to move on and run from the gore and offal so abundant in the police genre. “The crime in the novel is an accident that can explain the moral support of the characters,” says the author,
“There have been a lot of red crime novels since Hammett, and I didn’t want to wallow in morbidity,” he says. And he takes care to avoid the gruesome when he tackles a tricky subject like suicide. “I realized that suicide can be a strange crime, with vague contours and multiple moral aspects. That it could be a murder in a different way or a murder in a different way, although we will never know the ultimate reason for the suicide or whether we violated their privacy in investigating it,” he says.
Alacid believes journalists and novelists are a lot like “hunters,” and in this feature debut, he uses his bloodhound Viberti to investigate those disturbing suicides. “He has a liquid morality, sometimes gaseous, that proves to be very powerful. Under his disbelieving facade is a high sentimentality that he hides, finding his last in journalism, ”signs Alacid Viberti. “There’s the journalistic fisherman who casts the line to see who bites and the one who hunts for his prey, and that’s what I’ve tried as a novelist and as a journalist.” Alacid breaks a spear for journalism practiced “with excellence”, far from the centers of power, in the capital in which the novel is set “in which apparently nothing ever happens and that could be Logroño, Soria or León” . “Necessity sharpens the mind, and if you have nothing and seek gold and diamonds where there is only routine, you will find it and improve your professional practice,” Alacid claims that pickaxe journalism.
He is committed to the core of his work: “If I were born a thousand times, I would be a journalist a thousand times over.” «Journalism is the story of life and if you want to know what our time was like in the future, you have to go to the newspaper archives. We journalists help to interpret the world and I hope that we also give it a moral basis,” he emphasizes.
Source: La Verdad
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