Money and Madrid: A Conversation with Elena Medel
Photo Credit: Laura C. Vela
“In the last months of writing the first draft of The Wonders, I started each session by reading books I admired for thirty minutes; for the tone, the plot, the characters – just like an athlete trains before a competition.”
Hello Elena and thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about your beautiful debut novel, The Wonders.
Many thanks to you for your interest! I'm glad you enjoyed the novel!
I wondered if you could start with a brief introduction to the story for those who haven’t yet read The Wonders – what should our readers expect when they open your novel?
Yes, of course... The Wonders is a novel about money: about how the lack of money defines our lives. There are two main characters, two women (Maria and Alicia) who belong to two different generations. However, there are many elements that unite them: some obvious and others more subtle, but also more powerful. For example, the lack of money or precariousness —not only in terms of work and finances, but also emotionally. In the novel there is also care and motherhood, the contrast (beyond the landscape) between the periphery and the centre of the cities... And I would like to think that this is a story with a universal vocation told from the story of two women, in a deliberately political way.
Thank you so much. I’m interested that you mentioned the political aspects of your novel because, while it deals with deep inequalities and the repercussions of political systems, it is written in such a gentle, poetic, and lyrical style. As a poet, did you find it easier to write about political issues in fiction rather than poetry? How did you find the transition from one style to another?
For me the writing process is so different in the two genres that I find it difficult to compare the experience. In the case of poetry, there is a moment when an idea, or music, or an image comes up... I write it down, and over time (a week, a month, many months) another idea, another music, another image comes up, and the poem begins to take shape; it is a very slow writing process. However, for the novel I need to plan myself, to know what I'm going to tell and how, and to work on the book every day to avoid disconnecting from the story and the characters...
The political component is already very present in the poems I was writing when I was younger. Not in my first book (My First Bikini), which is a teenage book and without that social conscience, but in my second (Tara, published in 2006), from the wish to write about universal themes with a feminine voice, from the reflection on family and social genealogy. And above all in my third poetry book, Chatterton (2014), in which the effects of the crisis, economic and labour precariousness, Eva Illouz's idea of "emotional capitalism" appear... Many of these elements also materialised in The Wonders, which for me is a book that dialogues head-on with Chatterton. So the only transition has more to do with the form, with the literary genre, because the will is shared. And I don't think it's easier or more difficult to write politics in poetry or fiction: at least for me, it's different in its approach and its development.
Just to change the subject a little, I wondered if I could ask how it feels to see your book being translated in so many different languages? And – especially now that so many readers from different countries will be reading your novel – do you believe the themes you explore are universal? Or are certain aspects specifically rooted in Spain?
I used very specific historical and geographical coordinates for The Wonders: the outskirts of Madrid, the recent history of Spain from the last years of the Franco regime to the present. The novel has already been published in some countries that have a similar history to Spain's, such as Portugal (a long dictatorship with a very different ending, internal emigration with strong determinants such as social class or gender, etc.), but it will also be translated into other countries with a priori different circumstances, such as South Korea or Turkey. How will they read the novel there? What will interest them? What will they feel as their own, and what will they feel as unconnected? These are questions I am eager to find answers to.
But at the same time, I think that many of its elements reach beyond, and are common to other countries: precisely the reflection on gender and social class, on work and precariousness and money as a conditioning factor, on motherhood and care, on the way in which all this influences our lives, and our relationships with others. I think these aspects go beyond any linguistic distance. I would like to think that yes, these are universal issues, even if I can raise them from a more local perspective.
That is exactly how I felt when reading your novel – the larger, underlying issues and inequalities bubbling under the narrative felt incredibly universal, and yet the book felt incredibly connected to its specific locality. I wonder if I could ask about your creative influences – which novelists or poets have had a large impact on your writing?
Yes, of course... For me, reading is the origin of writing. Most of my texts (poems, stories, chapters of novels) come from reading other writers. In the last months of writing the first draft of The Wonders, I started each session by reading books I admired for thirty minutes as inspiration: for the tone, the plot, the characters... Just like an athlete trains before a competition.
I would like to talk about Spanish women writers of the dictatorship like Carmen Laforet or Carmen Martín Gaite, or the poet Ángela Figuera Aymerich, a contemporary of theirs and from whom I learnt how to talk about politics from the spaces of intimacy. I could also mention other writers such as Natalia Ginzburg, Annie Ernaux or Elena Ferrante, for the way in which ideology and history are told in their books: from the autobiographical and the emotional, with that awareness of the collective from one's own... And a filmmaker: Cecilia Bartolomé. She is a pioneer of feminist cinema in Spain, and her work was interrupted by Franco's censorship. On her Vimeo channel you can see some of her work. Her films helped me to get to know (and see) the reality of women in the sixties. She was fundamental for me in constructing the character of María.
What an excellent list – I’m going to look them all up! Annie Ernaux is an absolute favourite of mine, so it’s lovely to see her mentioned as one of your influences – I can definitely see the similarities in your work. We are sadly running out of space, so I wanted to ask you one final question about where your novel sits among other works. I read such a lovely idea recently about how each book is always in conversation with a group of other books… If you can imagine The Wonders being in conversation with other books (past and present!), which books would they be?
How difficult to choose! And how difficult it is also not to be petulant, or not to fail... I would like to think that my novel dialogues with some of the books by these authors I have mentioned: Behind the Curtains by Carmen Martín Gaite, or Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg, or A Man's Place by Annie Ernaux, or almost all of Elena Ferrante (perhaps The Lost Daughter or The Neapolitan Novels). Although I read her after I had written The Wonders, I feel very close to Burnt Sugar, by Avni Doshi, because of the way she approaches the bonds between mothers and daughters. Also, Sally Rooney, not in the generational question but in the reflection on money, social classes and ideology, and how she deals with it in a story in which emotion is present. And Land of Women by María Sánchez, will soon be published in English. It's a book that reflects on the lives of rural women in Spain, but there is a discourse in it once again about social class, who has the money and who has the power and so on, which I feel very close to me. María is my best friend (I must confess!) and many of our conversations revolve around these issues. So it is inevitable that she, what she thinks and what she writes influences me, and vice versa.
And one final quick question – could you leave our readers with a few recommendations of other debut novelists that they can read after The Wonders? Have any new writers particularly impressed you in the last couple of years?
Of course, they have! Although I admit that my reading of new names is almost limited to poetry, because of my work as a publisher, and when I read fiction or essays, I might not look for so many new voices... I'll try to recommend books that can be read in English. I've just read the Spanish translation of Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan, which has interested me for its account of toxic relationships (perhaps this is where Eva Illouz's emotional capitalism comes in), and Assembly by Natasha Brown, with its brilliant examination of privilege, labour issues... And I'd like to recommend the work of two Spanish novelists that are being translated into English for the first time, so they could fit in as debuts: Easy Reading by Cristina Morales (translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn), with its provocative ideological message and its rough [POP1] use of language, and When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà (translated by Mara Faye Lethem), in which poetry and the revision of traditional stories and folklore construct a political history also in their own way.
That’s incredible Elena, thank you so much for your answers and excellent book recommendations! We’re really grateful for your time and we wish you the best of luck with The Wonders.
