It is a tribute to when I fell in love with the stories my parents told: Irene Vallejo on “Infinity in a Junco”

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Irene Vallejo, a Spanish writer who will be at the Hay Festival in Cartagena, spoke in La W about her literary work “Infinity in a Junco” and her inspiration in classic books.

It is a tribute to when I fell in love with the stories my parents told: Irene Vallejo on “Infinity in a Junco”

31:20

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Paula Bolivarpaulabolivar

The writer Irene Vallejo has become one of the literary sensations of recent years after the publication in September 2019 of “Infinito en un reed ”. She has won dozens of awards, has sold more than 200,000 copies and her book has already been translated into 30 languages.

The writer in dialogue with W Radio recounted the exact moment when she was thinking of quitting writing. “I had been an itinerant writer who traveled from library to library and practiced literature in a humble and independent way”, however, after going through some adverse circumstances such as having a son with serious health problems, Irene thought that the dream to devote himself to literature was too great.

“I wanted to write that last book which was “Infinity in a Junco” as a way to cling to what I had always dreamed of being literature, books, reading, and to pay it one last great tribute of gratitude and that was the birth of the project of this essay”, he pointed out.

How was the plan to make this book?

For Irene, the structure of this book was the most exciting, and perhaps the greatest challenge. “I wanted it to be an intrepid adventure essay, containing a constant intertwining of story and story, in such a way that there was always a narrative going on and the reader felt immersed in The Thousand and One Nights of Books. To do this, I displayed a map on the wall of my office where I was pointing and drawing the tortuous but pleasant path where those ideas were going to go”.

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Is Infinity in a Reed a tribute to a specific book?

"I wanted to emphasize the importance of many books, because I believe that each one of them can embody errors, dangerous ideas, biased versions of events, but the fact that there are many books or exist in a library guarantees us that polyphony gives voice also to the dissidents, to the minorities that are not recognized and that is very important. The ideal is not a single book but the image of the library that contains all that choir that guarantees us freedom”, she expressed.

The writer also narrated with emotion that infinity in a reed is a tribute to her childhood. “When I fell in love with stories thanks to my mother and father who told me the classic myths before bed. It all started with Homer's Odyssey, I even thought my father had written it to tell me before bed. That story was a fascinating awakening to a whole mythology of the journey of nostalgia, adventure, encounter and for me it is the most special book that is linked to my parents, to the timbre of their voices”.

Man's desire to get all the information in one place

“It has been very interesting for me to go searching in history for the characters that feed and nurture the obsession of having everything, for example, a great moment is the library of Alexandria and that path that leads to the internet, again, as the renewed project of gathering all the knowledge and making it available”. Vallejo assures that she is inspired by all those characters who have made an effort to protect the books they considered most valuable and save the ones they loved the most. I believe that the classic books are those that many readers have loved and have striven to save them from the shipwreck of destruction.

Will there be version 2.0 of this book?

Irene is a specialist in classical antiquity in Greece, Rome and the Near East, and assures that outside the book many territories remained to be explored, so to rewrite another version of the Infinite in a reed she would have to study, document and be inspired again, even ensures that many parts were left out of this version.

"There was a part at the end of the book about the invention of the printing press, but that part was left out of the book because my publishers thought at first that maybe a book that was too long would turn off readers."

there festival

Irene will be in this version of the Hay Festival in Medellín. She assures that she is very excited about the quality of writers with whom she will share the stage and also about visiting Medellín, which is a great representation of Colombia.

The writer will have talks with Juan Diego Mejía, Piedad Bonnet, Juan Villoro, Juan Gabriel Vázquez and Yolanda Reyes. “They have meant a lot to me, I have lived in their books, I feel like an inhabitant of their imaginary”.