Ayanta Barilli: “The germ of the novel was the fear that my father would die, as it happened.”

The relationship between a father and his daughter forms the core if it didn’t dawn (Planet), Ayanta Barilli’s third novel (Rome, 1969). The fiction is temporarily set in the last 24 hours of the parents’ lives, and serves to review centuries of family history. Now this story has come to light just fifteen days after the author lost her father, also the writer Fernando Sánchez Dragó.

— It focuses on the relationship between father and daughter. Why focus on this relationship?

— It took me four years to write this novel and I entered that process, because of my age and the age of my own father, in which I began to fear that he would die, which later actually happened. So that was the germ of this novel; It was a way to exorcise that fear of his father’s death through the story of the shoemaker and the dancer, because this is a completely fictional novel. A hundred years of family history unfolds through the last 24 hours of the father.

— It is fiction, but to what extent does the relationship with the father reflect on Manuel and Anita? Are there a lot of Sánchez Dragó and Ayanta Barilli in them?

– Well, I don’t know, really. We writers write fiction, but everything we experienced and felt emotionally has to do with the characters and the structure of the novel. So obviously there will be a lot of me and there will be a lot of fictional. Basically, this novel, apart from the plot, raises a question that I think is vitally important to say goodbye to our elders and, finally, to discover ourselves, which is to know the person who lives behind the father. . In other words, not to stay only in the image of father, dad, but to go a little further and do the same as children, to get to know each other.

— Why focus on the figure of the father?

—Because more was written about mothers, including my first novel (dark purple sea) focused on the figure of the mother; I went through my entire mother’s line there. Let’s say, I reconstructed it, and it was an autobiographical novel, because it was the story of my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother.

— He claims that it is a novel in which he talks about the fear of losing his father and the importance of letting go of the elderly. Did your father ever read it? Did they start the problem? Have you suggested changes?

— We talked a lot about our work, obviously. Literary fact was something that connected us deeply through the time we spent together, but always, both my books and yours, we gave them to each other when they were completely finished, and then we talked about them, but there were no previous corrections or anything that looked like that In case if it didn’t dawni gave him proof prints — which is the final and final copy that later goes to press — and he read it and luckily, we were able to have a final conversation about a book that i was especially excited for him to read and have.

“He wrote the book out of fear that his father might die. When that actually happens, does that make the book special for you?

— It is a book accompanied by a strange synchronicity. What happens is that it’s a very obvious synchronicity, so it made me, the journalists and the readers wonder if there was any foreshadowing in this book. In reality, apart from speculations that have a very weak basis, because I think we’re just always in touch with these kinds of things, what happens is that a lot of times we don’t see them because they’re less obvious and they’re not written down in four hundred page books, but the mystery surrounds us and we live in that mystery. The second thing is that we ask ourselves a few questions.

— Where did your interest in family matters come from?

—I am interested in the family topic because families keep a lot of stories, secrets, lies. In fact, writing about family is almost like writing a crime novel, because there are always so many unanswered questions. And because I am very interested in emotions, putting them on paper, capturing them, which is very difficult because it is not allowed.