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Future of short story is clear, Spanish author Aparicio says
Along with Luis Mateo Diez and Jose Maria Merino, the 69-year-old Aparicio is one of the pioneers of a current that rejects empiricism and recaptures the notions of imagination and sense of place in story writing. Within this current that interrogates life, while it is hardly classifiable, Aparicio uses a different pattern of prose in every work.
So, as one of the best figures to explain the evolution of the genre, Aparicio was in İstanbul this week for a conference on short story writing on Monday at the Cervantes Institute.
This week’s conference, titled “Quantum Stories: A Theory on Short Stories,” marked the second time Aparicio visited İstanbul. “I was here about 20 years ago, around 1990. There has been a lot of change for the better. There’s a lot of improvement and the beauty of the city still remains. The connection with Europe is more visible now than before and I like that because I’m European.”
Distinguishing ‘good literature’
One of Aparicio’s main concerns about the future of literature is that there is too much focus on commercial or popular books presented as bestsellers. “The thing is, in Spain, as in the world, literature is experiencing a crisis,” explains Aparicio. “In Europe, in Spain, previous bestsellers and all those books only seeking money were not considered good and some publishing houses didn’t want to publish them, as they wanted to publish only fine literature. And now everything is mixed up. You can’t distinguish what is good and what is bad, what is business, what is market, what is quality. Here I have seen many bookstores, which left a very good impression of the city on me. Maybe you don’t have this siege of the bestsellers here that much, but soon it will come.”
Nevertheless, Aparicio sees this as an inevitable process. “It’s difficult to change that tendency, it’s very difficult,” he says. “There’s the Internet, there’s the consummation of cultures. Take, for instance, movies. I don’t like movies now because they are all like video games. When I was younger films used to make you think and at the same time offer some entertainment, but this entertainment would teach you in the meantime. Now they are only for killing time.”
Distinguishing the good and the bad in literature can be done according to the consequences of what is being read, Aparicio explains with a comparison. “It’s like food,” he says. “When people are starving you can give them junk food like hamburgers and so on, which are bad for your health. Reading is the same thing. If you read good books you’re well and healthy but if you read silly books you won’t grow and be nurtured.”
Despite the current situation in literature around the world, the future of short stories is quite different, according to Aparicio. “In Spain, it’s an excellent moment for short stories,” he says. “[Authors] always like to complain that we don’t pay attention to short stories, but now we do. There are even some publishing houses dedicated to short stories. Maybe they don’t sell too many, but they sell enough to get by and there are many of them. This is very good for the future of the short story.”
As for his theory of short story writing, quantum stories, Aparicio summarizes his technique with a live example: “I call them quantum stories because I compare them with quantum physics,” he says, and explains with one of his short stories, titled “Love,” the shortest story he has ever written: “He was immune to the bite of the wasp until he fell in love with one of them.”
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