Andrés Trapiello

File:Andrés Trapiello by Asís G. Ayerbe.jpg

Andrés Trapiello

Andrés García Trapiello (born June 10, 1953) is a Spanish writer and editor. Author of the monumental Salón de pasos perdidos, described by its author as a "novel in progress", of which twenty-four volumes have appeared to date.

Biography

Andrés García Trapiello was born in Manzaneda de Torío, Province of León, in 1953, one of nine children of a well-to-do Falangist farmer and merchant, Porfirio García and his wife Laura Trapiello. Two years later the family moved to León to live with his paternal grandfather. Several members of his family have had humanistic inclinations: a priest uncle, César Trapiello, a cartoonist and journalist, of whom he assisted as an altar boy, introduced him to reading; a great-uncle, José Trapiello, was a modernist poet; and his brother Pedro García Trapiello is a journalist.

He studied internal baccalaureate in a Dominican school and the PREU with the Marists of Palencia. After a trip to Marseilles, where he worked as a waiter, he entered a Dominican monastery in Caleruega (Burgos) at the end of 1970, but was expelled after two months. His father later threw him out of the house when he discovered some issues of Mundo Obrero under his bed. He then spent five months in Madrid with some anarchists and in a boarding house, subsisting on menial jobs. Afterwards he did incomplete studies of philology at the University of Valladolid, attracted to that city by the false promise of working in the factory of a paternal uncle of his. By then he joined the Young Red Guard and was already writing and collaborating in the press. He was a member, as he declared in an interview, of the Maoist Communist Party of Spain International PCE (i), from which he was purged in 1974 as a "revisionist and drug addict".

In 1975 he went to Madrid, where he currently lives, hired as editor of an art magazine, Guadalimar. He also worked until 1979 in the TVE cultural program Encounters with the Letters; there he met his wife, Miriam Moreno (1954), with whom he has two children. He directed the magazines Entregas de la Ventura and Número, and in 1981 he participated in the re-founding of the publishing house Trieste. He also collaborates with the Granada publishing house Comares.

He knew and esteemed Ramón Gaya, whom he considers his mentor. His novel El buque fantasma (1992) was received with great hostility by left-wing literary critics, because he had edited the Falangist Sánchez Mazas shortly before. He is best known for his diary (of which he has so far published 22 volumes, jointly called Salón de Pasos Perdidos) and his novels. He has also devoted himself to the research of literary history, especially focusing on some recurrent writers: Cervantes, Galdós, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Unamuno.

In one of his essays, undoubtedly the best known and most extensive, Las armas y las letras. Literatura y guerra civil (1936–1939), he studies the behavior of writers and intellectuals in that period, both among those who took sides with the Nationalists (such as Torrente Ballester, Álvaro Cunqueiro, Rafael Sánchez Mazas or Agustín de Foxá) and the Republicans (Antonio Machado, Rafael Alberti, Bergamín, Miguel Hernández, García Lorca, etc.), as well as the non-aligned (Pío Baroja, Azorín, Unamuno, Manuel Chaves Nogales, Clara Campoamor). Interested in literary falangism, he has rescued the work of some outstanding authors of the period, concluding that they "won the war, but lost the pages of the literature manuals".

His knowledge and wit as a scathing writer are appreciated. However, the main criticisms of his approach to the figures and works of the writers of the period are his lack of rigorous research and his poor use of sources. The critic José Luis García Martín, after confessing his admiration for Trapiello, states that "we already know that his rigor, when it comes to quoting and historicizing Spanish literature (one of his hobbies) is not excessive". Trapiello himself anticipated in 1993 the criticism, recognizing that Las armas y las letras is a hybrid between literature, history and politics: "To be a book of history it lacks dates; to be a book of criticism it lacks a vision of the whole and manners that it does not have. Perhaps, like life, it is a hybrid".

Trapiello ran for the Senate on the UPyD Madrilenian lists in the 2015 general election. A new bill proposed by the Citizens, which was member of the Commission of Historical Memory, — an entity created by the City Council in 2016, — was entrusted with the preparation of a report on the change of name of streets in compliance with the Historical Memory Law. Trapiello opposed the proposition, owing to the idea that "we must not politicize the past".

On June 13, 2021, he read the manifesto of the civic platform Unión 78 on the stage of Plaza de Colón in Madrid on the occasion of the demonstration against the pardons that the PSOE government was going to grant to pro-independence Catalans imprisoned since the fall of 2017 for the Catalan sovereignty process of 2012–2021. He was followed by Yeray Mellado, president of the association S'ha Acabat! and Rosa Díez, former president of UPyD and founder of Unión 78.

Works

Poetry

• Junto al agua (1980)
• Las tradiciones (1982)
• La vida fácil (1985)
• El mismo libro (1989)
• Las tradiciones (1991)
• Acaso una verdad (1993)
• Rama desnuda, 1993-2001 (2001)
• Un sueño en otro (2004)
• Segunda oscuridad (2012)
• Y (2018)

Fiction

• La tinta simpática (1988)
• El buque fantasma (1992)
• La malandanza (1996)
• Días y noches (2000)
• La noche de los cuatro caminos. Madrid, 1945 (2001)
• Los amigos del crimen perfecto (2003)
• Al morir don Quijote (2004)
• Los confines (2009)
• Ayer no más (2012)
• El final de Sancho Panza y otras suertes (2014)

Diaries

• El gato encerrado (1987)
• Locuras sin fundamento (1988)
• El tejado de vidrio (1989)
• Las nubes por dentro (1990)
• Los caballeros del punto fijo (1991)
• Las cosas más extrañas (1992)
• Una caña que piensa (1993)
• Los hemisferios de Magdeburgo (1994)
• Do fuir (1995)
• Las inclemencias del tiempo (1996)
• El fanal hialino (1997)
• Siete moderno (1998)
• El jardín de la pólvora (1999)
• La cosa en sí (2000)
• La manía (2001)
• Troppo vero (2002)
• Apenas sensitivo (2003)
• Miseria y compañía (2004)
• Seré duda (2005)
• Sólo hechos (2006)
• Mundo es (2007)
• Diligencias (2008)
• Quasi una fantasía (2009)
• Éramos otros (2010)

References

• Téllez, Rafael Adolfo (2007). "Una imagen de Andrés Trapiello," Renacimiento, No. 55/58, pp. 132–36.

External links

• Official website
• Personal blog
• Works by Andrés Trapiello at Dialnet