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Next Thursday, November 22, will be the presentation of the winning book of the XXII Edition of the Vargas Llosa Novel Prize "The night I could have seen Dizzy Gillespie playing", by Antonio Tocornal, convened by the Fundación Caja Mediterráneo, the University of Murcia and the Vargas Llosa Chair of the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library Foundation.
It will be at 19:30 in the Classroom of Culture of the Caja Mediterráneo Foundation, and in the act will intervene, in addition to the author, the Rector of the UMU José Luján, the president of the Fundación Caja Mediterráneo Clemente García, and the journalist and writer Raúl Tola Pedraglio.
All the winning novels in the Vargas Llosa Prize, instituted in 1996, one year after being chosen as the Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Murcia, will be digitized by the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library Foundation and made available to interested parties.
Among the 200 originals submitted to the 2017 edition, the jury chose the work of Tocornal for its "ability to capture an atmosphere starring a web of grotesque characters but endearing, looked with a certain tone of humor and irony, but also of nostalgia , which turns the novel into a confessional narrative ".
The jury, chaired by the professor of the University of Murcia Francisco Florit, stressed that "the author has managed to offer with brio and very good prose a representation of the Paris of the late 80's of the last century and experimentalism in art, making it caricatured form, but also printing sweetness in that rough world starred by failures ".
Antonio Tocornal was born in San Fernando (Cádiz) in 1964. He studied Fine Arts in Seville and, after a long stay in Paris, settled on the island of Mallorca.
In 2013 he published in the Editorial Dauro his novel "The law of similars".
He has won numerous literary awards, especially with his short stories.
A world of losers
"I'm not interested in the heroes or the winners, the losers have many more nuances," says Tocornal.
His novel narrates the events that took place during twelve hours, between six in the afternoon and six in the morning, in the Paris of the late eighties, during a long winter night that hides a drama that is revealed as which is portrayed to each of the characters with their circumstances.
All this with a background of jazz music in black and white and under the sieve of nostalgia that give the thirty years since the story happens until the narrator decides to dig between his memories and tell it.
In the novel appear, from the narrator's point of view, a series of young artists: painters, photographers, sculptors, musicians, poets, but also brothel characters, drug and art dealers, alcoholics, vagabonds, immigrants, porn actors , hustlers ...
"It is a tragicomic portrait of the microworld that the so-called avant-garde artists built in the eighties," says the author, who lived in Paris between 1985 and 1991, professionally dedicated to the plastic arts.
"The narrator is me," he says, "but not the" I "that was then, but the" I "of now remembering that other" I was. "All the characters are real, although in the novel they appear with different names and all the situations that are narrated They really happened. "
Source: Universidad de Murcia
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