The album of forgotten things, a text that, for Enrique Planas, has a lot of feeling and a great message.
What has been the common thread that you have used for all the objects that are in the book? Well, I think the common thread is a bit my own feeling of obsolescence. I believe that writing about objects is not something new, I did not invent it. It is an old literary genre, it is somewhat comparable to still life painting and those baroque painters did not do it because they were fascinated by the brilliance of fish or the shapes of apples, but because they wanted, with these objects, to speak of the memento mori, of their condition as mortal, of the transience of life. So writing about objects also means, not necessarily, talking about the transience of life, but rather about certain conditions, certain customs that are lost with the loss of the object itself.
You have constantly said that you do not want to appeal to nostalgia. Because in reality they are a kind of small essays, small reflections on those objects. Imagine how silly it would be to talk nostalgically saying, the recorder, there is nothing better than the recorder. Unclear. Of course there are better things than the tape recorder. So I don’t have a nostalgic vision because I understand that nostalgia is a false memory, it is a conservative memory to the extent that it leads you to think that the past was better. And the past was not better, no matter how much fear of change we have.
Here there are not only objects that you have rescued, but there is literature. What were you looking for with this, sometimes I start to think, what does it really mean for something to have literature? Because the text is the work with the word. In other words, a text being correctly written does not make it literary. I think that what a literary text does is find the symbolic value of things. Suggest stories, literary truths, poetic truths from an object. Because poetic truths, unlike factual truths, what they do is tune in to symbols that we had not thought had a connection. When literature allows us to connect things that we did not suspect before. So that’s what I’ve been trying to do in these texts.
In the book there are several objects that we have known as children, what caught my attention was this breakdown of why to include the interviews with Julio Iglesias. Is it also an obsolete object? I think it is all part of the same symbolic game, because I am not comparing Julio Iglesias with a typewriter, nor with an alarm clock, but I am talking about a lost time, I am talking about a way of talking about lost love, about a form of disappeared masculinity, about a person who had become the image of the seducer and today is the image of the meme, the image of the month of July and what awaits us. So it is those losses of meaning and that gain of other senses that I believe makes Julio Iglesias a presence that dialogues with other objects. In the end, Julio Iglesias is also an object of desire.
And your mother liked Julio Iglesias? Yes, my mother loved Julio Iglesias. That thing he told me “your mom did love me” was very funny. Julio Iglesias was from a family of journalists, so he is a guy who gave the journalist what he wanted to hear, but he could also play a lot with him. And that condescending tone that a journalist can have when interviewing someone whom deep down you don’t respect very much, I immediately noticed it. So I think that, with professional honesty, I also try to show how the relationship that one can have with the idol evolved.
PROFILE
Enrique Planas, journalist. He is a prominent Peruvian journalist and cultural writer. He is widely known for his work as a cultural editor at the newspaper El Comercio and for his literary career, which includes several award-winning novels.
