La voz interior

La voz interior would like to resemble the biographical novels of the 19th century, that deliberately seek to be entertaining, in spite of the fact that Sebastián Uribe Riley’s life was the monotonous existence of a stranger to whom nothing worth telling ever happened.

Sebastián died very young, when he was thirty, and much later his family discovered a huge number of notebooks filled with his writings. Mary Riley, Sebastián’s mother, calls Bernabé, a friend from his childhood and teenage years, who is now a commissioned writer, to establish whether the writings are of any value or it is better to through them away. Bernabe discovers that Sebastián devoted his life to inventing authors and writing the texts of these invented authors. From then on, the friend will devote himself to researching into Sebastián's life and writing the biography of that unpublished and elusive author of authors, which makes up the first part of the novel. It is a biography disguised as a novel which also contains a second part with a selection of texts by several of those authors invented by Sebastián – beginning by his own verses –, as well as poems, short essays, novel plots, apocryphal hagiographies and even a brief treatise on pataphysical theology entitled Los motivos de Dios, by the enigmatic Walter Steiggel.

It took me eight years to write La voz interior, to which I also added some previous material. I would have gone on with it. I stopped when I realised that if I went on, it would mean to never stop. (D. J. A.)