David Trueba was born in Madrid in 1969 and has been successful both as a novelist and as a screenwriter. La buena vida was his widely acclaimed debut as a film director, followed by Obra maestra, Soldados de Salamina, Bienvenido a casa and La silla de Fernando. He is the author of two previous novels, Cuatro amigos and Abierto toda la noche. Learning to Lose won the Critics Award in 2009 and marks Trueba's English-language debut.
Much of the pleasure in reading your novel comes from the details of everyday life and thought, the way you create such a full picture. You carefully and skillfully describe what would probably be a short scene in a movie or the background to action. It's so visual. What does your experience as a screenwriter and director bring to your writing?
My experience in the movies offers me a perspective in telling stories, having respect for the reader. I want to earn their attention, to make them live and enjoy the adventure of reading. The techniques are very different, but at the end of the day, the skill to tell the story, to create characters, and to make fiction sound like the real world are the great challenges of a narrator.
Madrid is another "character" in your book, a fascinating one with many aspects. Does your filmmaking experience give you a particular eye for describing Madrid?
I love my town. It has changed so much and in so many ways since I was a child. But I like to stop and look, to go to the streets of my childhood, to revisit, to appreciate how a city transforms. I enjoy the people. I am in love with humankind, even if sometimes it is deceiving. When I was born in Madrid, Spain was living under a dictatorship and a very strong tyranny composed of Catholic authorities and military repressors. Now it is one of the most free and multicultural places in the world. That change is the story of my life. It was a great time to live.
The characters are looking for connection, and the two who seem to do it best are Sylvia and Ariel, the youngest. Why is it so hard to connect at a later age? You'd think people would get better at it, not worse.
It is something that fascinates me, how difficult life becomes when you are an adult, especially if you have to start again as a professional or to put a family together through all the accidents of life. In the novel I wanted to show that life forces you to always be ambitious, to put all your energy in the adventure of living--that you can never abandon the fight.
Everyone lies; it seems to be not only a universal trait, but one that starts early in life. But their lies, for the most part, get discovered. In telling lies to others, are they eventually lying to themselves? Do you agree that "fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth"?
For me one of the most demanding themes in the novel was writing about a second life, a double life. People don't know a great deal about others. Even the people close to you ignore a lot of your inner problems, your complexities, your inner fight. It makes me laugh every time I see the news about a crime, and the neighbors of the criminal always say to the TV reporter that the guy was a regular person, completely normal. They're surprised that the guy had, let's say, three corpses buried in the garden. People are always surprised. I love them. That's why I love to meet people, that they tell their stories. It is always rich and fascinating.
The way you write about soccer is an education. Do you/did you play, or are you just an enthusiastic fan?
I used to play handball, so I was not a big fan of soccer. Soccer is a religion in Europe, it is the language that unifies our continent. You go to Africa or Latin America and the kids shout at Real Madrid or Barcelona, the two big teams of Spanish soccer. But I got to know very well some players and later coaches of professional soccer, so at the end it was a world that I knew and was familiar to me. It was something that I wanted to use sometime in my fiction. But never to treat the playing field as a poetic motive. Totally the opposite, the real world of the entourage--money, lies, vices, toughness. All the things you cannot imagine from the other side of the TV during the broadcast of the game.
Americans don't know much about soccer; for example, Argentinians play differently than Spaniards, who play differently than the British. I was struck by the harshness of the fans and the press toward the players and the teams. It's brutal. What does soccer offer you that, say, politics doesn't?
Let me say that professional sports, in my opinion, do not have very much to do with sports as we know them. They move so much money and they need to create big business that a lot of times they forget the origins of the sport. At the same time they are a great metaphor of the actual world. Politics are not very well understood by the people. They think politicians are a social class, far removed. Sports are simple, full of drama, examples, etc.
What elements in the book do you think a non-Spaniard would have difficulty understanding? One thing that's notable is the seemingly ubiquitous adultery--are no men monogamous? Are the actions of the men in the book extreme, or commonplace?
I never try to approach sociology in my books. I try to create strong and complex characters, but never representative characters. The ones that appear in the novel are particular; they don't represent the Spaniards in general. But let me say that for me the revelations about the private life of Tiger Woods or other notable husbands who look like the perfect guy are never a surprise. I don't understand the general surprise of the audience. Life has plenty of cases like that. Only hypocrisy makes us look in the other direction. Humans are not perfect. That is what I like about them. They have to fight with themselves all the time.
The book is universally appealing in many ways, but what aspects of your book would appeal especially to an American (or Canadian) reader?
The readers I am looking for are like me--people with curiosity who satisfy that need with fiction, with the books that are related to the real world. A lot of Americans are very good readers, and I will be glad to enter in their world of interests.
What writers have influenced your own writing?
I am a reader of classical Spanish literature, Cervantes, Baroja, Galdós. French geniuses like Flaubert, Stendhal and Guy de Maupassant. But also contemporary writers like Ian McEwan, Philip Roth, Lorrie Moore, Dave Eggers, Saul Bellow, V.S. Naipaul, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff.