A Conversation with Juan Manuel de Prada: Living with Truth in Times of Confusion

October is the month when books make the television news: the Nobel is awarded, the Planeta is awarded, bookstores fill up with lists and belly bands. A good time to publish a conversation that walks in the exact opposite direction. It is not about what to read this fall. It is about why you read. And, along the way, about why you think, why you work, and why you remain where you are.

Juan Manuel de Prada is a novelist and columnist: he won the Planeta Prize in 1997 with La tempestad, and his latest major narrative project, Mil ojos esconde la noche, spans two volumes (La ciudad sin luz and Cárcel de tinieblas). He is also an ally of Nomba, and his is the third conversation in this series, following those of Higinio Marín and Javier G. Recuenco.

An honest warning before starting: Prada is a vocational polemicist and several of his theses about the times raise blisters. You do not need to agree with all of them to make the most of what follows. A deep conversation does not ask for adherence: it asks for attention. When we said goodbye to him, we told him exactly that: thank you for a conversation without compromises, which does not seek to please, but rather to say what hurts and what saves.

Knowing Who We Are

We asked him what it means to live in truth in times of confusion and he began with a story by Borges, the biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz, where it is said that a man's life consists of a single moment: the one in which he definitively knows who he is. Prada does not buy into the entire phrase: "I do not believe we can ever come to definitively know who we are," he told us, because "the beauty of life is that we are always discovering something about the world, about our neighbor, and about ourselves."

What he does buy into is the task: "To live in truth is to live knowing who we are." And knowing who we are is knowing "our most intimate, truest yearnings," knowing what we ask of life and what our capabilities can yield. Then he added the phrase that deactivates any weekend workshop: "This is an artisanal labor, it is a labor that must be polished every day." Not a discovery, but a craft. And the material against which one works is noise: living in truth requires cleansing oneself, "stripped of propaganda, stripped of external incitements, and stripped also of internal ghosts."

If you have been suspecting for some time that you are living on autopilot, pay attention to the order he proposes: he does not ask you to reinvent yourself. He asks you to cleanse yourself.

The Boy Who Read Dostoyevsky on the Balcony

There is a childhood image that Prada has recounted on occasion: summers in a house on the Catalan coast, reading Dostoyevsky. We asked him if those readings saved him from anything and the first thing he did was dismantle the picture-perfect scene: he did not skip the beach, and let no one contrast Dostoyevsky with swimming in the sea. He read, in reality, to escape the afternoon nap: "I did not want to take a nap under any circumstances." His parents, who did want to take one, ended up banishing him to the balcony, and there he would spend hours, heatstroke included, with those novels.

He provided the moral of the story himself: "a good book does not keep us away from the good life." One can enjoy the beach, the sun, and the swim, and also read. What he discovered in those pages was something else: the possibility of "incorporating into my personal experience the experience of others who had preceded me," of peering into aspects of the human mystery that a child could not even begin to glimpse. Great writers, he told us, create characters "equal to them, similar to them, different from them, contrary to them": that is why they broaden the vision of the world instead of narrowing it.

And that is why literature will have work to do for a long time. The human mystery cannot be reduced to formulas because "no two souls are alike." Prada said this with a mixture of wonder and vertigo: among billions of souls, all different; "how beautiful and at the same time what vertigo." This immeasurable material is the field of literature. It is also yours: the reading list you carry is not a cultural ornament, it is a tool for knowing what you are.

A Thick Book Is a Thick Book

In the middle of the conversation, Prada picked up a volume of Anna Karenina and used it as a philosophical argument. The book has more than a thousand pages and a hard cover, and there is no opinion that can make it light: "Let's stop talking nonsense." Behind the joke lies a serious thesis: "Things are what they are," and what we think of them is highly secondary.

What worries him is the modern inversion: living under a "hailstorm of opinions" that does not seek to complete the truth of things, but to sow confusion, keeping the soul "like a tennis ball" bouncing from one side of the court to the other. He quoted Saint Augustine: souls need stability. If you review your daily diet of headlines, threads, and talk shows, you know exactly what he is talking about.

Is the alternative to start philosophizing for an hour a day? Prada expressly advises against it. The big questions are not a scheduled activity, but a companionship: "those thoughts must always accompany us," in our readings, in our daily work, in our relationships. Thinking about what we are is not separate from living: it permeates it.

Creating from Self-Effacement

Asked how to distinguish true creation from the noise of vanity, he gave a criterion that applies equally to a canvas as it does to your everyday work: "true creation is that which transforms us." When something is real, "something inside of us loses its footing." What does not transform "is entertainment": a perfectly legitimate and healthy leisure, but a different category.

And can one create without humility? His answer was categoric: no. The craft of the creator "is fundamentally self-effacement": "realizing that you are nothing and that from the nothingness that you are you must build something great." He who starts from self-deification lives settled in frustration; he who starts from his own smallness works in another way: "If one starts from misery, one is going to feel raised up, never deified," capable of making "small things but, in their smallness, valuable."

Swap the word creator for professional and the phrase still stands. There is a way of entering work on Monday from self-deification and another from the craft. The second is the only one that does not end in bitterness.

Staying Still as Rebellion

The discourse of our times invites you to do the opposite of all of the above: change, transform yourself, reinvent yourself. We asked Prada about the weight of fidelity —to a vocation, to a tradition, to a given word— and he answered that today staying in the same place "is an exercise in rebellion against the era in which we have had to live," a world that invites us to submerge ourselves in "a carousel of novelties." To persevere is to "swim against the current," which, as he recalled by quoting Chesterton, is the only way to feel alive.

Do not mistake this fidelity for staying out of fear. Prada is speaking of something else: of discerning one's vocation by listening to "the voice of our conscience" and to those who truly know you —not the empty talker who flatters your ear—, and of accepting that life "is going to be watered with failures," that no one is "a kind of Roman general" with an existence carpeted in success. From there, perseverance ceases to be inertia and becomes the only available happiness: "that our thought and our life be concordant, not just in accord, but concordant." And he topped it off with the phrase that summarizes the entire conversation: "perseverance, loyalty, fidelity is an anticipation of eternity."

This Is Not a Medical Consultation

In this conversation, emptiness, pain, and dissatisfaction are spoken of as human constants, and they are spoken of from philosophy and literature. That is what this piece is: a conversation, not a consultation. If what you are feeling weighs more than it should, if it resembles less of an inquietude and more of a tunnel, the sensible and courageous thing to do is to seek professional help —doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist—. No reading replaces that step, and taking it does not remove you from the journey: it is part of taking care of yourself so that you can make it.

The Conversation Continues

The complete conversation with Juan Manuel de Prada lives in El Viaje, accompanying several of its stages, alongside those of Higinio Marín and Javier G. Recuenco that we have already gathered here. Hold on to the thread that unites them: knowing who we are is a craft, not a slogan.

And autumn, with the days growing shorter, is the season that the classics reserved for that craft. Of that —of the questions the Stoics asked themselves as the year begins to fade— we will write next week.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.