Translation Rights TQE / The Motive

After the exceptional national and international success of Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamis), we found it appropriate to make available once again what was the first short novel by Javier Cercas, a narration that closed the volume of short stories by the same title published in 1987. As Cercas puts it, this story is the one worth saving from that book because, sixteen years later, he can still recognise himself as he reads it. The reader will not have a hard time seeing that, as Franciso Rico points out in the epilogue, all of Cercas’ oeuvre is contained in its quintessence here: his references to Borges , the irresistible desire to use what is narrated as an excuse to propose a poetic art, the development of the argument, precise as a clock, the inclination for the mise en abîme and, above all, the irony of a story that always turns against its own narrator.

Álvaro is different from the cliché protagonist of many first novels. He is not a writer that curses his luck, but rather one who wants to conquer the world in a most mapped out manner. His great ambition to write the «definitive work», which will revolutionise the history of literature, is as great as the dedication and discipline he applies in order to achieve it. As Álvaro himself says, creation is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. It is only when he needs to draw the plot that he turns to observe his neighbours: a recently married couple with financial problems, a retired man and a janitor. To his surprise, what he has desperately longed for comes true, and the need to truthfully represent a real crime in fiction pushes him to provoke it in real life. Álvaro does not see that, regardless of his own perfectionist and ambitious zeal, reality is never as controllable as a novel.

Javier Cercas was born in Ibarhenando, Cáceres in 1962. He is the author of a book of short stories, Cuentos reales (True Tales) 2000, of a nouvelle, El móvil (The motive) 1987 and 2003, and of three novels, El inquilino (The Tenant) 1989 and 2000, El vientre de la ballena (The Belly of the Whale), and Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamis). The latter is a novel that reached unprecedented success in bookshops, with readers, writers, and critics. It has received the following prizes: Premi Llibreter 2001 Narrativa, Premi Ciutat de Barcelona, Premio Librería Cálamo al mejor libro del año 2001, Premio Salambó, Premio de la Crítica de Chile, IV Gran Premio Qué Leer de los Lectores, Premio de Novela Histórica de Cartagena, Premio Extremadura a la Creación, Premio de los Lectores Crisol, Premio Grinzane Cavour. Javier Cercas worked for two years at the University of Illinois and, since 1989, is professor of Spanish literature at the University of Girona. He collaborates regularly in the newspaper El País.