On November 10, Mikel Santiago had one of the worst nights of the year. The next day it was published The girl by the lake (Ediciones B) and suffered as if it were his first novel, as if he were making the leap, more than 10 years ago, from self-publishing to major series, as if it were the first stage of that dizzying career that from Last night at Tremore Beach (Ediciones B, 2014) changed his life. “You always have many doubts about how the public will receive it, whether they will enter the game you propose. That tension does not disappear, perhaps it has even increased over the years,” he confessed on Tuesday in a restaurant in the Malasaña neighborhood of Madrid.
The appointment takes place on a cool and sunny November morning. It all began before lunch, at Cervantes y Cía, the Allied bookshop, the place where he had presented many of his books, including the previous one, The forgotten son. But the bet was relaunched and the end of the party would take place that same afternoon at the Palacio de la Prensa. Santiago (Portugalete, 50 years old) tries to ward off the evils of fame with a “simple and family life in Bilbao” and only “at certain times” does he enter the wheel of promotion. From here on out, one event per month is the limit. Water, swimming and the sea are his medicine and his music, bowling with a friend in the bars of his city, the way to stay on earth.
The girl by the lake it’s a thriller in which the protagonist, the writer Quintana Torres, returns to her town, the idyllic and imaginary Urkizu, to reveal the mystery of the death of the rebel Alba, a young woman who died on the night of San Juan in 1999 in strange circumstances. Torres fictionalized the case in a thriller which was called, in fact, The girl by the lakeand this catapulted her into the firmament of commercial literature. After a massive unveiling event in 2025, he receives proof that the victim’s diary is on the loose, a document that promises that whoever receives it will reveal not only the culprit in Alba’s death, but also many of the city’s secrets. With this stratagem Santiago brings all the characters into the equation, because who doesn’t have something unspeakable to hide that that irreverent and attentive young woman might have caught?
impostor syndrome
Santiago truffles almost 700 pages of references to the world of publishing, to power, to triumph and its consequences. “There’s a moment in success where you want to hide,” he reflects in a firm voice, “Quintana is at a point where he wants to run away from everything. If you come from a normal world, success can suffocate you, because it feels toxic, because it takes you away from your naturalness, and what Quintana has to do is accept it,” he adds, speaking both about his character and himself. There is the fear, he admits, that the reservoir of ideas will run out, of not being able to “develop them”. “Of course, I’ve never had impostor syndrome because I’m from Bilbao,” he concludes with a laugh.
The road hasn’t been easy, it never is. The ambition to do something different, to stay fresh, to go further, to travel through other landscapes, added further pressure to a process that had a clear deadline: we had to reach the Christmas campaign. “I always knew what kind of writer I wanted to be, what kind of stories I wanted to tell, and if crises came it was always because of the need for myself, of a certain vanity,” he says.
The result is a novel of characters (the inhabitants of the town, the friends of youth, the guilty, the falsely guilty, the people of the publishing world…) with Quintana’s voice dominating the narrative. But above all we are faced with aa thriller sewn with steel thread, a plot in three times and two places (Madrid and Urkizu) that takes the reader by the hand without valleys and without traps, which has a turning point after 300 pages and ends with solvency.
In life Santiago loves games very much and in his novels he invites people to participate, opens books to readers, always attentive to his audience and its needs. “Readers have children, work, problems… and they read me to escape from all this. They have, perhaps, half an hour because there is a lot of competition, and we have to do excellent management of the information so that they stay there, interested.” In a genre that tends towards repetition, Santiago searches for his own tone, which he has refined over the course of his nine novels. He speaks of “flavors to explore” and of colors, such as the dark, very dark green of the bottom of the Urkizu swamp, and of urban legends and other sources with which to fatten his narrative.
I always knew what kind of writer I wanted to be, what kind of stories I wanted to tell.
Illumbe, the mythical space in which he developed his four previous novels, seems exhausted, but not the new Urkizu, far from the coast but with the powerful presence of its swamp. He has a handful of stories in his head and a system for knowing which one will be next: “You have to choose the one you fall in love with. It’s like intuition in poker.” In the distance, always Stephen King, not in vain it all began when he began to self-publish horror stories, but now above all Raymond Chandler, to whom he returned with passion.
Two diners sitting at a nearby table interrupt the conversation, in a somewhat shy and delicate way. They are readers of Mikel Santiago, they come from Pamplona and they listened to part of the interview before daring to say hello. They don’t fit into their clothes, they don’t believe how lucky they were. Then in the afternoon the party will end at the Palazzo della Stampa, with a crowd of readers. There, in a packed cinema hall, the skills of showman of Santiago, his speed, his winks at the public, to whom he makes a confession: he too, like Alba, had a diary as a teenager, the one in which to vent, in which to express his Love from the religious teacher, where he began the path that brought him this far.
10 years ago, that same author, now riding high, confessed to this newspaper his fears after tasting success for the first time. What would the Mikel of today say to the one of then? “That he will make his dreams come true, but they are not what he believed in.”
