Mexican writer Mónica Lavín says Gonzalo Celorio, 2025 Cervantes Prize winner, is a great host. He opens his home, south of Mexico City, to friends with the enthusiasm generated by the anticipation of a good conversation. “This is another nuance present in his literature: friendship, the rituals of life that have to do with the table, the guest, the conversation, the interest in others. This distinguishes him and can be seen in Memory lieswhich earned him the Villaurrutia Prize,” says Lavín. Knowing his work, the academic also states that Celorio will become a classic of Mexican literature and a literary reference for the new generations.
Proof of this affection for friends, Lavín continues, is that this year he publishes a novel about another writer colleague of his, Hernán Lara Zavala, which he will present at the end of November at the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL). “Every Sunday they met to talk about writing, about literature, about life. We saw Rosa Beltrán, he and I accompanied Hernán to the presentation of her book, which we didn’t know would be the last, which is called The last carnival. This is why Gonzalo Celorio wrote this book, which is a tribute to his friend, in which he talks about friendship”, he explains.
My friend Hernan It was published the same year as the author’s memoirs, under the title That pile of broken mirrors (Tusquets Editores), an opportunity to learn about the life and literary creation of Celorio, who built a literature in which personal memory is intertwined with the history of Mexico and in which the act of writing is a way to resist oblivion. “His themes have a universal scope and are centered on personal experience or memory, which in reality is like a germ which is then moulded, invented on it, erected, because as we well know memory is always invention, but somehow the characteristic of many of his books is that Ithat first-person character that has to do with Gonzalo’s life experience or life experience,” Lavín says.
Born in Mexico City in 1948, Celorio is part of a generation of writers who see literature as a way of life, as he himself stated. Trained at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of UNAM, he was a disciple and colleague of figures such as Salvador Elizondo and José Emilio Pacheco. His literary debut came with Self love (1992), a novel characterized by an ironic look at university life and the disappointments of desire. They followed him And the Earth trembles in its centers (1999) e Three beautiful Cuban women (2006), works that consolidate his style: a confessional tone, a virtuous use of prose and the mixture of humor and memory that characterizes him. He is director of the Mexican Academy of Language, where he defends the language as a precious cultural heritage.
The exploration of memory is at the heart of his famous, ironically titled trilogy An exemplary familycomposed of the works Three beautiful Cuban women, The apostates AND metal and slag. In the first he explores the story of his mother, who was Cuban, and his two aunts and the life of the island, with whose revolution he identified. “I dare say that he is the author most clearly linked to Cuba, not only because his mother was Cuban, but because he went through different ways of relating to what seemed like a utopia and which turned out to be a disaster, but Three beautiful Cuban women It’s a very interesting book because of how the three sisters behave, the one who arrives in Mexico and marries Gonzalo’s father, but also the one who stays in Cuba. It’s a way of seeing our contemporary environment, this 20th century and part of the 21st,” says Lavín.
Cuban authors had a great influence on Celorio’s prose. In a midweek interview with this newspaper, he acknowledged that authors such as Alejo Carpentier helped shape his style. “The universe of influences is very broad and also has to do with the reading ability one has had and, before being a writer, I am fundamentally a reader,” he said. “Every day I write in the morning and read in the afternoon. There are many writers who have influenced me. It wouldn’t be easy to list them, but I can mention a few who are simply exemplary. One is Alejo Carpentier, who is truly a great lover of form and who uses a truly impressive vocabulary. And another who interests me a lot is José Lezama Lima, a truly plutonic writer, because he says about the baroque that it is a plutonic art, which comes out a bit like an explosion from the bowels of the Earth itself,” he explained.
Celorio admitted that this influence marks his writing, which he also defines as baroque. “This is the most powerful influence I have. There are writers who were called neobaroque in honor of another Cuban writer, a great theorist, also a novelist, Severo Sarduy, who is a writer I respect very much and used the term neobaroque to refer to some authors who had this great taste for form and who had a direct influence of the baroque, like Alejo Carpentier,” he said.
Lavín rather qualifies the writer’s prose as “burbotonic”, due to its erudition, the rhythm influenced by poetry and the richness of the words and the elegance in the creation of each sentence. “He searches and finds the right word; his prose has a very deep verbal density, because the poetry of the Golden Age runs through his veins. He has an elegance in his prose that makes it very pleasant to read, because it is not heavy, but it is intense and rich,” he says.
Juan Cerezo, his publisher in Barcelona, describes Celorio as an exemplary author for his careful use of language. “He is one of those intelligent writers who, right from his first work, discovers that he has a project, a coherence. Not only has he given us a wonderful and highly recommended trilogy, but he has portrayed us, as the jury of the Cervantes Prize says very well, like no other in the reality of modern Mexico through a tremendously human story and one in which we also recognize ourselves in Spain, because the roots of that family he tells are Spanish roots”, he explains.
This is another influence on Celorio’s work: the Spanish exile. “Many of my teachers, when I joined the faculty, came from Spanish exile, they brought with them the impulse of the republican attitude, the seed of rebellion against a dictatorial imposition, like that of Spain throughout the Francoist night,” he explained to this newspaper. “And these teachers were very formative for me. One of them was Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, who was a great philosopher who arrived on the ship Sinaia, where he published poems before philosophical texts. He was a 19-year-old boy who was so shy that he didn’t sign them with his full name, but with his initials. Ramón Xirau was also my teacher, who was a person who combined philosophy and literature very well; he was a great poet in the language Catalan. And Luis Rius, who was a wonderful teacher of medieval literature, they really had a teaching ability in making us understand and appreciate medieval Castilian literature, which was wonderful,” he said.
Julio Cortázar also strongly influenced the author. “Another writer who deserves all my devotion is Julio Cortázar. I often say that my life was divided between before JC and after JC, because there are writers who influence thought, but there are others who modify behavior, as was the case with Cortázar,” he explained.
These influences, however, served the Mexican to create his own style, with a writing that, in addition to the rich use of language, is, say his contemporaries, masterful in the use of humor and irony. “With his work he has built an edifice of memory, because he does not want it to be forgotten, he does not want illness or neglect to somehow leave future generations in the dark about what was the memory of his generation, the memory of his family, the memory of an entire moment in our recent history. His work is full of irony, tenderness, envy and rigor, because these are the ingredients that I have always noticed in Gonzalo’s novels. Celorio. That irony, that humor and that tenderness, with rigor and memory, which characterize the works”, explains Cerezo.
The writer Lavín states that Celorio will occupy a prominent place in Mexican literature, as “a classic”, an author “who will speak to new generations of a world they have never known”. These future generations, he says, “perhaps will want to peer into another moment of Mexico through their books,” with works like The earth trembles in its centersa love hymn to Mexico City and especially to its historic center, or Memory liesin which the author, through narrative and essays, tells anecdotes of his life with a special role that of the great authors of Latin American literature. “He uses humor and irony there. It’s an interesting contrast,” says Lavín. “He is a very elegant man in his ways, in his use of language and he balances it very well with that ability to laugh, even at oneself. Because he seems like a solemn man, but he is not, even if he is very respectful of the work of writing and of the literary tradition”, explains the writer.
