Javier Cercas: "Let's flee like the plague from literature that sugarcoats reality."

Spanish writer Javier Cercas "feels like vomiting" when he hears about literature that uses "ornament" to tell a story and that, furthermore, doesn't "break" with the pre-established. and it fits without being made from the guts, but, above all, it does not reveal the truth.

" Bad literature is that which sugarcoats things , that which does not reveal, because embellishment always hides something (...) Literature is what happens in the street, and you have to flee from everything that sounds like it, like the plague," explains the writer.

For Cercas, William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, and Franz Kafka were far removed from this literature and were the ones who renewed the narrative of their time in both "structure and form," a significance that obsesses him and influences his work.

The member of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) was chosen by the Vatican so that, for the first time, a writer would accompany a Pope , specifically the recently deceased Francis (1936-2025), on one of his apostolic trips to Mongolia, one of the countries in the world with the fewest Christian faithful.

As an atheist and anticlerical, the author of Soldiers of Salamis (2001) took on the task, like his teachers, of telling his truth with the Pope, an experience in which he mixed chronicle, theological essay and biography to "understand Catholicism" in The Madman of God at the End of the World (2025).

" I have dealt with this subject in a rather mischievous spirit (...) But this book is not written to defend Catholicism or to attack Catholicism; I have tried to be respectful," the writer maintains during his visit to Mexico.

The narrator from Extremadura was raised in a family with fervent Catholic devotion , especially that of his mother who, after the death of her husband, was certain that she would meet him in heaven, in the resurrection of the body.

Cercas doesn't consider this book to be a "tribute" to his mother, although he confesses that in this dialogue with the Pope he did have a "personal motivation" : to understand his parent.

"This book stems from a concern that couldn't be more personal, more selfish. My mother said she would see my father after he died. That's the point . And it turns out that's the heart of Christianity and the question a child would ask," he concludes.

Despite having such a personal query, as are often the "selfish motives of writers," it is literature that will later "be responsible for transforming it into something universal" and making Javier Cercas's "obsessions" known.

In his attempt to explain the religious world, Cercas did not intend to "be too clever" or pass judgment on the Church, as "many journalists do who think they know everything" about the congregation, but rather to avoid "making easy judgments, because only fools do that."

"Smart people are dedicated to understanding, except when we're in a court of law," he jokes.

In the purest rock and roll style of the Rolling Stones mentioned in the text, Cercas breaks "the solemnity and mourning with which the Church is regarded" and ends at the beginning of his work, with the Londoners' phrase: "Please allow me to introduce myself."