Alberto Gómez Vaquero: "When you're a teenager and you read passionately, books are almost like a drug."

A well-stocked library solidified over time, a life experience hardened in the 1980s and 1990s—decades in which loneliness was fought with alcohol, not social media—and a personal, precise, perhaps surgical knowledge of small towns. Alberto Gómez Vaquero (Valladolid, 1984) draws on these three premises to craft in When the River Returns (Carpe Noctem), a bold, well-crafted novel with crystalline prose about a passion for books and the transition to adulthood in a rural world free from any temptation of idealism.

"There's no other way to learn to write than to read a lot," the author admits to EL MUNDO. " The novel wanted, above all, to celebrate that first moment, in adolescence, when we begin to become real readers . When you're a teenager and you read passionately, books are almost like a drug."

That's exactly what happens to the protagonist of a plot set in the 1990s and woven around the arrival of a young literature teacher at a high school in a rural Spanish town. One of his students, a teenager who feels he doesn't quite fit in within the walls of his surroundings, discovers that books transform his worldview as he faces the obstacles inherent in puberty . "Every teenager is bewildered, believes he doesn't fit in and that no one understands him, lives life as a tragedy, and wants to go far away." From this feeling, the writer from Valladolid has constructed a story that crystallizes in a fictional novel with an underlying interest in exploring the twists and turns of adolescence.

"Although perhaps not definitively, what we are and what we do in adolescence," he emphasizes, "is reflected in adulthood. And a good part of what we do as adults is to amend, heal, or reinforce what we did as adolescents, or what was done to us . Then there are those who never even mature and stagnate in adolescence. Some end up becoming politicians to achieve what they couldn't have as kids, and they walk around with their flies open as if they were still 15 years old."

Gómez Vaquero paints the protagonist as an avid, restless, environmentalist, nerdy reader, somewhat rebellious at home, and frustrated by being "stranded in that equally stranded town." This last point is crucial both for understanding his personal worldview and for approaching the rural reality in which the author places his work. There are no remnants of the 1998 era. There are no traces of the mystique of the Castilian countryside. Nor is there a funereal or stereotypical daguerreotype . His view of the village eschews stridency. He presents a setting "closed in on itself and with hundreds of eyes attentive to every movement," a place plagued by the curse of "no change."

"There's nothing to mythologize, but nothing to raise alarms about either," he clarifies. "I sometimes have the feeling that Spanish literature, regarding rural areas, has either been very mythologizing—the Delibes school, for example—or has portrayed rural areas as a primitive and dangerous space—the Cela school in Pascual Duarte. Now perhaps we need to add a third model: that of rural areas as an exotic world for those who grew up and live in big cities."

Villages are nature, tranquility, a life in harmony with the environment. But they are also silence, loneliness, and a lack of opportunities . This is the contrast that has driven millions of people from rural areas and that still holds no appeal for young people today, despite successive economic crises and exorbitant rent increases in the city.

The protagonist of When the River Returns saw his adolescence drowned in the village. Because adolescence, as Gómez Vaquero points out, "prefers anonymity and wide margins of freedom. Spaces where parents or adults don't control you." This, which was once more accessible in cities, now seems "easier" in rural environments. This fact doesn't prevent, now more than ever, the need to leave the provinces to succeed as a writer from continuing. "We should also ask ourselves what we mean, at this point in the game, by 'succeeding.' Because social recognition often hides a precarious salary, because it's earned in 'likes' and applause, and a life full of anxieties."

Throughout the pages of this novel, names appear that evoke the talent of the writer. From Rilke to Conrad, passing through London, Stendhal, García Márquez, Félix Grande, Rulfo, Carpentier, Eliot, Machado, Laforet, and Hemingway. In this novel—as its author acknowledges—there is much of authors like Coetzee and Hesse , and also of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . Even of his fellow countryman Delibes, "albeit as a reaction, because Delibes was very much a mythologizer of the rural."

The fact that alcohol appears as a link in the plot establishes it as the element that links rural loneliness, the protagonist's personal frustration, and the bohemianism of the budding writer. "Alcohol," Gómez Vaquero confesses, "was very common in the 1980s and 1990s. And it was even considered acceptable for children to start drinking early . There were wine-based medicines for children! I think I was four years old when I was given my first glass of wine and soda. So, alcohol becomes a close way of equating oneself with the myth of the bohemian writer, even in a remote village."

Alcoholic inclinations aside, the author paints a simultaneously joyful and hopeless picture of the transition from youth to maturity. This is supported by the idea that what's truly important is taking advantage of the "profound moments" that arise throughout a lifetime. Because life, as Gómez Vaquero emphasizes, "is a real bitch, pardon the pun. When you're young, you have the energy, the time, a ton of opportunities... but you don't have the experience. And when you do gain experience, you tend to lack the time, the opportunities, and, above all, the energy." Hence, in his opinion, "the importance of developing, amending Unamuno, a certain comic sense of life. Because the tragic comes as standard."