The father pirated books and now the son writes a novel: we talk to Johann Page, author of “Pages from the End of the World”

There are books that open new neighborhoods for fiction, stories that we did not have mapped in our literary tradition. An example: we have always thought of the Bamba editor, of the pirate printer, as a criminal. However, the renowned storyteller John Page, in his first novel, presents us with a moving, terrible and funny scene at the same time: a pirate publisher, father of the protagonist, stands in line excitedly, with an illegal book by Vargas Llosa in hand, waiting for the Nobel Prize to sign it. . A purpose that (excuse the spoiler) will not be achieved. There is no place in official culture for him.

“Pages from the end of the world” is not a vindication of editorial piracy, obviously. But it is a novel that helps us understand what is behind these characters so demonized in the media. In its pages there are people, neighborhoods and printing presses that are invisible to the world of formality and that, however, remain in a permanent fight for survival, contributing in their own way to the reading education of the population.

For Page, one of the most important challenges when constructing this fiction had to do with generating this precarious but very rich universe: that of the reviled printing presses located in the Ica neighborhood, in the Center of Lima. It is an urban landscape that he knows well from the work of his own father. Indeed, since childhood, this narrator and editor has been impregnated with the smells of glue and turpentine, the noise of machines, the images of sheets of paper, reels and edgers. “All of this tells us about a time that disappeared but that left deep marks on many people. Those scraps of paper weave the memory“, it states.

From the privileged position of someone who recognizes himself as the son of a pirate publisher, Page shows us in his novel the conflicts and contrasts between two worlds: that of an official publishing industry, supported by the cultural system, and that of a veteran left-wing printer. who has had to fight against that system all his life.

Marcelo, the protagonist, is a wealthy editor in a position that took him great efforts to achieve, but whose behaviors are reminiscent of his complex father, who disappeared in the story being told. Thus, the novel leads us to reflect on how destined we children are to repeat the mistakes of our parents. Or, at least, how much we tend to reflect on them when we discover their mysteries. For this, the author uses a versatile narrator who plays with time moving back and forth, allowing the past to explain the present and vice versa. “One cannot be explained without the other. Putting them together allows you to realize truths that, sometimes, are very veiled,” says the author.

“I think I still judge my father until now, but today I understand him more”, confesses Page. “Perhaps literature serves to be able to judge others with feeling. In the novel, the son manages to understand the shortcomings of his father, and discovers that porosity in a body that he previously considered intact. That ends up making it grow. “Growing up is realizing that your heroes are made of straw.”says.

Love of paper

“The dusty and aged papers were the ruins of what our civilization once was. Pages now without writing, thrown into the abyss without readers or time”, writes Page in a book that suggests a deep love for paper and for the time when this invention did not have the competition of digital gadgets. Thus, “Pages of the End of the World” is a highly analogical and permanent book: it offers us memories of his childhood in the 80s and his youth in the 90s, but the story could still work in any decade in which it predominates. printers the smell of ink and the use of photoliths.

“We are losing the sacrosanct essence of ink on paper and everything that entails. In the act of placing ink on paper there is a ceremony, private, intimate and personal. This transmission of ink on paper to people is irreplaceable”, notes the author. “Umberto Eco said that the book is a perfect artifact. And it is: more than 500 years have passed since it was invented and about 200 since it was industrialized, but nothing has changed about it. And nothing would have to change. That apocalyptic threat of the digital, which about 10 years ago threatened the end of the printed book, was a lie. He is now more alive than ever,” Page states.