While Santi Leoné speaks at the Café Ventana of Xabier Street of the Head of City, he has on the table a book by Peter Handke in the German edition. Once the interview is over, it takes us to the nearby TBO comics store to do a photo shoot in which the two worlds of this Pamplona writer, high literature and pop culture, intersect easily, both in the stories he writes and when he speaks.

In the field of fiction, this is your first book, but you're not new to the world of letters. Why so long before we publish these stories?

One of my customs is always late to everything. I've been intending to write fiction for a long time, but sometimes I haven't had time, sometimes I haven't felt like it, and sometimes I haven't felt like it. Before I started the pandemic, I took six months out of work with the intention of writing, and then things went wrong and I couldn't write. The intention was there. Little by little, I began to write down the ideas I had long ago and others that have later emerged. Iduri doesn't, but it's a big step to get in a moment and say, "I start writing." I find it very difficult to take the first step, so it has been so long. It happens to me all things, I have some classic movies there, I have to see them, I have to see them -- and even say, "Today I'm going to see" I don't know how many years can pass. With this in mind: thirteen years have passed since I published the last essay [Euskal Herria in the travel books of the 19th century, Alberdania]. But in the meantime I have written other things, I have done some translations... And at one point I decided I had to take some things out of the inside.

I've noticed stories of two trends: metalworkers, on the one hand, and those more focused on interpersonal relationships, perhaps of a realistic or more crude tone, on the other.

Metalworkers are older than others, and in them often the subject is the desire and the impossibility of being a writer. Several characters try to become writers, but they always fail. Or, in the case of Gorka Goenaga, the astronaut God the protagonist of the story, gets it, writes a prolific work, but, well, the story explains the reasons behind it. In other stories, yes, the tone is more realistic the same, although in Liztor mutants, although the story is realistic in itself, we see in the story the occurrences of the narrator, and there are quite crazy occurrences, but -- well, special. With a couple of stories from the book, I did experiments: I changed the name and read with my students, to see what they did. Just with Liztor mutants I did this and the answers were: "This is a paranon," or "What is this?" as

And that's why you liked the result.

[Laughs] Yes. And, well, those two blocks are there, but there are some issues that bring both groups together, like the frustration or the fact that most of the time they're characters out of place. I have another story now semi-written. This is an exclusive, a scoop [laughs]: you know that in Euskal Herria he has traveled a guy named Joseba, who has deceived people to get money, using the Basque. Something similar happened to me, but he came to me with a Japanese saying he had lost his bags to leave money please. I left the money, of course. So, in that story that I'm half-finished, that happens: you start counting Josebarena, and the narrator always talks on Twitter, on Facebook, on all the sites. "The same thing happened to me, but with a Japanese." Then Joseba's victims will arrange a big dinner in a sports club and put the sushi and the sack for the storyteller, but in the locker room. Suddenly, when you're just eating sushi, you'll hear the asots, suddenly the silence and then the grandparents and the nipples. And he suspects they're doing an orgy. And she alone eating sushi. This anecdote seems to me to indicate what the situation of my characters in the world is, and I sometimes see myself as well. They're not in the group, but at the same time, they have something like this. They're not outside the group, but they're not outside the group either: they're a little marginal.

In these stories the reader will also find references of pop culture – comics, science-fiction – and high culture. There is a balance or mixture between the two.

I like movies from the B series in the movies. The complicity required of the viewer in such films. If you're going to see a slasher or zombie movie, you know what the rules are. Then you'll see if the authors have respected them, they've broken them, how far they've broken them, what ... Often what I like about the bad movies in the Z series is that. The author says: "You have to watch a bad movie, but it's a movie we like." Then the viewer doesn't accept anything, but I like that complicity.

Share code?

Yeah, that's it. And also the high culture, so yes, I am interested in things, for pure aesthetic pleasure. With some books, I have the same tone. Now some friends are going to read Hermann Broch's Virgil's death and how that book begins, the first sentence, how it rhymes the narrative, that seems tremendous to me. But at the same time, and that's related to popular culture, I really like seam texts. I love Borges: her works are often intellectual. You used the word balance, but I would say that it is an excess or bulimia. For example, if I spoke to my wife, I would tell her that we're no longer at home. And there are things and things that I will never read. Sometimes I see and I usually say something in the bookstore: "Well, I'm not interested in this."

There are also cult texts that, despite being fundamental to a community, have been half-forgotten. Are you worried about this?

Fame is usually quite unfair. Some get a lot of fame and everybody likes their work, all their books. And others don't succeed that much, and they stay a little bit out. I like these semi-secret or marginal texts. Sometimes, when I see that those books I don't know how many copies they've sold, I think: "If you've sold so much, I don't need to buy it." Instead, I like the pearls that are buried. Recently, and forgive me for saying, in a collaboration for Euskalerria Irratia, I talked about a writer named Elizabeth Taylor. I found out he's an English writer, and I thought he had to spend his whole life in the shadow of actress Elizabeth Taylor. To search for information about Google you have to put "Elizabeth Taylor writer", it's not enough just to name it, but the actor takes the whole place. I mean, you need a key to get to it.

In his presentation he commented that in some cases he departed from real facts of his life. But it is also a book that clearly bets on fiction, does not belong to the realm of the "literature of the self" that has been fashionable in recent years.

Yes, in one of the stories, one of the characters says that everything is more boring without literature. I'm not very interested in day-to-day telling, because I live day-to-day. I think literature should serve something else. I too take part in the things that have actually happened and that is OK, but then you have to do something else. For example, in the movies that I like, in horror movies, sometimes they try in the movie, instead of making an interesting, good, attractive narrative, to address important issues: bullying, racism, classism or homophobia. Well, yes, they're important issues, but maybe they've been mistreated, or maybe storytelling is boring, or it's not interesting or credible. "But this is a milestone, because no one has dealt with this issue now," they say. I think we have a certain obsession with the issue today.

The last story attracts attention: bullying, child cruelty... but besides the theme, how you told it: the other way around.

It is related to a personal experience, from there it emerged. Let the end be as it is due to the editor, I am terribly bad at ordering stories, and that was Leire's proposal [López Ziluaga, editor of Susa]. And I think he was right. It's written from behind and maybe some reader thinks that little by little you're discovering why they bullying you. But then there is no reason, sometimes things are like this, because children are cruel or because some become victims easily, without other reasons.

The irony that you have so much of yours also appears often in these stories. Can this time when "important issues" should be addressed not be the most appropriate for irony?

No, I think not, and what is the issue, much less. But it's not -- yes, it's something I do voluntarily, but it comes to me by itself. I have a tendency to that tone and that, not in stories, but in some of my articles it has brought me problems. It does not tell me about the criticisms I have made. Sometimes irony can be dangerous because it's not understood well or because some people literally understand it. Maybe they're not the best times, but what are we going to do?

How does this view our cultural landscape?

There are always intangible themes or intangible people according to the time. It has happened to me that I touched both and that has brought me some conflicts. Suddenly, some of us believed, and we said so, that Kirmen Uribe was untouchable. And then I've been around with that and I think I was wrong -- or we were -- Uribe had to listen to some criticisms and some pretty tough ones. It is true that it is sponsored and I do not understand those reports that ETB does to you: "This is the table he uses in New York," the Basque literary world. But it's not untouchable. But today there are issues, there are people who have achieved that status and you have to be careful. I do not like to blame social networks for all things, but sometimes the debates generated on social networks do not help, because you criticize a concrete action or a certain opinion and there are those who understand – or want to understand – right away that they are against the whole movement, be it abertzale, be it feminism, or be it the Basque... And, well, I don't agree with that person at that point and I want to express it, but it's hard to tell who that person is and what the subject is. And if you use irony, it's over.