Duende - Federico Garcia Lorca and Me :)

I'm totally new to blogging but am far from new to writing which I love as much as life itself. I think I set this blog up a year ago but totally forgot about it as I was in the middle of writing a novel called Duende - now finished.

It's a book inspired by a surreal 5 days in Madrid where I spent each day wandering around the Plaza del Angel, the Puerta del Sol, the Plaza de Santa Ana, not knowing why I'd ended up in a nightmare not completely of my own making. A Cuban guy I thought I'd fallen in love with did a spectacular disappearing act, leaving me confused, disorientated and reliant on my basic grasp of Italian, a pocket Spanish dictionary and a lot of gestures in order to survive. On my final day, I bumped into a statue of Lorca in front of the Teatro Espanol and realised he'd been my neighbour all along. He was standing a minute away from my hotel but because of the space I'd been in, I hadn't even noticed. At the time, and looking back, it was an amazing thing to happen during what has to be the most surreal experience in my life (and I've had quite a lot of these :)

A week after I got back, work started on excavating Lorca's body from a site in Grenada which eyewitnesses (now dead) claimed to have been his burial place after he was shot by Franco's Fascist supporters. This was the trigger for my novel and 6 weeks later, by which time my own writing was well underway, archaeologists announced they'd found no evidence of human bones or any signs of a mass grave. Newspaper reports referred to Spain's attempt to lay some of its ghosts to rest but the failure to find Lorca's body leaves another ghost without a resting place.

Ghosts are a fairly significant image and idea throughout Duende in which Lorca appears as a character. At first, I thought I couldn't possibly include him as it would be too ridiculous but then, given my main characters are an artist and philosopher living in Madrid 1918-1936, it became ridiculous to do otherwise. Salvador Dali's in there, too, but far less significant. A beautiful Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset, also makes his way into the story.

It's a beautiful and sad story about two men, totally in love with each other at a time when being homosexual wasn't something you could be open about. It's a love story but the time in which it's set makes it much much more than that. All the brutal events leading up to the Spanish Civil War create the landscape in which the characters live and breathe and, ultimately, die.

If you feel like having a read of the chapters as and when I post them, your feedback would be immensely appreciated. If you want to drop me a note to say you'd be interested, that's be great too :)