Gloria bar opens its doors in Ahotsenea

Euskaraz irakurri: Gloria taberna, Ahotsenean zabalik

They were missing the sawdust spread on the floor; the stuffed head of an ox “in which all life’s brilliance had dimmed”; the dense smoke of the cigarettes; the sweet and sticky smell of patxaran and vermouth; and the characters Migel, Ana and Rakel were also missing, as well as their conversations and the muffled words between them, but the writer and bertsolari Nerea Ibarzabal (Markina-Xemein, 1994) has opened to the public this afternoon in the Ahotsenea space of the Durangoko Azoka one of the numerous doors of his Glory Bar.

The writer has presented before a packed audience Glory Bara work that weaves wonderful images in the mind of the reader and the reader (it would be said that they seem to have been taken with Ana’s Super 8 camera) and immerses them in fabulous environments, through prose basted by clear, brilliant language, flexible, brave and creative.

Ibarzabal marked from the beginning, from the first paragraph (“it was the first thing I wrote”, he acknowledged), that gray atmosphere that permeates the entire novel, framed “in any industrial town in the Basque Country of the 1970s and 1980s” . This is how he explained it this afternoon to the writer and journalist Iñigo Astiz: “That tone appeared from the beginning, and my obsession or my fear has been that the reader shared my vision of what I look at.”

Nerea Ibarzabal, during the presentation in Ahotsenea

The book, which in the words of Astiz is defined more by how it tells what it tells than by its plot, is divided into scenes, into twenty-seven chapters, since, as Ibarzabal explains, “life itself is closer to being a concatenation of scenes that of being something that happened on a D-day and its consequences”.

For Nerea Ibarzabal it has been “a very nice process” to write the first book that she signed alone (she had already published other works as a member of the Txakur Gorria collective), and she said so at the end of the presentation: “I have learned a lot. She has It’s been a very strong obsession, but it’s been good,”

It seems that the public has also welcomed the effort: the people of Sousse have told us that Glory Bar It is selling very well both in bookstores (there is a world beyond Durango) and in the booth of the Durangoko Azoka. Wherever they are, Ana, Rakel and Migel will be celebrating with a glass of vermouth, gin and tonic or green cow.