Says Jesus Carrasco in the interview provided by Seix Barral that “I could dedicate a dozen books to his hands.” At the moment she is wearing one, Praise of the hands, with which he has just won the 2024 Brief Library Award endowed with 30,000 euros. “Without hands there would be no writing, no bison in Altamira, no crafts, no work force, no proletariat, no capitalism, no industrial revolution or discovery of America.”

“Without hands there would be no writing, no bison in Altamira, no capitalism, no industrial revolution or discovery of America”

And without hands this story would not exist either, with which it has prevailed over 771 other authors “for its originality as a parable about the importance of manual work as the ultimate origin of art, and for the richness of a prose as precise as it is full of emotion“.

The jury, which also included last year’s winner, Rosario Villajoshas highlighted that it is “a healing and luminous novel which narrates the process of restoring a house in the countryside that ends up redeeming the family that occupies it.

About ‘Praise of the Hands’

Praise of the hands It is more than a novel about hands. It is a celebration of life and how it is built through small everyday experiences. A life that, as we will discover throughout 320 pages, fits in a house. Friends, family, neighbors, animals… Also fear. Everything fits in a house.

Carrasco places us in 2011. The narrator of the novel, along with his family, arrives by chance to a house in ruins in a small town in the south of Spain. The owner, who wanted to set up modern apartments that were never built, allows them to take care of it while he seeks financing to relaunch the project. For years, the protagonists They will repair it with their own handstransforming it into a cozy meeting place.

“There are no explosions, no esoteric mysteries, no shootings. There are people who cook, who clean the bathroom, who trim the vine”

“There are no explosions, no esoteric mysteries, no shootings. There are people who cook, who clean the bathroom, who trim the grapevine, who play Parcheesi, who read. Those kinds of things that happen to everyone every day” , points out the author, who hides a whole series of reflections behind a simple argument. One of them, that of feeling comfortable with the possibility of finitude. “The house has its own history. To begin with, it is not our property, although we have lived in it. From the first day we know that they are going to demolish it so all those small daily experiences are conditioned by the fact that they will not be projected towards the future. The house will fall just as life ends. Without further ado.”

A house author

If last year the publisher Six Barral rewarded – and added to its catalog – one of the most promising Spanish storytellers, Rosario Villajos, author of Physical educationon this occasion the award goes to an author from the house.

Jesús Carrasco burst onto the literary scene in 2013 with Outdoora multi-award-winning novel that director Benito Zambrano brought to the big screen in 2019. Then they came, also in Seix Barral, The land we walk on (2016), Take me Home (2021), and, with the latter, a confession: “I felt self-imposed pressure, a weight on my writing that didn’t let me breathe,” he told us in this interview.

“Transcendent is realizing that you are unable to measure the love for your children”

With his fourth novel, “the most personal”, he confesses, he returns to bookstores on 6th of March. And he will do it with a book that also defends the enjoyment of the fleeting, slowness and failure in life. “Transcendent is realizing that you are unable to measure the love for your children, For example. “That can happen before going to bed, while you’re eating yogurt in the empty kitchen.”