10 green questions for… Purificació Mascarell
This week in Espores we interview Purificación Mascarell, professor of Literary Theory at the University of Valencia, literary critic and writer. The written word permeates the world of this writer from Seville, who has already left her mark on Valencian literature with ‘Centro comercial El Olvido’, winner of the Enric Lluch Narrative Prize, and ‘Mireia’, winner of the Lletraferit Novel Prize. Purificación lets us get closer to the landscapes that make up her world and confirms that combining reading and nature is always an excellent choice
What is your first memory of nature?
high branches) by my father. The olive and almond trees, always bearing fruit that we ate with passion: crushing and marinating olives with my older brothers, boiling and peeling almonds with my mother. The smell of the carobs falling to the ground and the taste of the grapes on the vine at the beginning of autumn. And the beautiful lilies that were born only once a year in the soil square. Memories merge with the present, because we still preserve and care for the Hortet.
A landscape that could inspire your next book…
The deep green solitude of the Tinença de Benifassà. Ideal for a mystery story with few characters and a lot of environmental tension.
Confess your unsustainable sin
The air conditioning on full blast. And in Xàtiva, in summer, most days we have it on for more hours than off… To compensate, I haven’t been taking planes for a long time now and I always try to buy clothes made in an ecological and local manner.
Choose your power if you were an environmental superhero
I will say three: purify polluted air, get rid of plastic waste from all the water on the planet and regenerate forests.
Your unspeakable phobia when you go to the countryside
A snake!
A garden where to get lost
I really liked the Botanical Garden of Ayuda in Lisbon. I did a research stay in the Portuguese capital and used to go to the garden a lot to read and walk around. The area with the tropical trees was particularly impressive and you forgot where you really were: it looked like the Congo, or what in my European imagination might be the Congo.
3 things you would take to a botanical garden
Well, a book, of course! Any book from the Elba publishing house, which has some great ones on gardens. Something sweet for a snack, maybe some good sweet potato cakes. And finally, time, time not to rush and to enjoy the afternoon slowly.
Do you think giving flowers or plants is out of fashion?
This will never go out of fashion. I especially like to give plants as presents. I gave my mother a beautiful jasmine for her balcony at the Xàtiva Fair last August.
Do you have any films or books that have had an impact on you where nature is the protagonist?
As a film, I would say the palm trees in Apocalypse Now, which are meant to represent the landscapes of Vietnam, but are actually from the Philippines, where Coppola shot the film. That exuberant, jungle-like nature, that inhospitable river, full of dangers, configures a natural world that expels the yankees, that can overcome them, that overcomes them. Che Guevara used to say: ‘Create two, three… many Vietnams, that’s the slogan’.
As a book, I choose Soledad, by Víctor Català (Caterina Albert), where the mountain is as much a protagonist as Mila, the young woman who settles there with her husband to act as a hermit.
Climate change has already knocked on the door, are we late?
Nature’s capacity for regeneration is great. Remember when we stopped for three months because of the pandemic and, in that time alone, pollution levels dropped dramatically and the planet became fluffy. If we go extinct tomorrow, planet Earth, fauna and flora, have millennia of bliss without us: climate change would not progress. But with us around, I see it as very complicated. We are the most destructive of all the species that have ever populated the earth.
