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The figure of Julius Caesar has been shaped by different creators throughout history. From classical sources, through Shakespeare, to Hollywood cinema or the Australian writer Colleen McCullough ―author of books like Caesar’s Women or Caesar’s Horse―. So when the writer Santiago Posteguillo (Valencia, 56 years old) considered undertaking the project of telling the life of the Roman dictator, he asked himself a question: “What can I contribute?” The writer, a reference in Spanish for the historical novel, posted last year rome it’s me the first of the six installments in which this company curdled. The answer to the initial question and many others about the book was offered at the March meeting of the EL PAÍS Reading Club, which took place at the Fnac in Valencia.
“I have always wanted to write about Julius Caesar because he is a character that I have liked since I read Asterix and Obelix”Posteguillo shared. Rome is me It focuses on the youth of the ruler and is based on the first trial that César faced as a lawyer at just 23 years of age. This fact was little known and it was also an important process in Cesar’s life. Posteguillo thus fulfilled the premise of contributing something new to what has been narrated so far.
The novel transports the reader to that trial, but “so as not to bore him”, it jumps in time and introduces other relevant moments both for the construction of the lawsuit and for understanding the time and how the character of Julius Caesar was shaped. It is a combination of the suspensions and the relationship, one of the anticipation of the successes of the posters and the script, conferring it to the novel and reading the cinematography. The author recognized that, as a movie lover, something that he consciously seeks and that he uses to gain dynamism. In addition, he revealed that he is also inspired by the cinema to build the battles, in which he takes the point of view of different characters to describe the action, imitating the reverse shot of the cameras.
As a professor of English literature that Posteguillo is, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar hovered over his work. However, the author distanced his work from that “destroying” referent, listing several reasons, but mainly one: “The Renaissance public has different desires than most of today’s readers; the 21st century reader seeks historical rigor and Shakespeare doesn’t care about that because the public was not asking for that”.
The structure, the narrative rhythm of Posteguillo and his rigor are also positioned as a singularity of this Julio César who can be accused of being somewhat Manichaean. However, the author defended himself by recalling that we are facing the first years of the character’s life: “Usually when we are young we see everything in black and white and we have ideals that we consider very clear; I’m not saying that we all lose our ideals, but I think that with life experience you realize that many things are grey”. The author advanced that in the same way the behavior of the character will be molded in successive novels, where we will see “the havoc” that seniority exerts on his naivete.
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