Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince (Medellín, 1958) has warned of the difficulty that the model of audiovisual content platforms entails for the sustainability of independent cinema and has assured that if this formula were exported to literature, writers would not have “how survive”. “Unfortunately platforms, being by subscription, make it very difficult for independent cinema to be sustainable”, the author pointed out in an interview with Europa Press on the occasion of his visit to Valladolid, where this Friday he presented Librería Oletvm his latest novel, ‘Except for my heart, everything is fine’ (Alfaguara). “If there were, as some have claimed, a Netflix of books where you pay fixed money per month, low, and you can download the books that If you wanted to, we writers would no longer have a way to survive”, stressed the author, who explained that this is precisely what is happening with audiobooks “on certain download platforms”. Free for payment of a fee. “We, who naively sold our books for $300, well, we sold them almost in perpetuity, for a pittance, regardless of whether one person, 10,000 people or 100,000 people listen to it,” he lamented. The new novel by Abad Faciolince, who reached international fame for ‘El olvido que seremos’ (2006), is starring precisely a priest who loves auteur and independent cinema, a character based on a real person close to the writer who, although he did not get to know the current platform model and the debate on the future of cinema, he was “in love with the special situation that occurs in a theater.” In the face of the new platform model imposed by the “crisis” that the theater sector was already feeling “even before the pandemic”, but which was aggravated by covid, the Colombian novelist has criticized that many times these companies “do not respect the cinema that creators want to make”, but rather have “formulas and prejudices” that “do not allow the free development of the personality of the creator”. “It is a very delicate moment, we must find formulas so that creators can continue creating and not everything is left in the hands of people who are not filmmakers, but marketing specialists, who think they know what is what people want to see, not even by themselves, but by algorithms”, he stressed, after which he defended that “the beauty of many books and movies is that the writer and director do things that a marketing specialist he didn’t know that people did want to see or read.” A novel by “good and heartfelt priests” Thus, he has ruled that his publishing house, Alfaguara, would never have accepted a project for a novel “by good and heartfelt priests” such as ‘Salvo my heart, everything is fine’ –title taken from the last verse of ‘Sonnet with a caveat’, by the 20th-century Colombian poet Eduardo Carranza– of having been a “marketing specialist” and not an editor, something that, she is sure, It would have happened to him too, due to his characteristics. cas, to Umberto Eco’s classic ‘The Name of the Rose’.Through fiction rich in reality and real characters, Héctor Abad Faciolince pays homage to Luis Alberto Álvarez, better known to his friends as ‘El Gordo’, who in the novel becomes Luis Córdoba, a priest with heart problems who settles down to live with a recently separated woman and her two children, who are joined by a maid and her daughter, which gives rise to a curious family that serves the author to raise, in the 360 pages of the work, a plea for the tolerance of family models. ‘El Gordo’ is not the only “good priest” who sneaks into the novel, well supported by two priests of abundant human quality such as his faithful Aurelio Sánchez ‘Lelo’ and Carlos Alberto Calderón, to whose work and dedication to others at a delicate moment in the history of Medellín and Colombia this book serves as a tribute. “It’s a novel against the current,” Abad Faciolince joked about the tendency to reflect in current fiction that “all priests are bad”, while defending that he sought to explore the complexity of his characters without falling “into a story of Against this, in the novel he appears, exchanging his name for the appellation of ‘the unmentionable’, the one who was Cardinal Archbishop of Medellín Alfonso López Trujillo, whom Abad Faciolince considers “the most disastrous facet of the Church” and whose behavior he sees as more typical of someone “an ally of evil” who does not act “as a Christian.” Although he acknowledges that he is not a believer, the Colombian writer has adopted the point of view of someone with faith “loyal to his thought” to give coherence to his story, for which he has based on his Catholic training and the Catholic environment that he breathed in his home mainly from his mother, Cecilia Faciolince, to whom he has dedicated the novel. Precisely the decline of Catholicism in Latin America against the push of evangelical churches is the subject of debate in the novel between Lelo and another of the book’s key characters, Joaquín, a sort of alter ego of the author. “Almost nostalgia” for the Catholic Church “Seeing the behavior and the right-wing extremist ideology of the evangelicals, I who am not a believer have felt almost nostalgic for the reformed Catholic Church, which is now the one persecuted in an authoritarian regime and very close to the evangelical churches such as that of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua”, has warned the author, who has also emphasized the link between these groups with options such as that of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or the ‘No’ to the peace referendum in Colombia. “In an issue that was peace or war, they insisted that voting for the ‘Yes’ was to support gender ideology and the indoctrination of adolescents to become homosexual, as if homosexuality were something that is taught or inculcated”, criticized Abad Faciolince, who recalled that this They coincide with the ideas that the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, defends about the family, whom Bolsonaro visited “just after the invasion of Ukraine had just begun.” During the writing of this novel, Héctor Abad himself had heart problems that conditioned the process of writing and made him deepen his knowledge of this organ, both to nurture himself for writing, and to know what he was facing, since he declares himself to be “a masochistic patient who needs to know all the risks he runs.” ‘Except my heart , todo está bien’ is the first novel published after the film adaptation of ‘El olvido que seremos’ by Fernando Trueba, a notoriety that has not conditioned him when writing, since he already considers himself a “very insecure” writer. “More than writing books, I abandon them. Since I wrote ‘El olvido que seremos’ I have aborted three projects, a novel that was almost finished and two half-written”, luck that the latter could have also suffered if it had not been, in part, for the encouragement of David and Fernando Trueba, the latter who personally knew Luis Alberto Álvarez and whom he defined as the Colombian André Bazin for his contribution to film criticism. Part of this novel was written in the house that Gabriel García Márquez lived in Mexico City and whose ghost, he jokes , accompanied him in the process, in line with which he has recognized that the shadow of the distinguished writer did “overshadow” notable writers from his country who were contemporaries of the author of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, to the point that many “even tried kill the father unsuccessfully”, although his generation has not suffered from that situation, arriving at a time when they see him “with the serenity that is given to a classic”.