Cuban scientist Eduardo López-Collazo (Jovellanos, July 3, 1969) has just published "Narcisos," a fiction novel set in Madrid, a city where he has lived and worked for thirty years, but which also holds many elements of Cuba, the country where he was born and has never returned to. "It is a personal reckoning," he says in an interview granted this Thursday to CiberCuba.
He has not returned to Cuba. Initially, it was because he was reluctant to meet so many requirements. Later, it was because he became the target of personal attacks on NTV, during the Covid crisis and after an interview published in CiberCuba. "I haven't done anything. Why am I being punished this way?" he laments, referring to the attacks he has received from the press aligned with the Communist Party.
Published by Editorial Huso, "Narcisos" tells the story of a psychoanalyst who studies the "broken and complex" lives of eight men who come to her consultation. One of them, Oliverio, is the alter ego of Eduardo López-Collazo, the author reveals.
The novel, already on sale at Amazon, temporarily sold out before its official presentation in Seville, Barcelona, and Madrid, on dates that are not yet finalized because the book went on sale this April 1st and has already exceeded expectations. In fact, the Cuban filmmaker Carlos Lechuga, who interviewed López-Collazo for El Estornudo, complimented him by saying that he didn’t know he wrote so well.
The fact is that Eduardo López-Collazo is more than a nuclear physicist who critiques dance and writes articles for the Spanish press. He is now making his debut as a fiction writer after spending ten years (two years longer than planned, due to the Covid crisis) heading the medical direction of the IdiPaz Institute in Madrid, the largest scientific research center in Spain, to which he is still connected today as a researcher and in other capacities.
His novel "Narcisos" revolves around the narcissism of eight men who seek psychological help to confront their fears, failures, unfulfilled dreams, accumulated psychological mistreatment, and relationship breakups. However, it also contains glimpses of the discouragement with which López-Collazo views the future for Cuba, a country that has been suffering for years without deserving the attention of the West, he comments to CiberCuba.
While waiting to see how the sales of "Narcisos" go, López-Collazo is already working on a sequel to this novel, which is actually the fourth book he has published. The previous ones were dedicated to cancer and HIV. In fact, "What is Cancer?" was included in 2019 in a list published by the Spanish newspaper El País, of the ten books on dire topics that are pleasurable to read.
This novel, the author adds, is also a reflection of Cuban narcissism, which has made us believe that we were born on an island that is the center of the world. "Oh.. isn't it?" jokes the scientist.
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