BARCELONA – Mexican writer Jordi Soler again digs through weeds to find his family roots in his latest novel “La Fiesta del Oso” (The Republican Tale), in which, between reality and fiction, he tries to follow through Spain’s Pyrenees mountains the trail of his great-uncle Oriol, who went missing in February 1939 in the midst of the Spanish Civil War.

In an interview with Efe, the novelist of Catalan ancestry and grandson of an exiled generation who has lived in Barcelona for more than 10 years, said that when he started out as a writer he never considered taking on three consecutive novels as he did with “Los Rojos de Ultramar” (The Reds Overseas), “La Ultima Hora del Dia” (The Last Hour of the Last Day) and this one relating the experiences of his family in the Mexican jungles of Veracruz and in the Pyrenees.

Nonetheless, he said, “subjects come up and I end up working out a novel and then I start writing. I write more by compass than by map.”

Published by Mondadori, “‘La Fiesta del Oso’ helps me understand my surroundings and myself,” Soler said.

The book cover is a sepia photo dated 1937 from the Aragon front showing his grandfather Arcadi (leading character of “Los Rojos de Ultramar”), his great-grandfather and his great-uncle Oriol, around whom this novel revolves, a man missing a leg who disappeared in 1939 and whom Soler, thanks to his investigations, tracked down in the mountains.

“Look at Oriol,” he said, “as a metaphor of the Republic. Of a Spain that was lost and crippled. But he is more than a metaphor, because he is his own person from head to toe and represents himself.”

About the role of the narrator in the novel who tells the story in the present tense, he said that he’s very similar to himself, but that he had to exaggerate him “because he is someone,” he said, “enthusiastic about the cause who suddenly finds a stain in his family tree. Without the tension I wouldn’t have been able to get to the end,” he said.

Together with this character, whose development the reader will follow, a gallery of secondary characters also appears, led by the giant November, a woodland witch and a nauseating female tramp.

About the giant, Soler said that he is “the childish part of the novel. He’s my childish whim, because I would have loved to have one,” he said, “that would defend me, to walk in his shadow.”

Another of the characters is the Pyrenees mountain range itself, “a magical land that interests me so much and where I go every year with my cousin to pick mushrooms.”

He also said that in the little town of Lamanere, also mentioned in the book, “there is a cemetery with very few graves, but a large percentage of them bear the name Soler. I have a feeling that we come from there.”

Always concerned about the “tempo” of his stories, he offers readers of “La Fiesta del Oso” in the second half of the book “a torrential part,” as it is described by his friend and fellow-writer Sergi Pamies, the first person he lets read his texts.

He also explained that next year the production company Contraluz Films will start shooting “Los Rojos de Ultramar,” adding that he is only providing the story and that others will do the scriptwriting. “They’ll tell it the way it has to be told, because the processes are different. And authors always end up getting in the way of directors and scriptwriters,” he said. EFE