Malaga filmmaker Ignacio Nacho makes his novel debut: "I had fun imagining the reader's puzzled face"

He's a precocious type. He appears in the record books as the youngest director in the world to lead a theater company, at the age of 16. He also ventured into cinema early, directing his first feature film at just 24 years old. Though it may seem like it, we're not talking about Orson Welles, but another pioneer, Ignacio Nacho (Málaga 1972), who, to break away from his reputation as a prodigious talent, has come late to novel writing. The filmmaker, playwright, and actor has just published 'Cósmicos' (Allanamiento de Mirada Publishing), a story in which his unique style, marked by absurdity and humor, is evident. He uses another adjective, "delirium," which he repeats several times in his conversation with SUR, where he confesses that he has committed to writing like never before and that in this process he has "enjoyed imagining the reader's bewildered and astonished face." This Friday, he will have the opportunity to see those reactions firsthand at the presentation of his literary debut at El Tercer Piso (7 PM).

The Book and the Presentation

• Title: 'Cósmicos'

• Author: Ignacio Nacho

• Publisher: Allanamiento de Mirada, 2025, 248 pages

• Presentation: Friday, May 23, at 7 PM, at El Tercer Piso of the Prometeo bookstore, with the presence of the author, Héctor Márquez, and the editor Paco Espínola

To set the tone of this surreal fable, here's the plot: "This is the story of Tropezón (named after the mistake her conception was). A girl raised in the bosom of a 'perfectly dysfunctional' family, who barely survives along with her parents and her twenty-two male siblings in a disturbing town called Nada (the name clearly reflects the virtues of the place)." Twin brothers named Davidson and Harley; another who played music so badly they named him Cansautor or the neighbors Fulano and Mengano populate this hilarious novel that had been circling Ignacio Nacho's mind ever since he saw a news story about a woman who had been painting a baseball for years, which, layer by layer, had turned into a large ball.

"It caught my attention that such an apparently futile action, repeated ad nauseam, had turned its author into a relevant character in the area, and I thought it could be the epicenter of a story, although it just stayed there, in my head," shares Ignacio Nacho, who in the meantime has written and directed movies ('El intercambio' and 'Isósceles') and series ('SOS Estudiantes'), was a professor of acting at the Center for Cinematographic Studies of Catalonia and won the Carmen Award for best supporting Andalusian actor ('La mancha negra'), until another fortuitous event crossed the path of his pending novel. His wife, Macarena, gifted him a notebook while they were on vacation, and almost instinctively, he began taking notes until he realized he had already outlined the novel there.

"So many years thinking about it, but I had never really decided to start because I was lazy about a project that required so much time dedication compared to the fascinating staging of a theater play or a film project," confesses the also director of experimental films like 'Júpiter' and 'Poliedro', who with the same humor of the novel adds that this late debut is "a result of age, I no longer feel like socializing as much." "As if I had locked myself in a prison, I spent six months writing wildly as if the story had matured inside me and burst out without me realizing it," claims Nacho, who, however, points out that his 'cell' was five-star because he wrote on the terrace of his house.

Out of Boredom, Rather Than Vice

"Truth be told, it has been less stressful and less crowded than a movie and, not being enslaved by the budget, I wanted to work from total freedom and delirium, so I imposed on myself not to be restrained or politically correct no matter how irreverent or absurd," acknowledges the debut novelist who has let himself go with the fantasy and humor already present in his film work, though with a very personal touch by creating from scratch the symbolic territory called Nada, a world where there is little to do, which causes the population to multiply quickly, but not because sexual relations are "out of vice, but out of boredom."

The reader thus follows the protagonist, Tropezón, who discovers with disbelief her own large and unwanted family with a tone of zany and fun comedy that not only captivates through its plot, but through wordplay and its (de)construction of literature. "I belong to the old school of comedians who think that if a gag fails, throw another because one has to stick, so if I put three jokes per page and there are 250 pages, then if 50 work, it can be considered a funny novel," he summarizes with the same humor, whose novel is hard to flip through without a smile or a laugh.

Behind this purpose to entertain, there is also a message of "hope," admits Ignacio Nacho, who upon rereading his own novel later discovered "jokes that I had forgotten and that made me laugh as if someone else had written them." He himself turned into that astonished reader he had in mind when crafting his novel. Although immediately after, he looks around and uses irony to ensure that his fictional Nada has competition. "What the novel describes seems delirious, but there are things that reality surpasses by far. Just look at the White House approving that photo of Trump dressed as the pope."