Javier Sierra: Spain’s Greatest Export Since Rioja
By Adriana Lopez -- Críticas, 5/15/2006
 Photo Credit: Joan Borrás |
| Books by Sierra |
This historical thriller has converted the one-time journalist, editor, and TV personality of all things mysterious into Spain’s leading publishing export in the States. Currently surpassing renowned Spanish authors such as Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Javier Marías, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, and creeping up to Cervantes, the young Spaniard is sharing best seller lists with Brown himself. (Though Sierra is a more sophisticated writer than Dan Brown according to Kirkus Review.)
Simon & Schuster’s Atria launched the English translation of La cena on March 21st during the height of London’s Da Vinci Code trial. But, welcoming comparisons, Sierra insists The Secret Supper, is different. At first glance, giving the zeitgeist, you might want to think Sierra ripped off Brown’s formula. But Sierra started investigating his book way back in 2000 and published it in its original Spanish in 2004 with Random House Mondadori’s Plaza & Janés imprint. The book became a finalist for Spain’s 3rd Annual Ciudad de Torrevieja novel prize valued at 120,000 Euros ($145,000 approx.). This allowed for a high profile media and marketing campaign for La cena otherwise unheard of for new releases in Spain. Plaza & Janés took the generous budget and converted the mid-level author into a household name. Now in its 14th edition, the book has sold more than 200,000 copies in Spain alone.
Sierra vs. Brown
Sierra remembers meeting Brown on the last leg of finishing up La cena and thinking that Brown’s book smelled like “possible competition.” Once he read it, he was relieved to learn that they were worlds apart in content matter. Brown’s is a contemporary thriller where the great Italian painter’s art is used as a historical point of reference. Sierra’s book, by comparison, is set in the 14th century when Da Vinci was still alive. When La cena won the Torrevieja, Sierra assured the skeptical Spanish press that his book was different: “The Da Vinci Code only dedicates three pages to the famous painting while I have practically written an interpretative guide to ‘The Last Supper.’”
Still, it could be said that Sierra is riding the coattails of the publishing world’s fascination with all things Da Vinci-esque. When Sierra’s U.S. representative, Thomas Colchie, asked for a half-million-dollar advance for the English translation and Atria’s senior editor, Johanna Castillo, gave it to him, that precise timing was playing out for all parties. Atria released a 375,000 initial print run in March, after a mighty premarketing campaign that included first-class boxed galleys with French flaps and tie-in screen ads of The Secret Supper set to run with trailers of Da Vinci Code, the movie. By mid April, the book had hit #6 in the New York Times best seller list, and ranked in the top three in the PW, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post lists. And when Sierra appeared on Good Morning America, pointing to “The Last Supper’s” faces and Judas’s suspicious resemblance to Señor Da Vinci himself (which is a major part plot detail of the novel), millions of readers were sold. The American audience found their next big-page, historical page-turner to fill their post–Da Vinci Code void. They fell in love with the scholarly and excitable Spaniard.
The Power of Fiction
Sierra was born in Teruel, a modest Spanish town in the province of Aragón, in 1971. The town is famous for its symbiosis of techniques and ways of understanding architecture resulting from Jewish, Muslim, and Christian cultures living side by side. The religious fusion gave rise to the architectural style of Mudejar, which reached its peak in Teruel and perhaps ignited a young Sierra’s interests in the complexities of past civilizations. He headed for the capital and studied journalism at Madrid’s Universidad Complutense and soon after graduating published his first nonfiction books, Roswell: Secreto de estado (Roswell: State Secret, Edaf, 1995) and La España extraña (Strange Spain, Edaf, 1997) with co-writer Jesús Callejo. Both books explored unsolved mysteries in science and history.
Sierra found his true calling when his editor at Planeta’s Martínez Roca imprint suggested he take his latest investigative obsession with the Spanish religious conquest of the American Southwest and convert it into a novel. “This is how I discovered the enormous and unexplored potential of fiction for my work and its infinite capacity to offer answers to history’s unresolved questions,” says Sierra. “If I had decided to write that book as nonfiction, it would have never surpassed being mere speculation.”
A ferociously quick and prolific writer, Sierra published La dama azul (The Blue Lady, Booket, 2006), his first work of fiction, only a year after his last book, La España extraña. It was followed by Las puertas templarias (The Templar Doors, Martínez Roca, 2005), En busca de la Edad de Oro (In Search of the Golden Age, Random House Mondadori, 2000), and El secreto egipcio de Napoleón (Napoleon’s Egyptian Secret, La Esfera, 2002). When Sierra’s Barcelona-based agent, Antonia Kerrigan, first decided to take him on as a client she remembers he was still working as the editor for Spain’s best-selling sci-fi magazine, Más Allá, and making a nice living for himself. But Kerrigan remembers him saying: “I want to be a full-time writer,” something that is considered a luxury for most published authors. “And now,” she says, “he really is.”
On to the Cabala
Sierra’s novel in progress, about the origins of the Cabala, is going to have to be put on shelf until his U.S. and international promotions subside. Having completed a ten-city book tour with Atria last April, Sierra will return to the States this summer to promote Random House Spanish’s new Spanish-language edition of La cena in mass-market format. With an initial print run in the “tens of thousands” and a national author tour set for Sierra, Random House Spanish is backing Spain’s new crossover in its original language (albeit a possibly neutralized Spanish is rumored) for U.S. readers.
Since Sierra is truly following in Brown’s footsteps, we were sure to ask Sierra if there had been film offers. Yes, they’re already piling in he said. Sierra says he hopes that the movie version of La cena is a cross between “the atmosphere of a film like In the Name of the Rose and the intensity of a James Bond 007 movie,” only to add mysteriously in an afterthought, “Who knows?”
Adriana Lopez, a regular contributor to Críticas, is a freelance writer and Latina magazine’s book columnist.
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