Get to know Miguel Delibes.

Discover
the hunter
Miguel Delibes

Hunting is a returning pleasure. During six days a week men get enough reasons to get rid for a few hours of the social conventionalisms, of the daily routineand the predictable. On the seventh day, he gets full of oxygen and freedom, faces the unexpected, experiments with the illusion of creating his own fate…but at the same time he gets tired, is thirsty and hungry and he gets cold… In other words, he finds enough reasons to abandone his primitive experience and go back to his urban, domestic and comfortable lefe. This method is as good as any other to bear life, or maybe even better than any other method.

Once again the unpublished notes of his note books, and also indirectly, the testimony of Lorenzo, the main character in Diario de un cazador (sometimes it was said that Lorenzo is an alter ego of Delibes), reveal that his fondness to hunting had come back during the following decade. Since then his writing about fishing and hunting kept on naturally flowing from his feather pen to conform these important collection of pages […] that collects eight booksand two minor written works that appear between 1963 and 1996. […] These works analyse the hunting world from different perspectives from the motivation of the hunting act to the regulations that control its practice and the analysis of its different modalities to the daily experiences of the author- and that when it comes to its creation, as Delibes himself has admted, mean for its spontaneity, a liberation of the rest of conditions that rule the rest of his literary production, for this reason the author preferred to calle himself “ a hunter that writes” more than a writer that hunts.

To this and the quails in summer id¡s what Delibes limits his hunting practice whose hunting preferences […] coincide with those of the modest hunters of Catilla. Once or twice I heard to some members of the hunting club Alcyón, to which Miguel Delibes was part since 1965, “¡How great are his tales about hunting but such a few ways of hunting he knows about!”. The truth is that indeed he knew about more hunting modalitites, but he only felt really captivated by the primitive forms of hunting, in which the hunter mst do everything, search the catch, wake it up, shoot it and retrieve it. A type of hunting in which shooting the shotgun and retrieving some bird requires to get exhausted and be precise with an stratergie in which a whole group takes part. A type of hunting, on the other hand, that does not end with the shot since retrieving the kill, examining it and hang it on your hanger was part of the hunter´s pleasures to which he will not give up or leave to the hands of an assistant. And a type of hunting that considers the final but no leat important part the victory of seeing the kill transformed into delicious culinary dish.

Miguel Delibes y su hijo Germán con su perro Grin. Quintanilla de Abajo (Valladolid), 1979.

This tendency to melancholic revision of events could be dramatic for his depressive and pessimist ways if it wasn´t compensated by his long urban walks and, for him exhausting, hunting seasons. Even if some years ago his legs became alittle more of a “middle class” kind of legs, he continued chasing red partridges along the fields of Castilla. The title of his most recent book-El ultimo coto– makes inevitable reffernece to a farewell. I t won´t be me who really belives that. I think the Hunter will dies with his boots on. In fact, between the date of the Foreword- in which he announces his hunting retirement- and the date of his latest short story with the totle “La despedida” something like five years have gone by: from 1986 to 1991. And he keeps on going out on the search of whatever he finds, wood pidgeons or fine meat quails…For Delibes his physical decline coincides with the extinction of the wild partridge, a sign of worse and more severe declines.

The fact is that if Delibes decided to end seventy years of hunting adventures it wouls also mean the end of that series of precise writing, beautiful, and classical books which lastest title is El ultimo coto, a highlight piece of work that started in the form of a novel with Diario de un cazador and in for of a chronicle with La caza de la perdiz roja. (About a thousand pages which would be enough to conside Delibes an exceptional writer.)

Winter text in which are decribed sleepy landscapes and wet foggy early hours, text with happy feelings so breve as the rays of sun light that find their way throughout the castillian wastelands or the happiness of a good catch. “I caught for the comunity satchel five red partridges, one hare and a rabbit… Moral of the story: I still can catch them. Which doesn´t mean that I kill all the partridges I shoot. Yesterday I spooked the ones that came on my way, only that, and those which flew like lightening passing me by I couldn´t even smell them. Becoming old has its prove in those kind of things”.

Probably nobody made a greater effort to reach closer such opposite worlds: hunting and Nature preservation, just because of this effort he is worth of our respect and aknoledgement.

In the first palce I think, we fell attracted to the sincere and self confessional tone of a man that has lived in an alert way the unexpected events of our time. He offers cold, aseptic and hyperbolic stories […] of the hunting practice and are often interwoven with the self experiences, emotions and fellings of the narrator provoked by the landscape or an anecdote. Without any tenderness the human being that the hunter hides can be seen in these stories. That is why he was ver y rght when he defined himself as a hunter that writes. It seems that he is not creating literature, but literature is there in all his stories with his simple way of saying things […]

The reason why these stories catch us, independently of the topics, comes from the fact that this man from Valladolid offers a clean, clear, rich, expressive and simple language with which he says many things […], a common language […] that the writer rescues […] because he is keen on the precise and exact language and giving things their correspondant name.

[…] That affection and simplicity so typical of Delibes, a pure and alive language that he uses to construct pilots of his books and testimonial chronicles. All those aspects only serve to a precise conception of Literature as a form of communication and a way of directly transmiting a personal experience. And there, I think, it is the success of his lietarture, saying things in a close and loving way that readers accept as an authentic way of expressing real life experiences.