14ymedio, Yunior García Aguilera, Madrid, 26 april 2025 – “I left Cuba to be free”, Eduardo López-Collazo said on Saturday in Madrid at the launch of his first novel, ’Narcisos’. After thirty years in Spain his life has become an example of personal and professional realization, combining rigorous investigation with creativity, a passion for the arts and literature, scientific dissemination and activism to promote diversity and inclusion.
On account of this, the psychologist and neuroscientist Ana Asencio wondered: “How can so many lives fit into one single body?” López-Collazo himself rebels against the insistence, in certain sections of society, for always classifying or pigeonholing people with one single label. It’s a long time since he decided to come out of all the closets: he stopped signing his cultural critiques with a pseudonym, and in his LinkedIn profile he stopped hiding the fact that he wrote about dance in El Cultural. He’s not worried that they call him a twenty-first century Renaissance man.
The amazing thing is that this Cuban, born on 3 July 1969, in Jovellanos, Matanzas, manages to do it all “like crazy”. He graduated as a nuclear physicist from the University of Havana, a city in which, in his own words, he was “hungry and homeless”. In Spain he got his doctorate in pharmacology at the Complutense University of Madrid and ended up running, over the course of a decade, the biggest centre for scientific investigation in the Spanish capital. The impact of his work has been recognised by Forbes, El Mundo and El Español, all of which have described him as one of the most influential people in the country.
Narcisos presents us with the lives of eight men through the eyes of Carmen, a psychologist who will go on to have a journey of self discovery over the course of the narrative. The author describes the novel as a search for understanding “who we are when nobody is looking at us, not even ourselves”. The work is dedicated to his lifetime companion Holden, with whom he discussed the evolution of many of his characters.
[The filmmaker and writer Carlos Lechuga, charged with presenting the book, described its cinematic potential
The filmmaker and writer Carlos Lechuga, charged with presenting the book, described its cinematic potential. The reader will be able to confirm this immediately, thanks to the fluidity of the dialogue and the richness of the images transmitted through its pages.
Although this is the first novel he has had published – by Mayda Bustamante and Ediciones Huso – it is in fact the third one he has written. The previous two are very personal and it might take a little more time for them to see the light of day. Nevertheless, anyone who has followed his work, including his most scientific texts, will recognise the ease of his writing. It’s not for nothing that El País included one of his titles in their list of “books with an unsettling theme that are a pleasure to read”.
When questioned about whether there exists a battle between the rigour of science and the chaos of creativity, López-Collazo replied that he always looks for freedom. Naturally, he’s a firm believer in discipline: he admits that on occasion he sometimes found himself counting the number of words that he’d ascribed to each of his characters in order to achieve perfect equilibrium. “But without freedom”, he confessed, “growth is lateral, never upwards”.
It’s no surprise that the Elena Fortún public library was packed with a broad ranging audience, many of them standing, to be witness to this presentation. Among those present were the singer-songwriter Liuba María Hevia, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Carlos Umaña, the former Vice Mayoress of Madrid Begoña Villacís and the dancer María Pagés, worthy winner of the Asturias Prize for Princess of the Arts. And many others, who, when it was all over, rushed to buy the book – in which some of the characters are real… and others are too.
Translated by Ricardo Recluso
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