“I gave you eyes and you looked at the darkness/Te di ojos y miraste las tieneblas”, by Irene Solà, an apocalyptic altarpiece with a medieval spirit that once again reflects a deep and contagious love for oral narration and for culture, history, Catalan society and cuisine.
Text: Milo J. KRMPOTIC Photo: Alex GARCIA
Last year Malla, the town in Plana de Vic where he came into the world, had 272 inhabitants Irene Solà, one of the most notable phenomena of recent Catalan literature. 272 inhabitants in an agricultural and livestock town established around more than sixty dispersed farmhouses and with a population density of 24.7 people per square kilometer. What these eminently Wikipedian data are saying is that Malla, so flat and solitary, but also so akin to the trompe l’oeil of fog, lends itself to the unleashed imagination stacking things up and filling its seams: some mountains and the history that has passed through them here, the delicacies of the earth and the pleasures of the flesh there, and, in between, a barrage of ambitions and revenge, curses and secrets, wild animals and even wilder hunters, nymphs and ghosts, witches and bandits, rot and disease, spirits and demons, horseless carts and rectangular mirrors that do not reflect what is in front of them, but what they carry inside…
Yes ok I sing and the mountain dances/I sing and the mountain dances It was not Solà’s first narrative work, since he had previously published I tell them/The dikes (Documenta award for authors under 35 years old in 2017), I gave you eyes and you looked at the darkness/Te di ojos y miraste las tieneblas It has quite a bit of validation due to the success of its predecessor, which won the Anagrama prize for a novel in Catalan in 2019 and received one of the European Union literature awards in 2020 (the first for a work written in Verdaguer’s language) and It was the most borrowed Catalan novel of 2021 in Barcelona libraries and gave rise to a play and… Without the slightest hesitation, Solà chooses here to follow similar parameters and, at the same time, redoubles the bet with a baroque family saga and eclectic, halfway between fable and realism, centered on a hamlet in the Guilleries, Mas Clavell, where the present and the mythical past, we will say, intersect in a similar way to what John Banville presented in The infinities.
The confluence between lineage and magic also invites us to think about One hundred years of loneliness, although Solà will surely have taken the sagas of the Icelanders more into account (he lived for a time in Reykjavík; also in Brighton and London, cities in which he conceived his previous novels). But, beyond our own and other people’s references, I gave you eyes…is an apocalyptic altarpiece with a medieval spirit that once again reveals a deep and contagious love for oral narration, with that succession of anecdotes and stories that are linked together without rest, and for Catalan culture, history, society and cuisine, seasoned with a wealth of vocabulary, a sense of rhythm and a confidence in the regurgitation of sources that invite us to deny the author’s age. Solà may be 33 years old, but the wisdom in her books is centuries old.
2023-09-11 09:26:09
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