Three important novels of this Sant Jordi – Confetti by Jordi Puntí, the Història d’un piano by Ramon Gener and, now, Una ombra blanca by Carme Riera (Palma, 1948) – deal with themes related to music: the life of Xavier Cugat , a piano who teaches history and an African-American soprano who suffers a cardiovascular accident on stage and then loses her voice. Talent, opportunism, spirituality, dissatisfaction, drama, injustice, guilt, trauma are concepts that can easily be associated with these books, which are, of course, very different from each other, but which coincide in the desire to find a space in which to build. stories outside oneself, in a historical and symbolic, meta-literary and biographical terrain of others. The musical reference has a deictic function: eh! This book talks about transcendental issues, topics that have to do with the big world, spiritual or, in the case of Carme Riera’s novel, both.
Manuel Forcano, Vicenç Llorca and M. Àngels Cabré have provided the phrases of praise that accompany its release in Catalan: Riera invites us to take sides against injustice (Forcano), she is a master of the multiple point of view (Llorca), an author with a trajectory built book by book (Cabré). Three incontrovertible ideas that A White Shadow ratifies. Because although Riera addresses the complexity of things, she takes sides in the two main ethical themes that float in the book: racial discrimination and abuse. The story of the soprano Barbara Simpson is reconstructed from family documents and testimonies and one of the graces is that the character Riera is in charge of the investigation in Mallorca, commissioned by the diva’s secretary, Rose Barnes. It is as if the novel was written by another author or, simply, by another Carme Riera. There are books that mark peaks in a trajectory and this is one of them.
It is written with pause and naturalness, it has a survey tone that makes one think of other works by Riera – such as A Spring for Domenico Guarini to cite one of the first – and it moves quite skillfully between the cosmopolitan environment and microhistory, because The story, which begins at a gala at the Metropolitan Opera House, continues in a hospital, transports us to the south of the United States – with Presbyterian pastors, exorcists and street musicians – and with a brilliant somersault takes us to Mallorca, because the father The girl Barbara Simpson hires him to perform with a jazz quartet at the famous Formentor Hotel, while the girl, recognized as a child prodigy, remains under the protection of a great opera figure who has a house near Deià: Pandora Brunellesky. The figure of the child prodigy – who appears in the three musical novels – indicates an inclination towards the exceptional and the magical.
I find it admirable when an author sets out to write about, for example, Savannah, in the state of Georgia, in the United States and it turns out acceptably. But I find the Mallorcan plot more authentic and interesting, with the foreign colony and the rustic population, the local press and some police officers who remember García-Pavón’s Plinio. This novel is an egg with two yolks: the first, the legend of the White Goddess, connected to the work of Robert Graves, offers the protagonist an ethic and an aspirational model that manifests itself in the elevation provided by music and in the kindness of one of the characters, Tià. The second, the idea of ??guilt and remorse related to the world of grandparents. Through a system of communicating vessels, the blame is distributed in the story of the mother and the sister’s accident, the father and the mother’s death, the abuse of the girl and the responsibilities that derive from them.
A success of this Mallorcan part is that Riera brings together the tensions that run through the book in a search for the truth, a thriller plot and an ethical reflection on the limits of personal reparation. The novel continually plays with duality. For example when he talks about near-death experiences (NDE), which have become a subject of psychological and scientific research and connects them with the immortality that worries great artists.
The most complex, interesting and rounded Carme Riera’s latest books.
Carme Riera A white shadow/A white shadow Edicions 62/Alfaguara. 320 pages. 21.90 euros