Without abandoning the topic that has occupied us these past weeks, today it is time to talk about a sensational book. Neus Canyelles (Palma, 1966) has explained the grief for the mother, the loneliness of the daughter and the heartbreak of the father’s illness, who has Alzheimer’s, with an extraordinary poetic force. I think that the last three books of Canyelles – The best holidays of my life, from 2019, about a psychiatric admission; Authorized autobiography, a dive into personal history, from 2021, and now this Milady – they are very serious stuff and I don’t understand why they haven’t had more recognition – not from awards that, you’ll forgive me, tend to have a straw component dry, but the authentic recognition of reading and the love of readers, of more readers. Milady is a book that stands out in the current landscape of our literature, because of the human density, the concept and the language.
It is written with great freedom, without any recipe. It is articulated like a notebook that allows sharing the intimacy of the author. It is dramatic – tragic -, tender, makes you smile, makes you rummage, invites recollection and piety and opens the door to identify with history, without any exhibitionist facility or concession to pornographic sentimentality. Faced with so many books full of reproaches of spoiled children, Canyelles says a few truths: that the well-off and sober life of a childhood in the sixties gently rocked the scoundrel in a world that was disappearing very slowly; that daily life, when it is good, is the best; that he doesn’t write because he thinks his mother has anything exceptional and deserves a book but because she is his mother. And these ideas are based on two essential thoughts that I collect in his words: “Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if my mother was happy, if she was happy with her life” and “Writing these words that nobody cares about . I don’t even know if they even interest me. But if I don’t write them I’ll die.” It is a book that gives and that gives a lot.
Milady reconstructs small episodes of the daughter’s childhood, the mother’s maturity and the last years, when she is already over eighty. The pages about the care he gives to the sick mother, the last visit to the father, who no longer knows her, are a wonder. When she explains the joke she plays to her mother: she appears dressed as a nurse in a cap with a red cross on the top and calls herself Polita, while she treats her swollen legs and a horrible ulcer, it is an extraordinary moment. The portrait of the mother who grew up fond of Nintendo conveys emotion and truth. The scene in which he visits a seventies boutique – Magali – to get the clothes of the season, how he combs his hair and gets ready to go out, the atmosphere of the establishment that made me think of the Juanita del Poblenou boutique, where the Nollegiu bookstore is now, is another great moment. How he describes the small world, feminine and masculine, of the bathroom, with the Moana soap and the three-piece mirrored cabinet, full of pots and pans, with the father’s shaver. Only Mercè Ibarz and Biel Mesquida have made portraits of the mother that can be compared.
As a professional reader I am not used to so much feeling and beauty. That they have nothing mannered or soft: everything is redone and written with a hardness of steel and a soft touch, the characteristics that Canyelles attributes to the stones of the beach of Foravila childhood. Because in the background, and in counterpoint, there is the whirlwind that takes away happiness, the painkillers, the anxiolytics, the distant daughter, a secret love relationship that broke up, admission to the sanatorium. The feeling that going ahead recommended by friends and acquaintances – “you have to distract yourself”, “Go away, Anton, because what remains is already composed” – is to die inside.
I really, really, really liked Milady. And I recommend it to them with enthusiasm and, if necessary, with a shout that becomes a call to order.
