El libro de mi madre, published by Panorama de Narrativas d’Anagrama, in the translation of Javier Albiñana, was a widely read book in the early nineties. At that time, no one remembered the mothers. Albert Cohen’s song of love and remorse showed that it was necessary to dust off the manias and approach a subject that could be important. Thirty years later there are as many books about mothers as there are hats, written with resentment, mania, rage and turbulence. Sometimes I think it’s another literary fad: you don’t know why everyone starts writing the same book or a very similar one. We live in an age of literary confessions, the creepier the better: mothers? Dry stick!

Marta Marín-Dòmine (Barcelona, ??1959) has lived between Canada and Catalonia. He currently directs the Born-Centre of Culture and Memory. He has made documentaries about emigration and exile, artistic installations, written essays on translation from a Lacanian perspective and a book about his family’s uprooting, Fugir era el membre belle que tenie (2019). A few months ago I heard a lecture about memory. He explained that in recent years we have turned the witnesses of the great massacres and holocausts into victims. And that being a victim means not having the tools to act. While being a witness means taking the floor, opening up to the dialectic, to the transmission and to the responsibility of listening.

It made me think about Diré que m’ho he inventa, the novel with which he won the 2023 BBVA Sant Joan award. A testimonial book, in this dialectical sense. And with a unique structure: the first part is a fantastic tale, a little truculent, of a mother-daughter relationship, with zoological metaphors: the mother looks like a lioness and a wolf, while the daughter identifies with the bison of Buffalo Bill. There are also eagles, crows and slugs. It is a violent, visionary, extreme writing, with mutilations, angels and Rodoredian paraphernalia. In the eyes of the daughter, the mother appears as a goddess and a beast. It’s a rambling narrative and sometimes you get the feeling that to achieve the textual complexity he wants, Martín-Dòmine lacks language.

The second part fits into the narrative of the confession. It shows elements of the plot of the tale of cruelty and fear that we have just read and unfolds the different factors of the mother-daughter relationship: from the idea of ??ordinary madness (a theme that Imma Monsó has treated very well), to the envy of the daughter for the mother. A disturbing element is that here and there the narrator addresses the mother, to remind her of something she did or a feeling she had. In the same chapter we can find fragments in which the story is told in the third person, the mother becomes Marina and it does not seem that she is the mother of the narrator. This approach and distance from the other, gives the text a psychoanalytical depth.

The story of decay and illness is well balanced, the figure of a nephew who adored his aunt makes a counterpoint full of success, the parallel plots – the history of pillow laces since the 19th century or the case of an Algerian boy who spends twenty-three years in prison for stealing, a scene in the subway with a woman in a red coat, an ellipsis about Alzheimer’s disease, a reflection on the gestures of the actors of ‘an old film – they take the text from the face-to-face mother-daughter encounter. The wound of a hand links dream and confession. I personally think that references to “writing” and the “writing process” intellectualize the text in a way that it shouldn’t. In any case, the book grows, the story wins in the realistic part and, in a third section, it culminates in a splendid phrase from Bergman: “A mother and a daughter, what an absurd combination of feelings, confusion and destruction”. Martín-Dòmine undoes the knot and the bow.

Marta Marín-Domine. I’ll say I made it up. Editions 62. 184 pages. 19.50 euros