Carlota Gurt (Barcelona, ??1976) has been one of the literary phenomena in Catalan in recent years. A few weeks after the publication of her first book of stories, Cavalcarem tota la nit (2020), everyone knew that there was a new, good author, and she was a tank. That he tackled heartbreak – and the tail: separation – with his own language, with metaphors and landscapes that left you standing still, that he didn’t marry anyone and that combined literary intensity with a polemical attitude: he doesn’t mix with mill wheels and flaunts them as they come. Right now if you type “Carlota Gurt” into Google, one of the first entries that will come up is an interview with the headline: “Why is there this public discourse that says women don’t masturbate as much?”. The fact of having been assistant director of La Fura dels Baus and of translating narrative from German complete the portrait of a woman who is going to shock.
Sola (2021) was the second book, a one-of-a-kind novel that – you don’t know why – coincides on the shelves with works dealing with the same themes: in this case the separation of the world, in a house to write With Biografia del foc he returns to the story. It has been three years well spent.
At the time of the war, Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel wrote Imitació del foc, one of the great books of poetry in Catalan of the 20th century. An underlying idea is that, just as the poet uses different styles to express his diverse personalities, he uses the symbol of fire to explain different ways of burning. Biography of Fire inevitably brings this to mind because, although Gurt’s characteristic way of burning is the fire with large flames, lots of fuel and explosions, the book includes others: the fireplace of the first weeks of sharing life with a new partner, the tweets and volcanoes of San Juan dels nens, the flameless fire, nest of ashes, which is destroying people and which is a symbol of boredom and claudication.
Biografia del foc is a somewhat confusing book. It includes fourteen stories ranging from the portrait of the couple’s relationship, realistic with symbolic elements, to the abstract and metaphorical story and the speculation on a theme: twists and turns on a motive. For example, in the story that closes the volume, Bales de palla, written with two driving ideas: a movie scene – the protagonist’s car goes behind a truck that scatters straw – and a reflection on the mother with Alzheimer’s, became a mother’s fluff. On this axis, Gurt makes variations. In other stories, the metaphorical factor completely prevails over the realistic plot: the little girl in My Tanks is given a toy tank as a gift and goes around the world with a battle tank. It’s a story about family and the need to toughen up like a rhinoceros, in the face of pressure from others. Sometimes, to talk about the couple relationship, which is a ubiquitous theme, Gurt uses the metaphor of the floor and the small bed, relating it to the displacements of geology (Plate Tectonics), he poses the relationship between two cosmonauts (Love) and between a photographer and a diver looking for an anchor (The immense machine). Some images – the robin that has fallen into the Ronda hole and cannot get out – are excellent.
It’s funny because you think: “he doesn’t get the endings” and on page 186 you find written “the endings don’t interest me”. You think: “yes there are cars” and on page 209 you find “I live in a road movie”. You think: “how does this girl make the metaphor go”, and one of the characters says “my brain is rotten with metaphors”. It is a writing that is aware of itself.
Gurt doesn’t write long stories, it’s all a bit uneven and sloppy. Biografía del foc is not a refined and compact book. But this is also his grace: the impassioned and abrupt immediacy, the searching while he writes, opines, and slaps the reader in the mouth.
