How sad: we have not been able to follow Miquel de Palol (Girona, 1953) in this symposium that he has been conducting with himself for years and that has produced five very extensive novels (some published in several volumes) and a bunch of texts adjacent where he has mixed narratology and quantum physics, geometry and fantastic literature, music and economics. A series that began in a very promising way with El Jardà dels Set Crepuscles, in 1989, his most read and translated book, of which a new Catalan edition is being prepared (in Navona) while another has just been published in English ( Dalkey Archive Press), with very good reviews. Afterwards, I insist, we could not follow him: friends, other writers, successive enthusiastic editors, literary agents and readers. When Palol appears in public in an interview and says so many things on his behalf, about the cultural and political system, about the desertion of the elites, about the increasingly marginal role of real art, I find it admirable and not I can agree more. But it pains me to think that he attributes the disappearance of his books from the reading and debate space exclusively to these factors. There is also an internal cause which is excess.
Bootes, the last novel, written in a year and a half, between 2015 and 2016, occupies 1,273 pages. Besides being very long, it’s a great adventure. The landscape: the Isle of the Dead, with its fantastic constructions, arbitrary access controls. The protagonist who goes there to make a repair that we don’t quite know what it consists of. The ambivalent characters, who you don’t know who they work for or why they approach the boyfriend when he’s queuing to get in. The companions he is inside with whom the protagonist forms a Commission. what is the job Why are they there? The mix of realism and fantasy literature with the character of Mina Murray, who is a vampire. Humor: before she was called Mina, like the victim of Stoker’s Dracula, the girl was called Conxita Casas, like the protagonist of Pau Riba’s song, who wore bras like sacks of wheat. Eroticism I don’t know, as things are now, if it’s acceptable. Palol is a master of dirty literature, who paints portraits of sexualized women who fall on their ass. The impression that all these high officials and women who succeed in life are teenagers. Palol has described adult life as a projection of adolescence, perhaps because he himself is something of a scoundrel.
I follow: the idea that in the contemporary world, power is located in an inaccessible dimension. We don’t know who is in charge, we don’t know why they want to make us do this or that. The illusion of the self pervades all of his work. Characters have two identities, or more. Narrators are screens that hide the true self. Many times you get the feeling – I said this at the beginning of the article – that Palol is conversing with himself and that the entire novel unfolds in his head, that there is no such thing as space: only the brain and the Universe. We must add the disappearance of any sentimental or emotional ease, the feeling that the characters do not love anyone. But, at the same time, those very good pages dedicated to discerning between sex and love, between fidelity and adventure. And with what talent he combines these discussions with a well-informed reflection on Bach’s The Art of Fugue and how to get excited about mathematics. And how from this he draws a top-level aesthetic and philosophical idea: the author’s indifference to sentimental aspects leads “to works perceptible as tragic”. The crisis of the neoliberal system, ecological chaos, game theory, the immortality fantasies of transhumanism, find their place in the pages he writes. He has a very quick intelligence and a great ability to associate these great journalistic topics with high culture.
What a lot of good things Palol’s novels have. In El Troiacord (2001) and now in Bootes, also in Angèlica i Rafel (2019) and in his other books, there is the basis of geometry and mathematics that a reader like me – and I must not be the only one – does not i am able to understand But after a funnel of divisions and square roots that mean nothing to me, come some sarcastic pages, very beastly, starring some mutant children, dressed in 20th century school coats, with championship cicadas – the Phonoctons – : The book activates and regains fluency. For me, there is always a lack of rhythm, which can be understood if we think about the dimension and complication of it all.
Given the difficulty of reaching the end, I will not promote the reading of Boots with a megaphone. But I will say to good friends and good readers: “You have to know it”.
