New book by Irene Solà (Malla, 1990). Four years after the brilliant and progressive success of Canto jo i la muntanya balla –awards, more than 100,000 copies sold, more than twenty translations, theatrical adaptation and symphonic music–, Et vaig donar ulls i vas mira les hits bookstores on Wednesday tenebres (Anagrama), a novel that works the simultaneity of time and space to explain the story of a lineage of women based on a pact with the devil.
The beginning of the book seems like a wake, but later we see that it goes further, it’s like a geological cut in which everything comes to light at the same time.
When I start a book, I don’t decide what book to write, or how it will start and end, or what will happen or who will appear, but rather I start by trying to understand what interests me and what I want to learn, what thoughts I want to spend the next few years. Here I saw from the beginning that I was very interested in the pact with the devil, a folklore premise present in many cultures and very very present in our imagination, and closely related to the idea of ​​the story, magic, the rondalla. As I write and gradually understand the history of this family and the characters, I realize, for example, that the novel happens all in one day, I see that from within this day, of this day of today, of this contemporary present too, which is not a concrete today, has no face, so that it can be every day, and it is from here that I will stretch this day, and the day and time will be so malleable within the novel as to fit me all the memories, all the stories, both from the side of the living who inhabit the house and from all these dead women, ghosts or spirits, or whatever we want to call them, who have lived in that house since the moment of this pact with the devil.
Why the pact with the devil?
In Canto jo…, although it has some small premises or small magical characters, most of the characters and events are absolutely flesh and blood, and I find that I want to play and explore a little more from magical premises. , of imagination, of rondalla, even of story. Because it is in fiction, it is in literature, in narrative, in stories, where magic exists today. One of the things that move me when I write is this reflection, this exploration, this squeezing, playing, testing or finding the infinite possibilities that the narrative opens up.
And the devil?
There is an implicit pact between writer and reader that when you read a fiction book you turn off the incredibility sensors, and instead of reading and saying “It doesn’t exist, it’s impossible”, you believe it, you go inside and immerse yourself, you believe what incredible and you make the impossible yours.
Have you ever quoted Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, for the way to enter a magical world…
It’s one of my great adolescent readings and I don’t know what I understood and what I didn’t, but I remember the enjoyment you have at that moment, of getting inside and living there like a crazy person going to Mordor. It is spectacular. There is much of this enjoyment in what I do, both in reading and writing and in exploring and learning.
He does not invent a world, he reinterprets it based on folklore.
Yes. I have studied Fine Arts and I have trained as an artist, and I always have the feeling that I work from very contemporary art methodologies. I start a book researching, and in this book there is an interest in folklore, with a treatment of time
There are many layers of light and dark.
Perspective and subjectivity interest me a lot and I always end up working on them. In Canto jo…, there was a constant game of perspectives, but also in Els dics (L’Altra, 2018). I like to think and reflect on subjectivity, and since the same place, the same room, even the same events, each of those who participate will feel, perceive, understand and explain them in a different way. Here there is a constant game of the different perspectives and the different ways of seeing the world and of understanding it and of remembering these women, which are sometimes even contradictory. The book explains some familiar stories, but from a series of very diverse subjectivities. While I was writing it, I thought that you have been building your family history, in an absolutely fragmentary way, taking from here and there and hearing one day that I don’t know who in your family explains I don’t know what and over time you have been putting all of them in their place. these bits and intuitions, and over time you have been understanding and building this family history of yours. Nobody ever picks you up and says: “Come, sit here and I’ll tell you the whole family story from start to finish.”
Think about women.
Reflecting on perspective, memory and oblivion allows me to reflect on history, history in capital letters, what we have collectively remembered and what we have forgotten, who decided which stories were important and which events were worth recording and which ones. No. These women are the ones who have not been protagonists, and they are not only women, but they are old women, ugly, abject or out of the canon, and they are also dead women. The perspective allows me to reflect on motherhood, sexuality, violence or romantic love, and above all how romantic love has been built for women, how we have narrated the female characters either as history or as fiction. But there is all the ironic, funny part, of women who do not stop laughing and making jokes, which links with an almost irreverent will of the novel, and even with a relativistic will.
The barriers between good and evil are blurred…
And between luck and bad luck, too! It depends on how you look at the world and you yourself will always be missing something. Is it lucky or unlucky not to feel pain? Is it bad luck to see everything? Is it bad luck not to have memory? It all depends on how you live it.
The character Clavell is inspired by the bandit Serrallonga.
A complicated and terrible man, yes, but when they’re torturing him and when they’re killing him, it turns my stomach too. It is that people are many things and no one is black or white alone, and everyone is the child of many decisions, of many small circumstances.
There is also pleasure and a lot of sex.
The book is full of these lights and shadows, day and night, life and death, moments of joy and moments of sadness, but it is a book with a playful intention, too. It’s like a ghost story, of which there are many, and the ghost is a character classically related to memory and oblivion. It is not corporeal, it cannot be touched, it does not have a body, but at the same time this is a material and corporal book, full of descriptions of corporality and not only of bodies, of humans and animals, but of the landscape, also of the house, and there are a lot of descriptions of deliveries, births, but also sex, and at the same time descriptions of torture, pain, and food preparation, wolf traps are included… And That is why this ends up being a book in which there is a very important presence of pests, smells, textures…
There is a very powerful vocabulary.
But it is not sought, rather it impregnated me with these words and these ways of saying. As I enter the novel, I understand this narrative voice that walks through the house, and I imagined it as a breeze that is entering the different rooms, it is getting closer to the ghosts, because in fact the living are almost the sound in the background, but we don’t care. From here she explains her memories, sensations, thoughts, ideas, and when the narrative voice explains things from our world that we give done, technology issues or ways of doing things, she does it in her own way, from the language they have. .
Have you agreed with the devil?
No pact with the devil, but I have looked into the darkness.
Catalan version, here
