Manuel Vilas (Barbastro, Huesca, 1962) was a secondary school teacher for years before devoting himself entirely to literature. Among his books of poems, I highlight here The rumor of the flames (1990), Resurrection (2005), Rome (2020), Complete Poetry 1980-2118 (2019) and the recent One Life (2022).
In 2008 he began as a narrator with Spain, published by Sergio Gaspar’s audacious and now defunct DVD publishing house, a brilliant career that reached its highest point in the successful Ordesa (2018), followed by Alegría (2019) and Los besos ( 2021). The list of awards received throughout his career is overwhelming, and is partly explained by how accessible and wisely crafted his novels are. Something very perceptible in Nosotros (Nadal 2023 prize) where there are a series of approaches and obsessions that are explained as we go along.
The epigraph with which the book opens (“We,/who love each other so much,/we must separate,/don’t ask me anymore”), part of the lyrics of a song by Los Panchos that marks two aspects of the novel: the Music is very present in someone who wanted to create a rock and roll band and who is the author of the biography Lou Reed in Spanish (2016). Along with Reed appear The Who, Tom Waits, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, the Rolling Stones, Elvis Costello, Erik Satie, Teodorakis or Fellini’s Nino Rota de Amarcord, a director very present here. And along with the musicians are writers like Flaubert, a deranged writer like Virginia Woolf who we easily identify with the protagonist, Irene, and, above all, Quevedo’s poem “Constant love beyond death”, where we live the intensity of love (“Dust they will be, more dust in love”) “Gloriously burned”. And the we of the book is “how Irene conceived her love story”.
Nosotros is a plant by Irene for the death of cancer of her beloved Marcelo, or Marce (a quiet tribute to Marcello Mastronianni from Fellini’s La dolce vita). Marce had a furniture store and he pays homage to them here, to artisan furniture, “all lovers need furniture”, although I think that Vilas should not point out by name those of a well-known brand, which are “the defeat of love”, and we observed “the erosion of love in couples who bought poor quality furniture”.
The novel is a tour of the different places visited by the couple. Preferably if they look at the sea, “material equivalence of their love-passion”; and of all the seas, the Mediterranean, “that legendary body of salt water” that “loves humans”. This love of the “most magical marriage in the universe” is a song to love, in what is a cosmic vision. But the absence of the beloved condemns Irene to loneliness, and the only way to recover it is through other bodies, in a song to freedom and pleasure.
We are getting to know her conquests in which, in her orgasm, she sees Marce going up a ladder full of fire, a meaning, that of fire, that we will only discover later, as we are discovering so many things that I should not reveal, although they have hinted at us in this woman who lives fully and obsessively, who lets herself be carried away by fantasy and fetishisms, especially the attraction to perfumes, watches and brand cars, and by the price of each one of them. they, she who paradoxically does not have money because of her husband’s inheritance but, again, for a reason that as a critic I am forced to remain silent.
But in the obsessions, in the pursuit of pleasure and in everything that is revealed to us is the grace of a cultured and intelligently structured novel, cunningly hidden qualities.