This is a novel to navigate aimlessly, which proposes a reading experience tailored to our times. We have no north. We don’t have a character hierarchy. We don’t even have a chronological evolution, although the stories that Egan proposes are located between the seventies of the last century and the future of the year 2035. We do have a lot of North Americans, some are dedicated to the music production business, some are They have become rich with technology, others move between universities and a few live on the margins without knowing what to do with their existence.
Halfway through the book, one of the characters is surprised by her ability to philosophize and, with this detail, the author winks at us. Her new novel, apparently so focused on big data and figures, is full of philosophical questions that come to us camouflaged through the channels of fiction. The main one is: what weight does individuality have when people give up intimacy? The author presents it through a network structure, with a series of stories that seem independent, like small stories that attract us and that weave a spider web. Isn’t that what you wanted to talk to us about, our hyperconnected world?
The Candy House is a novel full of genuine, curious characters, those that you retain in your memory. There is no very clear argument, no coherence is sought, we do not even read a single style or a single point of view, but rather we collide now with one, now with the other, and thus we follow the trajectory of these individualities that surprisingly end up forming a family. To just choose a few, which could be others, we find a man who likes to shout in the street, in the subway, in supermarkets, simply because he is tired of humans being so predictable; There is another who is in love and only sees reality through his numerical calculations; A third is a heroin addict who buys a clipper to store her unconscious and recover good moments.
In fact, this little machine is one of the curiosities of a novel that without this gadget could seem realistic, but that plays with science fiction because it shows us a future conditioned by a social network in which humans share the unconscious. They offer it, thus, bravely, without any precaution, in exchange for being able to see the inside of others. Naturally, along the way, they lose their freedom, giving away data without knowing who or what. Does it sound familiar to you? But it is so tempting to participate, as tempting as Hansel and Gretel’s candy house.
I read Jennifer Egan for the first time ten years ago with the translations that were made in Catalan (Edicions de 1984) and Spanish (Minúscula) of The Keep, a novel from 2006. I was impressed by her ability to create parallel worlds, to connect the dots when you least expect it, to leave the reader with a feeling of bewilderment very typical of our time. Egan represented a very new bet in a very worn-out world.
Reading The Candy House it was difficult for me to recognize the same author, although in The Tower of Tribute the mania for new technologies was already outlined, the theme of detoxification already appeared and there was a reflection on triumph and the lack of freedom. The candy house is less intoxicating. Things are explained, many, that is undeniable, perhaps because the idea is to show us the infinite variations that the human being offers, although some of those in the book think that we can be fixed within a pattern of behavior.
The novel comes to our bookstores with a reissue by Salamandra of El tiempo es un canalla (in Catalan, El temps és un cabró, in 1984), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A success that represented a leap for an author who does not need any little machine to give us her unconscious. She knows that, as a novelist, her job is this: serve it to us on a platter, well camouflaged.
