We have often wondered since the beginning of the pandemic how living that experience would change us. And now, that we have begun to talk about all of this in the past tense, we have verified, among other things, that the confinement served to illuminate our houses more. The home became a privileged shelter to which we began to pay more attention. Domestic life and daily chores became part of our conversations.
The experiences, experiences and memories that permeate the walls of our houses tell stories that some authors have wanted to share. Instead of writing from the outside, some current narratives invite us to go inside, close doors and inhabit familiar spaces. There the bustle of day to day coexists with the legacy –not always pleasant– accumulated over the years.
The Savoyard writer, soldier and traveler Xavier de Maistre (1763-1852) was under house arrest in an apartment in Turin for forty-two days as a result of a duel over a love affair. From that experience of confinement came Journey around a room (Tightrope walker and Marmara ed.), Some pages where the nobleman travels over and over again and in all possible ways the perimeter of his cubicle.
The author’s story in French was recovered by some readers in our recent confinement. De Maistre, with the only company of his servant and his dog, paid attention to nearby objects and from them he recalled emotions and past experiences. He turned confinement into a trip –also introspective– without giving up humor.
In La casa de la vida (Debolsillo), the prestigious art critic Mario Praz (Rome, 1886-1982) left us a beautiful book full of art and experience. What was his home in Palazzo Ricci – today the Praz Museum – packed with his personal collection became a book, a peculiar autobiography. Neoclassical, Biedermeier, Empire, Regency furniture coexisted in the house together with mirrors, miniatures and paintings. Through all of them he found a way to explain his life.
In El libro de las casas (Anagrama)/El llibre de les cases (Edicions del Periscopi), the also Italian Andrea Bajani (Rome, 1975) has recently constructed a meticulous novel with characters that seem generic –they are called Me, Mother, Father o Wife– but who have a lot of identity. He has done it by placing the reader in the different spaces that I have occupied in his life: houses, apartments or studios in an Italy fifty years ago. From Rome to Turin, the house in the city and the one on the beach, the student house, the married house, the house with family and friends, the house with his lover… Everything is home. Also the family car or the notebooks where he writes down.
The author describes the spaces and adds the reproduction of some plans that allow us to circulate through the existence of a man who grew up in a humble house where “one has the impression that it is always cloudy”, marked by the harmful presence of a father violent and castrating. There is a patio where a turtle lives, which will be the most stable and long-lasting tenant. You have to catch the rhythm of this story to finally have a global vision of that existence that takes place in the years of lead in Italy – the death of The Prisoner and the Poet, Aldo Moro and Pier Paolo Pasolini present through the screen of television or the press – and that portrays a generation that coincides with that of the novelist.
Andrea Bajani invites us to be present in a kind of editing room with multiple screens in front where we jump from one to another to see spatial fragments of a life, that of Me, that we end up completing from the initial start at the childhood home to the recent time of the pandemic in the city of Rome (“beauty without human beings is frightening”).
Pablo Acosta from Tenerife (La Laguna, 1981), a specialist in female medieval mystical literature and professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ??turns to La casa de mi padre (H
That house of memory must be expiated in order to erect it as a palace and re-inhabit it. Acosta redefines the objects –the books, the paintings or the armchair in the study– and the dreams that assailed him during the ten years in which he has been preparing this text. There is pain and suffering in this evocation that tries to understand the reasons for the father’s life and not those of his tragic end. It is a distilled and condensed text that avoids sentimentality despite the poetics of some pages (“we are two flowers full of blood”).
A house, the one that belonged to the grandmother of the four leading cousins, forms the container framework of this story that contains as many narratives as there are women in the story, including the dead grandmother. In Las herederas (Tuquets), Aixa de la Cruz (Bilbao, 1988) places the women in a two-story mansion, located in a town, far from the noise. The kitchen and each of the rooms serve to capture scenes and conversations of these characters who are looking for a way to get ahead. Also the stairwell, looking from top to bottom and vice versa allow to see and hear the murmurs of uncertain lives and the echoes of the past.
Pilar Adón (Madrid, 1971) does something similar in her novel De bestias y aves (Galaxia Gutenberg), but in these pages an atmosphere prevails that maximizes magic. The author takes us to a large house in the middle of nature, a place called Betania where a series of women living apart from society live. Coro arrives at that space fleeing from a loss that oppresses her. That house works like a kind of boarding school. The austerity and the standardization of spaces and personal attire contribute to accentuate a fantastic climate. The house and the landscape that surrounds it leads each woman to work on her identity.
From the countryside to the city, where the narration of Lara Moreno (Seville, 1978) takes place, The City (Lumen), a simple title that does not do justice to the novel, rich and suggestive. The plot takes us to a building in the Madrid neighborhood of La Latina and to practice a kind of rear window exercise. Here, too, the eye –and the ear– focused on three houses, three complex worlds, three women: Oliva, Spanish; Damaris, Colombian and Horía, from Morocco. The house in the story as a social reading –Moreno wrote an autobiographical essay on housing problems in our country–, as the scene of so much violence, sometimes a refuge and other times a cell.
A house full of people (Impedimenta), by Mariana Sández (Buenos Aires, 1973) shares an approach with Moreno. The Argentinian author places in a limited space the relationships between three women in a family (grandmother, mother and daughter). The deceased grandmother is present through her letters. Writing as an amalgamation between a mother, demanding, and the daughter with other interests.
The South African writer Deborah Levy (Johannesburg, 1959) achieves in the last volume of the trilogy that she herself has called “an autobiography in progress”, a serene and profound exercise in personal writing. In Una casa propia (Random House Literature) / Propietats reals (Angle) the author shares snippets of her daily life at different times and locations. There is a balance between reason and feeling and an honest and deep reflection on her role as a mother and a writer and her coexistence throughout the years. “The domestic space, if it is not imposed on women by society, if it is not a disgrace inflicted on us by patriarchy, can be a powerful space,” she writes.
The title of her book refers to the room of Virginia Wolf whose suicide haunts her. These pages are full of the houses in which Levy has landed and with elements that accompany her like a banana tree, which she cares for like a son. The spaces of her life are conjugated and the distances between London and her hometown where her childhood home “lived inside me” are shortened.
The first novel by Argentine Ana Navajas (Buenos Aires, 1974), You are very quiet today (Seix Barral), is an autofiction story that combines mourning for the mother, family day-to-day life, and an exercise in introspection and search. staff. The protagonist of this story is a housewife who spends her days taking care of others. There is in this volume, as in Deborah Levy’s, an uncomplexed look at domestic life and motherhood. The tone is both light and deep with a strong sense of humor. The house is the stage where each member shows himself as he is, a place that makes up the person: “My birth house reminds me of many things that I don’t like about myself.”
The writer Marta Orriols (Sabadell, 1975) has titled her latest book La possibilitat de dir-ne casa (Proa) / That place we call home (Destination). Here the house refers to finding a place in the world that goes beyond the four walls of the house. The protagonist, Valentina, is a journalist who returns to Barcelona after covering war information in the Middle East. Work, family and her love life offer different versions of herself and she must find her location.
These books contain houses of all kinds and conditions. Some anchor the story in a special way in our imagination and make us feel that we, the readers, have also lived through them. Current literature, perhaps impregnated by recent times of confinement, has opened the doors of different homes for us to enter and read.