About ten years ago, editor Brigid Hughes, walking through a flea market, rummaged through a box of old books and came up with a copy of W-3 by Bette Howland, a then-forgotten writer, for a dollar. whose work Hughes gave a second life. Howland had lived with madness and that left its mark on her writing, because she “found in her madhouse her own room and a world to explain.” Says Miquel Adam, from the publishing house La Segona Perifèria, which has published Mòdul 3 in Catalan. Adam says that Howland was “a child prodigy and a promise of letters” and thinks that perhaps it was the high expectations of her that led him to madness.
She was not the only one. Other writers suffered from mental illnesses and made literature with them. The Ona bookstore in Barcelona reviewed the life and work of some of these authors on Thursday afternoon in a debate moderated by Núria Juanico. The editor Eugènia Broggi, from L’Altra Editorial, has published Les cares by the Swedish writer Tove Ditlevsen, “a very productive narrator and poet who wrote nearly 50 books and who committed suicide at the age of 60”. “The madness manifested in Tove when she was an adult, but there was always a seed, she looked different and all she wanted was to be normal. That obsession already denoted something strange. Little by little she became addicted to drugs and descended into hell.
Sylvia Plath “was already writing before the first episodes of madness, she was looking for beauty through literature, but she couldn’t get where she wanted. That and her problems in her marriage to Ted Hughes were undermining Plath”, that she committed suicide by asphyxiating with gas. Her work has never been forgotten. Aniol Rafel has published in Edicions del Periscopi La campana de vidre the best-known novel with autobiographical overtones by the American novelist and poetess.
New Zealander Janet Frame spent half her life in and out of asylums and mental institutions. “In her work, she analyzes the other patients with an almost anthropologist’s look, but her story hardens and borders on literary delirium when she finds out that they are going to submit her to a lobotomy,” says Jan Arimany from Trotalibros, who has edited Cares enmig de l’aigua where the author narrates the stay in the hospital. Frame’s life was made into a film by Jane Campion in a 1990 film titled An Angel at My Table.
The Danish Trine Piil has also turned Nada, a book by her compatriot writer Janne Teller, into a movie. Nothing is a required reading novel in Danish schools and also in many Spanish schools. It tells how a simple anecdote can unbalance a group of teenagers. Pierre Anthon decides that life has no meaning and that people are nothing more than mere copies of each other. The boy is so annoyed with this idea that he climbs a tree and there is no way to get him down. His classmates decide to support him and show him that there are many things worth living for. They offer you emotionally valuable goods until you reach a limit situation.
Piil explains that many young Europeans “have problems and sometimes, behind them, there is a risk to the mental health of minors” something that is reflected among the protagonists of Nada, which premiered yesterday in Spanish theaters.
But the problems that children in advanced societies may suffer today cannot be even remotely compared to the suffering of enslaved blacks in the Iberian Peninsula since the fifteenth century. “The rotten smell announced the arrival of the ships from Cape Verde, which went up the Guadalquivir from Sanlúcar de Barrameda to Seville”, writes Jesús Cosano in one of his books on slavery in Spain. And there are seven.
Cosano, who investigates the history of the black population on the peninsula, became interested in the subject because he is a great lover of flamenco and, as a young man, wanted to know if the music he loved had black roots. He was pulling the thread, found documents and discovered a reality that “history has made invisible.”
So he has been recording his findings in works such as Los invisibles or El arroz negro que tu no ves that he presented on Tuesday at the La Central bookstore on Mallorca street accompanied by Basha Changue.
