That smell is the sense that best connects with our memory is not a surprise to anyone. Perfumes reminiscent of love, delicacies that transport you to the family kitchen, the humid salty smell of the coast. The Barcelona of 1937 smelled of war, the Barcelona of today smells of works, protest and contradiction. Both worlds meet in the latest novel by Emma Riverola (Barcelona, ​​1965) Metamorphosis (Edhasa). After working for years as an advertising creative in various agencies, the Catalan writer is now a successful playwright (with the play Puertas abiertas), a columnist in the daily opinion section of ElPeriódico and has just published her sixth book.
Lali returns home after an experience in the army and there she is reunited with the women of her life. A grandmother who never accepted her and a mother whom she loves and rejects in equal measure. One day she is commissioned to restore the perfume of her former neighbor Roser de ella, who died during the Civil War and a good friend of a young Mercè Rodoreda, with whom she shared correspondence for years.
From that epistolary relationship in the mid-twentieth century and the ghosts of Lali’s past, universal themes emerge that help us relativize our own time. The reconciliation between motherhood and professional ambition, which cost Rodoreda much criticism after leaving for exile without his son; a theme that also crosses Lali, who does not abandon the guilt, but neither does the desire for freedom and the lack of attachment to her daughter. Lali, Roser and Rodoreda share pages and also the contradictions that arise between their role as mothers and the freedom they yearn for.
The letters remind us of the violence that permeated Barcelona during the war and between the lines the internal battles between revolutionaries resound. The confrontation between Andreu Nin and Ramón Mercader, the internal conflicts between the POUM and the Stalinists and the chaos of a city devastated by war.
Back in the present, the violence persists. Aggressive characters with worn-out ties, sad at the lack of meaning that prevails in an individualistic present that has forgotten tenderness. A conqueror addicted to seduction, a woman who listens to her mother after she’s dead, a son who wants to restore her mother’s perfume to smell her one last time. And Lali, a direct and aggressive protagonist, who has found shelter behind an apparent indifference and a cynical humor that amuses on the page, but that we would hardly accept willingly in real life.
A psychological novel that is located in the Sant Gervasi neighborhood, with fictional and real characters, whose experiences also appeal to ours. Two times in the same city, one as a consequence of the other and the human being clinging more than ever to vital dissatisfaction. All this around a mysterious story around a fragrance that mixes the smell of sewage with the aroma of a rose bush.