Les calces al sol by Regina RodrÃguez Sirvent (Puigcerdà , 1983) is one of those books that makes its way with the help of an attractive title, a striking cover and multiplier word of mouth. The title warns that, despite the fact that the novel deals with themes that perhaps we have already read in other authors, the direct and self-ironic treatment is nothing like it. The problem of the protagonist and her literary psychoanalysis is identified with showing her panties or hanging them on a clothesline for readers to see. The cover reminds me of an anecdote by Ferran Torrent. He was about to publish Un negre amb un saxo and they asked him what image he would like for the cover. “A black with a sax!” The friend who told me about it tried to convince him that if the title included a black man and a saxophone, the image had to be, for example, a girl in an evening dress. It was useless. I want to say that the cover of RodrÃguez Sirvent’s book is redundantly simple.
No one will ever know how to create the virtuous circle that propels a book like a rocket. I think that in this case the lack of affectation has a lot to do with it. Les calces al sol is a comedy around two classic themes: running away from our little world to live a great adventure and communication problems in a strange country, related to learning English. Years ago, Carme Riera transposed her personal experience into a novel –L’estiu de l’anglès– that recreated the atmosphere of a Gothic novel. Regina RodrÃguez Sirvent takes elements of sexual comedy, stories of children and kangaroos and road movies (she describes a trip to the Grand Canyon) and combines them in a cocktail that goes down well. Beginning with the story that causes Rita Racons’ trip to Atlanta based on a comic succession of lucky breaks and bad luck: a night of cuckolding, a radical crush, a failing in the last year of Psychology, a friend who gets you high. a journey to learn English that, once at the destination, turns out not to consist of attending university but of babysitting three children, children of intellectual parents, successful but –like everyone else– wanting to try things new.
The novel describes the environments and the people, with some good dialogues: from a party with a marijuana-charged cake, to a Presbyterian ceremony, an orgy or a school festival. Some scenes, in other hands, could cause serious accidents. Regina RodrÃguez Sirvent practices a controlled skid like a world rally champion. It includes jokes about Catalonia and Barcelona, ​​seen by the Americans (they prepare a welcome cake with the four bars made with tomato and banana), and one of the characters –who has a family link with Coca-Cola– explains a story of Juanito, the Pinotxo de la Boqueria, who saved his life. Well, boy: it works. There are effective scenes, of pig comedy, when Rita discovers the man of the house’s obsession with a porn actor with a big stick, which materializes in a meeting in a hotel. She shows up there, to watch, dressed in camouflage. Jealousy, doubts, the feeling of being out of place, the grief for the death of the grandmother or the loss of a crazy friend who is going to live in Seattle, the sexual desire towards men and women, are explained with a style light, a voice that is not an echo and juicy details. The writing accompanies When she portrays Samantha, a woman who has just separated, she is shocked, saying that she “darks the last drops of the gin and tonic with all the elegance that allows a vulgar gestureâ€. It is a phrase that I have underlined, among many others.
With a storyline that makes one think more of a series than a novel, the book is a bit long, but it has elements that compensate. The main one – freshness – is an increasingly scarce commodity in today’s world.
