At the beginning of Poder i desig, the booklet published by Fragmenta Editorial in the series of new readings of the Bible, Anna Pazos (Barcelona, ??1991) tells a story that happened to her in Greece. He went there to report on a local cult that sought to recover the polytheism of the ancient world. On the return trip, he sat next to a boy, a mechanic by profession, a follower of the rituals of Apollo, who spent his weekends doing enze in a white robe. At one point, on the bus, the boyfriend put his hand between her thighs. It was an inappropriate gesture that tickled him nonetheless. Should she retreat to a safe space, of chastity and denunciation, or would she bear to the end the impulse of the transgression that perhaps she herself had caused? “Two narratives were diverging in front of me,” says Pazos, journalist specializing in international issues and scriptwriter of BBC documentaries.
This idea of ??bifurcation is very present in the other book he has just published, the big book that brings together his experiences of youth: Matar el nervi. At the outset, between staying in Barcelona making a career in a local newspaper, growing old at press conferences and at the saraus of commercial literary awards, or leading “an epic and memorable life and imbued with the permanent feeling of ·limitation, possibility and urgency”. The same idea appears again in New York, when Pazos talks about the free spirit of sex: he is writing an essay in which – along the lines of what I explained in Power and Desire – he rails against the culture of rape, surprise due to the fact that in many environments the ambivalence of human relations becomes jivarized and becomes a question of unilateral power. All this – he says – does not help women to be stronger or more free. Rather, it locks them into an infertile and predictable paranoia and condemns them to the paralysis of the victim. One of Anna Pazos’ references is the entrepreneur – for some feminists – Camille Paglia.
Matar el nervi is a thick broth, with many characters. Geopolitics (it goes to Thessaloniki – where Pazos wants to interview the mayor, who is preparing a Jewish memorial -, Jerusalem, the Atlantic Ocean, New York and Catalonia). It reflects a sexual activity with many edges and variants (sex provides the protagonists of the book with practical wisdom far superior to technical and university knowledge) and a perplexed look at the global disorder, between euphoria and depression. Against the one-sidedness of many sudden novels and books, which cheat with the final cause, Matar el nervi – like a few months ago, in a comedy key, Les calces al sol, by Regina Rodríguez Sirvent – presents a reality that it never has only one face. Erasmus and speed, war photography and surfing, oenagés and arms trafficking, elevated but mechanical and bland sex, dirt and glamor (the character of Dafni she meets in a dilapidated student flat who ends up working in a technological multinational in Barcelona ), anti-Zionism and passion for Lloret de Mar, jealousy and desire, creativity and instability, protest and tourism. It is the reality of now, disorganized, turbulent, which you would say only makes sense if you support it in a personality and a narrative voice. That is, if it is a biography. The protagonist of Matar el nervi is in transition towards something, without knowing the thing and without knowing how to get there. From this point of view, it resembles the characters – Germans from Thessaloniki, Ethiopians from Jerusalem, cosmopolitan Canarians, Nigerians from New York – that fill the book with real and eccentric life.
Daughter of a wealthy suburb of Vallès, favored by an awakened intelligence and by the system of international studies and scholarships, Anna Pazos delights in grandiose and unstoppable love and heroic and thorny journalism. And he has written a book that forcefully explains the sadness, the despair, the disenchantment of a world that is tumbling towards collapse.
