A new book by Irene Solà (Malla, 1990). Four years after the dazzling and progressive success of Canto jo i la muntanya balla – awards, more than 100,000 copies sold, more than twenty translations, a theatrical adaptation and symphonic music -, I gave you eyes and you looked is hitting bookstores on Wednesday les tenebres (Anagrama), a novel that uses the simultaneity of time and space to tell the story of a line of women based on a pact with the devil.
The beginning of the book seems like a vigil, but then we see that it goes further, it is like a geological cut in which everything comes to light at once.
When I start a book, I don’t decide which book I will write, or how it will begin and end, or what will happen or who will appear in it, but I start by trying to understand what interests me and what I want to learn, what thoughts I want to dedicate the next few years to. Here I saw from the beginning that I was very interested in the pact with the devil, a premise of folklore present in many cultures and very very present in our imagination, and very related to the idea of ​​the story, the magic, the fairy tale. As I write and gradually understand the history of this family and the characters, I realize, for example, that the novel takes place all in one day, I see that from within this day, from this day of today, of this contemporary present as well, which is not a concrete day today, which has no face and eyes, so that it can be every day, and so it is from here that I will drag out this day, and it will be so bad readable the day and time within the novel because I can fit all the memories, all the stories, both from the group of the living who inhabit the house and from all these dead women, ghosts or spirits, or however we want say, that they have lived at the farm since the moment of this pact with the devil.
Why the pact with the devil?
In Canto Jo…, while it has some small premises or small magical characters, most of the characters and events are absolutely flesh and blood, and I find myself wanting to play and explore a little more from magical premises, imagination, fable, story even. Because it is in fiction, it is in literature, in narrative, in stories, where magic exists, today. One of the things that moves me when I write is this reflection, this exploration, this squeezing, playing, trying or finding the infinite possibilities that the narrative opens up.
And the devil?
There is an implicit pact between writer and reader in which when you read a fictional book you turn off the sensors of incredulity, and instead of reading and saying: “It doesn’t exist, it’s impossible”, you believe it, go inside and you dive into it, believe the incredible and make the impossible your own.
He has once quoted Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, for the way you enter a magical world…
It’s one of my great teenage reads, and I don’t know what I understood and what I didn’t, but I remember the enjoyment you have at that moment, to get in there and live there like a madwoman on your way to Mordor. It’s spectacular. There is a lot of this enjoyment in what I do, both reading and writing as well as exploring and learning.
Rather than inventing a world, he reinterprets it based on folklore.
Yes. I have studied Fine Arts and trained as an artist, and I always have the feeling that I work from very contemporary art methodologies. I start a book doing research, and in this book there is an interest in folklore, with a treatment of Rondallistic time, the devil’s pact and different tales and fables, many other explorations, based on a research paper, in addition to a very great work of imagination, which is not self-fiction but you do have to find a door to be able to get inside the characters and the places.
Everything happens in the same house, but there are moments when it doesn’t seem like it, with many layers of light and darkness.
Perspective and subjectivity interest me a lot and I always end up working on them. In Canto jo…, there was a constant game of perspectives, but also in Els dics (L’Altra, 2018). I like to think and reflect around subjectivity, and how the same place, the same room, even the same events, each of those who are a part of them will feel them, perceive them, understand them and explain them in a way different Here there is a constant play of the different perspectives and the different ways of seeing the world and of understanding it and of remembering these women, which are sometimes even contradictory. The book tells some familiar stories, but from a series of very different subjectivities. While I was writing it I thought that you have been building your family history, in an absolutely fragmentary way, taking from here and there and feeling one day that I don’t know who in your family is telling I don’t know what and over time you have you have been putting all these pieces and all these intuitions in place, and over time you have been understanding and building this family history of yours. No one ever grabs you and says: “Come, sit here and I’ll tell you the whole family story from beginning to end.”
Reflect on women.
Reflecting on perspective, memory and forgetting allows me to do so on history, capital history, what we have collectively remembered and what we have forgotten, who decided which stories were important and which events were worth watching record and which ones not. These women are the ones who have not been the protagonists, and they are not only women, but they are old women, ugly, abject or out of the canon, and they are also dead women. The perspective allows me to reflect on motherhood, sexuality, violence or romantic love, and especially how romantic love has been constructed for women, how we have narrated female characters either as a story or as to fiction But there is also the whole ironic, funny part of women who don’t stop laughing and making jokes, which ties in with an almost irreverent will of the novel, and with a will that is even relativistic.
The barriers between good and evil blur…
And between luck and bad luck, too! It depends on how you look at the world and yourself will always lack something. Is it lucky or unlucky not to feel pain? Is it bad luck to see everything? Is it unlucky not to have a memory? It all depends on how you live it.
The character of Clavell is inspired by the bandit Serrallonga.
A complicated and terrible man, yes, but when they are torturing him and when they are killing him, my stomach also turns. It’s that people are many things and no one is only black or white, and everyone is the child of many decisions, of many small circumstances.
There is also a lot of pleasure, and a lot of sex.
The book is full of these lights and shadows, day and night, life and death, moments of joy and moments of sadness, but it is a book with an intention of play, too. It’s like a ghost story, of which there are many, and the ghost is a character classically related to memory and forgetting. It is not corporeal, it cannot be touched, it has no body, but at the same time this is an absolutely material and corporeal book, full of descriptions of corporeality and not only of bodies, of humans and animals, but also of the landscape, also of the house, and there are a lot of descriptions of childbirth, of births, but also of sex, and at the same time there are descriptions of torture, of pain, and of preparing food, of preparing wolf traps… And that’s why this ends up being a book in which there is a very important presence of smells, smells, textures…
There is a very powerful lexicon.
But it is not sought after, but I was imbued with these words and these ways of saying. As I enter the novel, I understand this narrative voice that walks around the house, and I imagined it like a gust of air that enters the different rooms, it gets closer to the ghosts, because in fact the Lives are almost the background sound, but we don’t care. From here he tells us his memories, sensations, thoughts, ideas, and when the narrative voice explains things in our world that we take for granted, technology issues or ways of doing things, he does it in his own way, from of the language they have.
Has he made a deal with the devil?
No deal with the devil, but I have looked into the darkness.
