The writer Jordi Puntí these days is promoting his latest novel, Confeti (Proa), winner of the Sant Jordi award, which is based on the life of Xavier Cugat. I was interviewing him a few days ago in this same Francesc Bombí newspaper and one of the highlighted sentences caught my attention: “Information is a springboard to be able to jump towards the imagination”. After delving into all the possible documentation about the musician for a stack of years, the result is a novel and not properly a biography.
And this is exactly what Kathryn Scanlan has done in Agafar les regnes (Second Periphery/Errata Naturae), a little gem that deserves many readers. In short chapters – some very, very short, but with a lot of teak – Scanlan tells us the life of Sonia, who as a child already wanted a horse, dreamed of being a jockey and ended up dedicating her whole life to horses as a stable maid and trainer, she does all sorts of jobs on ranches and racetracks in the US Midwest. A woman in a man’s world, in which “there is a lot of suffering and substance abuse”, jockeys get high and then throw up and thus maintain the weight, and where because of being a woman “everything you do you have to do twice as well”.
At the end of the novel, Scanlan informs the reader that he had a few meetings with Sonia, in person and on the phone, and that the book, “which is a work of fiction,” came from this.
With these two novels as a sample, in principle it seems that it should not be so difficult to understand what fiction is, however much it has a basis in fact. But lately we have been perplexed as a few energumen threatened the artistic team of Cacophony, which was performed until yesterday at Sala Beckett. It was a play about the power of social media. It wasn’t against them or their idols, but they didn’t understand. They spit insults without even having moved to see the assembly. Make a note of it in case it’s rescheduled or toured, and go there because it’s a good show, not because of the morbid, there’s not a drop of it.