There are moments of life in which the burden that moves forward becomes heavier than ever. The loss of a mother usually gives way to one of these stages, so painful for most people who, however inevitable they are, one does not seem to be prepared to face the suffering they bring. When Alejandro Palomas (Barcelona, 1967) began writing A life (Destiny Editions, 2025), the author was aware of the complexity of the subject: the terrace death, it is afraid to look at her face. Nobody wants to lose a mother. But the author was also aware that, although there are scars that never disappear, literature has even greater power: healing pain.
Consider that Alejandro Palomas’s new novel goes on the orphanhood that threatens to destabilize the life of three brothers is to stay only on the surface. The work of the Barcelona writer is a tender tribute to the pleasures that give hope and to the sweet calm that is born of loving others, pretending to honor those links that bother us and support us at the times when we need it most. Palomas extol the mother’s figure and claim A life The strength of friendship and brotherhood to digest our own weaknesses.
He also does it as a farewell. The writer closes the cycle that opened with his supervants A mother (2014) and concludes a saga that is immersed in the dynamics of a family composed of Amalia and their three children. The four books of the Palomas Universe are independent reading and it is not essential to follow the order of publication; However, your approach on this occasion is more nostalgic than in previous deliveries. The writer, who uses his works as a “Diario de Vida”, faces writing this time with the “healed wound” of losing his mother: “When I wrote the previous novels, my mother was alive and she was my zero reader, so I wrote imagining me by reading them. In this novel my mother was no longer, so she has been writing with her, not for her. ”
However, Alejandro Palomas does not consider that the work revolves around death, but about what comes before and after those who suffer from outside. “I am very interested in disorderly time because it gives you a lot of freedom to live better. If not, we are slaves of a temporality that is actually artificial, ”says the author. “How will we be later? How did we go before? Where will we be and when before someone’s death? ” Palomas states that “life is what we are and we do life”: “It is not that life exists outside of us and suddenly we access it, but that life is manufactured and created daily to the extent of our possibilities.”
The author explores the loss of death from the concept of the “second half of your life”, which begins when your mother is missing. “From there you have no roof, there is no shelter. The shelter you have to manufacture it with your own evolution as a human being, ”says Palomas, pointing out that everything depends on the relationship you have had with your mother and the relationship you have with yourself. “If you have not managed to have a good relationship with you when you get to that last station, at the time you get off that train and face that desert that is life, you sink,” he warns.
Perhaps that is why the novel delves into the difficulties of the preparation, at the time prior to the death of a loved one. When Fer finds out that Amalia has cancer, the protagonist of the story thinks during one of the passages that “rowing against current” plays, a current that considers so “adverse and lethal” that life will cost her to face her. Palomas considers that one is never prepared for this event: “While your mother exists, you are a son, and being a son is wonderful. But when your mother ceases to exist, you stop being a son and you simply become someone. ” The writer comments that “when you have no children, you become an odd element”, becoming a “small planet.” “If you have not learned to think how an individual can be made very complicated,” says Palomas, emphasizing that when death comes “there is no place to return”, because “there is only what remains in front of you and the back is only the memory.”
Although we are all aware that time ends, the disease puts expiration date. It also arrives, without prior notice, as a slab that falls and breaks into a thousand pieces. “We believe that cancer is something that does not touch us, that passes through the neighbor’s door but never through ours, and suddenly one day is at home. It is then that you learn that the disease is part of the bond, ”confesses the writer about his own experience. “The patients become very needy of touch and that produces a lot of approach. There are many borders that are demolished, many taboos that disappear. A very pure relationship is created and you think: ‘I hope we would have done this before, hopefully we would have had less debts with each other,’ “Palomas reflects. The work deepens the direct relationship of the mourner with whom he takes care of him, drawing the force of that union.
But the disease also exposes those uncomfortable truths that, no matter how much no one dares to verbalize them out loud, constantly flutter through the head creating a rather painful internal struggle. The main character of A life He affirms that cancer is “asking you why he has touched one of yours when there are many others who perhaps deserve him more.” For the author, showing the “most human of the human” face goes through showing both his “lights” and “the shadows that make us who we are”: “There can be no light if there is no shadow, and try to reflect the human being in all its complexity. I don’t like writing hiding things that I think are natural and we would have to have very settled. ”
In times where the right to euthanasia is still sowing pitfalls, Alejandro Palomas claims it as “the most natural in the world” even though it is not an issue that is touched directly in the novel. “Wanting means giving a good life and giving a good death. There is no more mystery. From there, giving good death means helping to die to someone when life is no longer living, ”says the writer, who recognizes that he does not understand“ what is the taboo ”. “We would have to listen to who cannot live. How can we let someone who is telling us that his suffering is so great that he wants to leave? ”Palomas points out.
Vulnerability is the most beautiful part of the human being, it is what makes us unique. What differentiates each person from others is the color of their vulnerability. The way to make visible and integrate everything we always try to hide because they have taught us is normalizing it.
Alejandro Palomas
– Writer
The author also defends the importance of normalizing and embraceing male vulnerability, often invisible by shame or social pressure. Alejandro Palomas considers it “the most beautiful part of the human being”, which “makes us unique”, something that is embodied “in the art and in the different works of each one.” “The family of the book is composed of three children, one of them is gay and another is a lesbian. It seems wonderful that nobody has talked about this, ”says the writer. “The way to make visible and integrate the difference, vulnerability, fragility and everything we always try to hide because they have taught us is normalizing it,” he adds.
Another of the most characteristic elements of Alejandro Palomas’ literature is the reference to nature and plants, which is noted more than ever in A life. “The doctor’s sentence interwoven that crack that opens on the ground and that, climbing by the wall, ascends as a root, thus defining the border between the past and future,” says one of the passages of the book. The author attributes it to the “green hand” of his mother for being “all the time surrounded by plants” and the fact of having grown “in a florist.” “We have had a lot of awareness about the roots, about knowing how to root well and give importance to what is not seen, because the roots are not seen,” says pigeons. “Actually, the scars we carry are at our root, not in what we see. They are in the emotion, in the plexus, in the memory, in childhood, in what we share with our mother when we were very small, “he says, claiming that” every child must be entitled to childhood with good treatment. ”
Memory and memory is what makes us react to the present. We are all that we have been and we are all that we have not been: all those decisions we make and all those rejections.
Alejandro Palomas
– Writer
“We are what we have been,” says the writer. “We are the child, we are the teenager, we are the sum of all we are that we have been,” he says when recalling the appointment of the work in which he expresses that “our memory is an accordion of accumulated information folders and millimetrically organized.” For him, “memory and memory is what makes us react to the present”, even being able to “create thousands of lives only with the memories we have.” “We are even what we have not been: all those decisions that we make and all those rejections, with which the memory and memory is infinite,” he reflects.
Although our existence ends at some point, Alejandro Palomas has managed so that the successful universe of Amalia that concludes in A life Keep sailing through other ways. Although he confesses that he does not close to “things happen in the audiovisual field,” bookstores will continue to present the history of this family in different formats. As of April 2, the first installment of the saga, A motherwill be published as a graphic novel by Lunwerg Editores. “The project is to take a volume every year or a year and a half, with totally new material and being a kind of mafalda, where Amalia is a very unleashed, fun and tender old lady,” explains the author. The book will be illustrated by Carolina de Prada.
Alejandro Palomas hopes that, after the trip he proposes, the readers “are accompanied” and “do not feel alone”, ending “comforted.” After all, it seeks that their literature be a “safe place” for those who embark on it. “The six months I had to spend taking care of my mother with my sisters have been the six months Heavies But more beautiful than I have passed with her, ”he has retrospective reflecting it in the work. Both for him and for the protagonist of the story “Life is a wonderful party.”
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