There is a temptation that literary critics too often fall into: analyzing a novel in light of its author’s biography. I think that, in its proper measure and justifying the link, it can be enlightening for the reading of the work. Obviously I am not referring to certain attempts to psychoanalyze the writer’s mind by deducing from the problems of his characters supposed personal traumas of the creator. This type of lucubration should be left out of a serious literary criticism, but some data from the author’s biography can shed light when studying her production.
In the case at hand, ‘The lives I did not live’ (Candaya, 2023), I think it is obvious the importance that two places that are central to the novel, Menorca and Iran, have had in the life of the writer. Patricia Almarcegui lives on the Balearic island and is a deep connoisseur of the Asian country, to which she has dedicated her book ‘Knowing Iran’ (2018).
Both vital coordinates explain the relationship established in the book between two territories that, apparently, cannot be further apart (geographically and culturally). On one side we have a peaceful and small Mediterranean island that only in the last decades has seen its idiosyncrasy threatened by tourism that little by little is taking it over as it already did with its neighbors Mallorca, Formentera and Ibiza.
The friendship between Anna and Pari takes root, and never better said, in the garden of the busy hotel that they both take care of even when they are aware that they will soon be evicted.
On the other hand, there is the magnetic Persia, a nation with a rich culture but with a convulsive political present and seen from European eyes with too many prejudices based, for the most part, on ignorance of its reality. Almarcegui gives prominence to these two places to show us in fragments that he intersperses throughout the novel episodes of the history of Iran (a terrible attack, but also the taste of one of its past rulers for photography or filming of the first of his films that won an award at the Cannes festival) and Menorca (shipwrecks, the siege by an imposing Turkish fleet or the settlement on the island of some Phoenician warriors).
This dichotomy that is established throughout the novel between Iran and Menorca is personified by the two protagonists of the book: the Iranian Pari and the Spanish Anna. It is about two strong women, with a complicated past and who, after meeting in an abandoned hotel on the island that has been occupied by a group of citizens fed up with speculation, become friends. The friendship between Anna and Pari takes root, and never better said, in the garden of the busy hotel that they both take care of even when they are aware that they will soon be evicted. The Iranian woman was the first to work on the abandoned terrace, risking trespassing on property that she did not own, despite being an immigrant woman. For Anna, a biologist specializing in landscaping and gardens, the place is a way of rediscovering the family garden where she spent the best of her childhood and which her parents had to get rid of. References to plants are frequent throughout the book; Almarcegui includes them in the narration with a careful and poetic prose in which the chromatic allusions stand out. For example, she dazzles the mastery with which the author describes the different shades of the same color that can be found in different areas of Menorca: pistachio green, emerald green, jade green, mint green…
The mastery with which the author describes the different shades of the same color that can be found in different areas of Menorca is dazzling: pistachio green, emerald green, jade green, mint green…
In this vindication of nature, there are two tendencies that are making their way in contemporary literature with increasing frequency. On the one hand, environmentalism that, exemplified especially by Anna, warns of the consequences of climate change and the need to adapt our gardens to increasingly arid climates. On the other hand, the neighborhood struggle to give life to the abandoned hotel, before it becomes a luxury establishment, is determined by the havoc that unbridled tourism is causing in Menorca and in many other corners of the Mediterranean. Almarcegui perfectly summarizes what islands like this one suffer (which are gradually expelling their own inhabitants) in the following sentence: “That desire that never ceases to live in paradise” (p. 39).
independent women
These problems that the over-exploitation of tourism has brought to the Balearic island contrast with the reception for migrants that the busy hotel offers. Among them, those of the small Iranian community in Menorca stand out, who often use this enclave as a crossing point to other countries. The book shows us the difficulties of emigration by narrating the long journey (from airport to airport, from one border control to another) that Mana, Pari’s grandson, takes from his native Iran to the town where his grandmother has settled. . There the young man arrives in full transition to womanhood, thus joining a kind of female community created by the two protagonists, his friend Laia and Anna’s little daughter. The sisterhood that is established among all of them contrasts with the difficulties that Pari and Anna have had to suffer throughout their lives due to their condition as independent women: marginalization, family misunderstanding, motherhood alone, toxic relationships, etc.
Despite the fact that the meeting between the two women around the occupied Menorcan hotel is the highlight of the novel, in reality, it focuses more on the previous trajectory of the two before reaching this moment than on what happened there. Almarcegui chooses to give greater relevance to the past, creating a novel that, if we add the aforementioned episodes from the history of Iran and Menorca, ends up having a fragmentary structure and in which time jumps are frequent. In any case, these characteristics make ‘The Lives I Didn’t Live’ a suggestive novel in which, despite its brevity (barely one hundred and forty pages), the author deals with numerous and interesting topics around two women, Anna and Pari, and two places, Menorca and Iran, that are twinned in the work.
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