The mating system of most animal species is very simple: a specific mixture of chance and pheromones results in friction and then procreation. Without the weight of self-awareness, there is no beauty in this union, but also no suffering. And Paulina, the protagonist of Camila Fabbri in The dancing queen (finalist for the Herralde Novel Prize) envies him and pities him.
The scene will be familiar to the reader accustomed to contemporary fiction: Paulina is a woman in her thirties, who has just separated from an insubstantial man, with the anguish of motherhood and egg freezing clinics on the prowl, a boring office job and photocopying. , a single histrionic friend, a defeated father and a mother who does what she can. It is difficult for her to find a meaning pulsating in the core of something that surrounds her, but instead of falling into a nihilistic spiral, she accepts that the form replaces the substance of things: “Felipe was my boyfriend, I was his girlfriend, We lived at the same address. I suspect that this meeting of elements meant that we had fallen in love, that perhaps what we were doing was living the romance of our lives and that everything that came after would be ridiculous.” Fragments like this could make us accuse the novel of being frivolous, but Fabbri's gaze resists the adjective. There is detachment and aggressiveness in the disorientation of the characters, but also the firm will to find texture in details a priori insignificant.
The novel, short and round, braids two temporal threads, both in the first person. On the one hand, in the past, the days of breakup and subsequent drift, in which the protagonist wanders accompanied by Gallant, the dog that her ex has abandoned with her. On the other, the present tense account of a car accident. A Paulina in the limbo of death but surprisingly conscious, is seen bloodied inside her Peugeot 307, where there are also (alive) the dog and an unknown teenager. A scenario this exaggerated is required, the author seems to tell us, for the people around her to pause their small lives and pay attention, to her specifically and to the tragic in general. And it is curious that, although Fabbri does not have a very extensive corpus, the clash is already a topic in her literature: her two books of stories are titled The accidents and We are safe.
Fabbri's prose is abrupt and could even seem dry, but it is not so because of the skill with which he filters the transcendence.
Fabbri's prose is abrupt (he comes from the world of theater and cinema) and could even seem dry, but it is not so because of the skill with which he filters transcendence. Although on some occasions she unnecessarily explains ideas that she has already circumvented with images – “this world is so deep and so nonsense that nothing makes real sense” – there is in The dancing queen a firm will not to give in to futility or despair. And this affects the philosophy that lies at the heart of the novel, but also the style, which is sarcastic and close but also fine and elegant.
The protagonist respects her enemy—loneliness, cynicism—and that is why her tone is more strange than hesitant. She looks at herself in the same way as the animals that keep appearing in the novel. They procreate, they obey and they are always: “Out there Gallant he growls at the skinny chickens, who look at him without any interest. I call him, the dog is coming. I call him, the dog is coming. I call him, the dog is coming. Things that can only happen with pets and that we should not naturalize so much.” Like a documentary filmmaker who approaches little by little to study an unknown behavior, Camila Fabbri does not romanticize animal naivety, but rather, through literature, tries to understand this space of beauty and suffering that separates her from it.
Camila Fabbri
Anagram, 2023
176 pages. 17.90 euros
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