The effect left by this latest Planeta Award is devastating: it seems like an intrasystemic act of cultural transgression. Wonderful the capacity of The maid’s daughters to de-escalate downwards and without limit into the underground of the novel. As I read, sunk in misery and on the deck chair, I wondered if any of the jury members made the sacrifice of reading those 400 pages. Didn’t Rosa Regàs or Carmen Posadas feel cosmic shame? What did the fine reader Pere Gimferrer see that prompted his favorable vote? Hasn’t José Manuel Blecua been taken by all the academic and non-academic demons? What is the limit from which a jury reader becomes chloroformed or anesthetized in such a way that he renounces being who he is?
The novel tells the parallel biography of two girls born to the same father on the same night in 1900 in Galicia. One of the mothers (the maid) decides to make the change so that her daughter has a happy life in the house of the lord (and father) and the lady’s daughter suffers the suffering of poverty and helplessness (and her drunk husband lost) . 42 years later, the two old women meet again to tell each other the truth, when the lady’s real daughter has been welcomed as one of the family and has brought prosperity to the canning factory (which even educates the workers) and a buoyant business, while father’s other sister escaped to Argentina and had an equally prosperous life.
The feuilleton is a genre that can be done well or badly. Here strange things jump out on every page”
The feuilleton is a genre that can be done well or badly. Here strange things jump out on every page. Suddenly, in chapter 15, “Don Gustavo” goes back to look for Doña Inés “in bed”, where they recovered “soaked in her sweat and caresses”, without the slightest idea of why this is happening. part of Inés (nor the reader), who never “asked him what had caused this change of mood.” The plot needed another child. As there is no evil that does not come from her, she became pregnant again or, better yet, she managed to “detect the demonstrations of love” (it would have been strange not to detect them) “and the fertilized womb that began to shape her figure.” ”. It cannot be just bad luck that the child is born when an invasion of “black, white, brown” rats enters the house. There were also those black as coal.” And we will agree that it is reason enough to return to Punta do Bico in Galicia and leave her husband in that damned Cuba, “always involved in some political or military mess.” Of course, the risk is that Mr. Gustavo will become an idiot among Cuban women and mulatto women, and that is how Inés apprehensively imagines him, “grabbing another woman’s waist” or, and I don’t know what is worse, “tangled in other people’s arms.” just a moment before, I imagine, she “withdraws her tears,” as the women do in this novel: they “withdraw” her tears many times.
The narrative aberrations are continuous. The inconsistencies too. The capricious antics continue to delirious extremes, like the key letter that Clara discovers and reads, but whose information about “the sin of the flesh” committed is only confirmed by the doctor 21 years after the father died (because the doctor wrote it all down in a “little notebook. Just in case”), or like the girl who is stillborn to prevent her from procreating the marriage of two half-siblings, etc.
Was it necessary for Doña Inés, the mother, to be late for her husband’s death because she was busy hunting for a sperm whale full of rich amber (and which makes the family a millionaire), just after the father confesses the secret? from Clara to the doctor? There is also no shortage of adventurous daring already in Clara’s sixties, when she discovers “an irrepressible desire to let herself be hugged and, if necessary, make love.” Her husband Jaime—and her half-brother—doesn’t love her at all. She, on the other hand, did “like the way Plácido looked at her,” a bit of a Francoist, but luckily widowed 19 years ago, and with a political correctness in 1963 that was admirable because “Clara’s silence was the consent that Plácido needed to receive.” while he unbuttons her blouse and the party begins. At that time, Clara also discovers that her eyes have “the frame of a lady and not a maid”, a premonition of the discovery of being the daughter of Doña Inés, who has discovered her gifts of business intelligence (inherited from her mother, of course: again the force of the blood).
With her husband, Doña Inés does well not to argue. She is of no use, although she went so far as to swallow her displeasure “at the risk of ending up suffering from heartburn.” On the other hand, Doña Inés “grabbed him by the hair and gave him four lashes, which were taken away for “always the desire to open your mouth again.” Damn, poor thing. It is also normal that if the guilty father receives information about his daughter, much later he is willing to take “to the precipice of his death the chill that split his heart in two when he learned about his daughter Clara.” .
“Someone has lost the nerve to reward a school essay of disturbing crudeness”
The feeling of ridicule is suffocating. Because of the plot, because of the style, because of the prudery, because of the staleness, because of the simplicity, because of the arbitrariness, because of the absolute nothingness of a serial without even the category of serial. Someone has lost the nerve to reward a school essay of disturbing crudeness. The popular presenter Sonsoles Ónega does not have the slightest responsibility in this calamity: she will have written the best she has known how to write a novel, as she has written and published many others. The systemic problem is the resignation of the seven members of the jury and the publisher, a fraud so massive that it once again betrays the trust of a majority of Spaniards who want to read entertaining stories without necessarily navigating moral and literary destitution.
Sonsoles Ónega
Planet, 2023
480 pages. 22.90 euros
Planet Prize 2023
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