‘The Mount of Furias’, by Fernanda Trías: the mountain sermon

Fictional places that give the author the silence and distance necessary so that loneliness and madness His character expands like a gangrenned leg or as a lyrical outburst of variable cloudiness.

The only distraction of this woman is to write in a notebook: «I write because yes, not because something has happened in my life but the opposite, because nothing has happened and the only thing that happens is this: my struggle with words, my own thoughts ». Fortunately, this is not true. It is just from that moment when the reader begins to find out the family past of the protagonist, of her proximity to the grandmother and the suffering of having grown up with a mother whose life was marked by alcoholism and prostitution.

The relationship between women and the warden is one of the most interesting segments of the novel. For a moment, it seems that the story would lead to a kind of ‘Lady Chatterley’ lover ‘proletarian, or a’ in the mood for love ‘rural, but Trías soon abandons this subtram to replace it with another, which is the one that in the end will gain more weight: The mysterious appearance of corpses that the woman will wash and bury in various places in the mountain. This pious vocation will degenerate in a necrophilic coexistence, with a character called the revive.

In a recent interview, Trías said: “When I want to see a story with a plot I look for a Netflix series, but telling a story is not the main function of literature.” This disinterest in the plot He would come from his fed up for the success achieved with his previous novel, ‘Mugre Rosa’. However, the most successful of the novel seem to me the passages that would precisely be part of what Trías calls, in a derogatory way, ‘plot’.

The resources that the author uses to sabotage or dilute the plot are stylistic equivalent to those women of Jehovahthat occasionally visit the woman from the mountain to make her come to reason. I refer to these interspersed chapters in which the narrative perspective of the mountain is assumed, of an allegedly naive invoice and, in the end, expendable.

EITHER The admonitive tone with which we are taught about the power of destruction of man and his machines that pour the earth. Or the repeated drawings and typographic incursions whose function is, I suppose, wake up from the silly illusion of literature. And it is a shame because, in this book, Trías gives us several examples of The good narrator that is And to tell a story that catches the reader is not at odds with an excellent, evocative and suggestive prose.