‘The Scorpions’, the prodigious novel by Sara Barquinero

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Narrative | JOSÉ LUIS IBÁÑEZ SALAS | @ibanezsalas

The third novel by the Spanish writer Sara Barquinero (I think) it is a masterpiece, (it is) one of the best novels I have read recently, among the most outstanding so far this century. Impactful, complex in its complicated simplicity, captivating, dazzling, hypnotizing in many moments, fully human, without ceasing to be that eloquent distraction that I ask of literature, that I ask of my narrative readings. What I ask of life. It is titled The Scorpions and appeared in 2024.

“The Buddhists were right: one never wants to diebut to kill something that lives within oneself, even if sometimes that means ending one’s own life.”

This is how it begins The Scorpions. And when you read those twenty-six words you don’t realize (you couldn’t) that what you are going to find inside this justifiably voluminous novel is a book about death (which “is obscene, a totalitarian terror”), but above all about the need, the desire, the desire, the belief in the convenience of suicide. But don’t be scared, everything is dazzling, almost scientific, but fully literary. Someone telling you something. You already know. The novels.

One of the quotes that open the chapters of the book is powerful. It’s a line from Leonard Cohen’s 1964 poem ‘Opium and Hitler’ that says:

“Opium and Hitler taught him that the world was made of glass.”

In The Scorpions we quickly witness this experimentation of reality uncouplingas if whoever experiences it had a hidden answer within their reach that would allow them to appear happy, or at least calm, without having to pretend. As if there was hope left. But above all, we continually have the opposite in mind, hopelessness in its portentous doses of self-destruction. With all those “absurd complications” and all that “indestructible emotional pain.” Without such sadness (“incompatible with any promise of happiness”) belonging only to those who star in what Barquinero tells us in a masterful, torrential way. And we were nothing more than entertained and absorbed spectators before “that negative and complex dimension in which some men want to take refuge from time to time.”

“Opening up to another always strains the soul.”

And enjoy your own company, know how to do it…

There is in The Scorpions above all a conspiracy story sunk into the very soul of the Internet (“a macro conspiracy theory that has been playing for more than a century with the mental health of the poor human beings who fall into its clutches through a society called The Scorpions”) that draws that mysterious and indestructible line that separates the credible from the incredible, reality from fiction, certainty from fear and anxiety and the demand to know what in reality we already knew. (At the end of the book, the author warns us of the fictitious nature of “the entire conspiracy described in this book”). There is all that and, within, human beings who are existentially damaged, complex and full of the imperative need to be loved and perhaps to love (to aspire “to a complete love without uncertainty” that fills without gaps, and allows one to live “an existence outside of the disaster and authentic death. Everything was specially designed from the incandescent writing of a Sara Barquinero who was surprisingly mature as a writer, admirably gifted with the art of the sculpted word to be read as if nothing else could be done with it.

“How do people stay calm?”

Are there people who are made to suffer anxiety, to feel it and not know how to ignore it? What does exist, exists in the novel, are human beings frightened not by the suffering caused by pain and anguish, but by knowing that it has no objective. Depression that leads to the powerful idea of ​​suicide and with it to death. Death, which is perhaps something even worse. In short: the damn concern for the future. When “any misfortune becomes a habit.” Is it the most human thing to “find meaning in pain”? Is that teaching “the younger sister of conspiracy and paranoia”?

One of the chapters of The Scorpions It is, in turn, a novel that its protagonists read. A novel that would become, perhaps, in itself, an extraordinary novel. If it weren’t for the fact that it is an essential and ethereally perfect element of the sinuous mechanism of Barquinero’s novel. That novel within the novel is titled Low astraland it is supposedly written (and starring) by the Italian Margherita Vitale (nothing to do with a homonymous writer who exists in realitysomething that I do not know if it is known to the author of The Scorpions).

“Having fun is too easy. Just having fun, I mean. The best philosophers have shown that happiness is not the natural end of the human being.”

Vitale knows she would be cured if someone loved her, that is why death is within her, her body “is a tomb.” There is no doubt that “the relationship with death changes people.”

It is in this section of The Scorpions when the idea of ​​music capable of ending all our pretensions to basic humanity and survival is closer to readers. An idea from which Barquinero (capable of creating a character, a musician, for whom the marvelous Smells like teen spirit from Nirvana be a “tacky nineties”) supplies a good part of his book: the devil’s chords.

“Scorpions are one of the few animals that commit suicide when they believe their life is over, so as not to suffer. If you enclose a scorpion in a circle of fire, it will either sting itself or walk calmly into the flames.”

There is none Hidden Truth that only sadness can reveal. Don’t you think?

Or maybe yes?

The scorpions. Sara Barquinero. Lumen. Barcelona, ​​2024. ONLINE PURCHASE