The literary language of the veteran theater director and playwright Francisco Suárez in this novel is unique, exclusive, inimitable and hypnotic in its street-level, cultured and agitated orality. Verbosity and absurdity, linguistic obscenity and harsh frankness are chained in the voices of the protagonist Amada, who has spoken since she was a baby and does not stop talking afterward, along with various narrators who tell things as if they were stories told. on the edge of the fire, street can fire and sticky smoke, anticlerical and in chronic rebellion. It can evoke Ángel Vazquez, but also Valle-Inclán and Lorca, although practically the entire literary family of the West passes through the novel: from Virginia Woolf or Turgenev to Proust through Madame Bovary and coming to Bertolt Brecht, to make the short list.
This novel is very, very rare, and its Lusitano-Hispano-Gypsy language is a prodigy of freshness, eagerness, density and daring: musical, humorous, Cervantine as in the most oral and ribald hors d'oeuvres. It has some elements of blind man's romances and gruesome stories, and yet it also contains the joy and joviality of sweet moments of abused lives. The style pulls on the reader even though the changes of characters and scenes are constant and abrupt, but almost always with movements as happy as this sparkling fragment, straight to the cut and without modesty: “Cuban ass, long femur and expert hands in special scrubs. They spent the night in the Celestial suite of the Palace hotel. Although he behaved like a good officer and gentleman, he had, and did what he could, two superb shots. He missed the shot on the first and, on the second, the shot backfired. Looking at the pretty girl's legs putting on the crystal stockings that he had given her, he declared to her with humiliated content. Not even Baker has them that pretty! They are worth a fortune. With a confused voice. Colonel Obrigada. And let's see if he shoots next time.”
Or this other: “When I was young I was sweet. Honey-colored eyes, a snub nose with a moon face, short, retinta, and long hair tied up in a bun. A happy halo brightened his face when he laughed, but life darkened his halo and soured his laughter. The cameos of Arnold Schoenberg and his granddaughter or of Pessoa, of Jorge Semprún or Álvaro Cunhal —or even single phrases that shoot with bullets: “I'm sorry. He won't happen again. I was wrong”—are as successful as they are crazy to tell the bitchy, very bitchy lives of a handful of characters from the fifties between Évora and the Portuguese secret (the fearsome PIDE), Extremadura and La Raya, Madrid, the puterío, the Falangist bastards and some bullfighters, the Gran Vía at dawn and the squalor of Chicote.
Confidence, dramaturgical craft, stylistic electricity, grotesque foreshortening as an almost permanent point of view: a very original neo-baroque hive of turbidity, secrets and verbal lubricity
The extremely complicated structure of the book, the variety of narrators, the transcription of letters and diary pages, the assignment to finish an unfinished novel and the saturation of literature entangles everything without stopping one from wondering why one wants to know what happens to Amada and if whether or not she consummates her love for her brother, finally reunited at the age of 20, while the girl reads and reads tirelessly. Shameless soap opera, yes, but the chaos of the stories captures the reader thanks to the glibness, the joke, the bad temper, the eager snout of a very unleashed tongue for a crazy and sour story. Confidence, dramaturgical craft, stylistic electricity, grotesque foreshortening as an almost permanent point of view (except for Amada), pity for the marginality of the characters and a dense acid mist as an atmosphere of Salazarism and Francoism lived at ground level: a very original hive neobaroque of turbidity, secrets and verbal lubricity.
Francisco Suarez
Regional Editor of Extremadura, 2023
308 pages. 12 euros
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