Pol Guasch and melancholy as a low blow

In one of his many letters to Julio Payró, Juan Carlos Onetti wrote these lines about one of his books: “Don't make fun of it: it's too 'well written.' Never academic, of course. But a thing excessively of 'words,' of well-written history. Something—to orient you—Huxleyan. It has been said of him that his great defect is being too intelligent. And when you look closely, it's true. It's about becoming a little brutalized. So that it seems as if the problems of the poor men who play the characters are a bit like those of the God who creates them.” Onetti was thinking of undertaking a rewrite, then, that would allow him to find a voice of its own for the text, something he always claimed he had been unable to find in his entire life. He was also thinking, no doubt, of a certain independence in River Plate literature, a “badly written” literature, with Arlt at its helm, of which he considered himself a part.

On the other hand, we can say little about the tradition and style of Pol Guasch , author of the novel En las manos, el paraíso quema (In the Hands, Paradise Burns) . At times, there are traces of a voice in which echoes of the earlier texts of Mercè Rodoreda, for example, might resonate, but overall, we find that the author has deeply felt a series of issues, which he has partly failed to put on paper.

The result is a nostalgic text whose most frequently used resource is comparison. A profusion of "as if" as a stellar device ("as if, upon looking at each other, her eyes decided to work," "leaving the city behind, entering as if the building were devouring them," "as if one could really start from scratch," "as if thousands of years of evolution hadn't existed," "as if it had stuck in my heart"—the et cetera of "as if" could take up several pages, but we'll leave it here), and of "as ifs," combined with repetition to generate a certain circular effect in the prose, a trick that Juan Rulfo probably excelled at in Pedro Páramo, and that's it. ("You avoid saying your name, because saying Rita is like saying: I am the daughter of a miner. The daughter of a miner who lives in the Colonia. The daughter of a miner who lives in the Colonia and acts as a daughter, a sister, a mother, a mother to her mother.")

In one's own hands, Paradise Burns is a kind of vintage dystopia in which its protagonists, all young twenty-somethings, watch the city they live in (a mountain mining town) burn and find and separate themselves in relationships of friendship and love. It's about leaving a home and ending up abandoning a body, as happens to Litón, the character at the beginning of the book, who begins by leaving his home to put out the fires.

Guasch has a hint of the more melancholic and almost corny films of his compatriot Jonás Trueba, such as Los exiliados románticos or Los ilusos (to leave no doubt, shot directly in black and white), but the setting, in this case, is the catastrophe, drawn as a backdrop, epitome of the disaster of a country and of an entire generation, condemned to devastation and death. The story has its moments of beauty, there's no doubt about it, but its resources, whose use does not seem to arise from a necessity (among them, the arbitrary changes of point of view and verb tenses), do not end up producing a novel.

Perhaps what Pol Guasch would need, in the manner of Onetti, is to revisit the Catalan language itself, to tap into its own tradition, so to speak. Or perhaps we can attribute the shortcomings to the translator. Or, as Rita, one of the characters who populates these pages, says: "What you have to do is make a few mistakes; perhaps that's the way for another world to unfold." Onetti would say: to become a little more brutal.

In the Hands, Paradise Burns , by Pol Guasch. Trans. Carlos Mayor. Anagrama, 168 pages.