World and lens: Toni Sala’s Escenaris

Detail of the cover of Toni Sala’s Escenaris. / L’Altra Editorial

License Creative Commons

Andreu Navarra

Just as we gained nothing — and lost a great deal — when a certain strand of the left abandoned humour and ceded that terrain to the far right and its obedient conspiratorial fringe, so too have we gained a new world now that writers have reclaimed laughter as a subversive force. At last, we can breathe again and read literature that is truly free, rather than those dreary, thesis-ridden books. A newly published novel from Males Herbes, Mara Faye Lethem’s Series boja si no ho fessis — the story of a pregnant woman, fed up to the back teeth with moralising sermons, who becomes a self-liberated serial killer; a kind of inverted Patrick Bateman in a world where the Patrick Batemans continue, sadly, to multiply, untouched by the humourless zeal of the illiberal left — also gestures towards the path Toni Sala takes in this ambitious, flayed-back novel, unafraid to press its finger directly into the wound of contemporary Catalonia.

We are far removed from the days when Pere Marín (1998) or Rodalies (2004) shook the orthodox certainties of well-behaved Little Catalonia. Sala can now devise novels as ambitious as those of Francesc Serés. And the school of “Sincere Realism”, developed in Girona by Ponç Puigdevall, Damià Bardera, Anna Carreras Aubets and Jordi Dausà, seems to be consolidating — while the capital has sunk steadily into anodyne discourse and literary insignificance. Girona blows the world wide open; Barcelona tries to make peace with too many post-ideological inanities. That, at least, is how I see it.

The braided stories that Sala offers here will make you laugh — and think hard about the kind of country we live in. A stylistic and thematic counterpart might be Marta Sanz’s Farándula (Anagrama, 2015), equally steeped in grotesque energy and expressionistic truth about Madrid’s theatrical world. Sala’s perspective on actors and the stage leads him, at long last, to dare to speak truths about his own cultural ecosystem — one sorely in need of giving up its comfort blanket. It was necessary to say things like this: “Barcelona’s theatres are full of stunted authors — just look around someday. That’s why there’s no ambition. Or rather: actors in Barcelona are stunted because the theatre made there lacks ambition. It shrinks them, and the whole thing becomes a snake eating its own tail. A theatre without great actors is a theatre without great acting. Barcelona is a machine for levelling down, a theatrical machine for castration”. The protagonist is letting rip — but it is true that literature in Barcelona suffocates between its perennial petty-bourgeois small-mindedness and its guilty substitute: a pseudo-Leninism without neurons and without a single reading of Marx. It is a posture that has grown tiresome and one we are, thankfully, beginning to outgrow.

This Gironan nihilism is far healthier than the polite, well-behaved civic convenience that wafts through the capital. In Escenaris (L’Altra Editorial), real Puigcerdà throbs and breathes: a real Catalonia populated by obese bodies, by the mentally ill traumatised by the end of the Procés, by loneliness and individualism, hellish hospitals, depressive scriptwriters, a dystopian Barcelona, emo teenagers with heads full of post-truth turbulence — a world in which a piece of cultural detritus like the Malicious saga can make millions while a delicate spirit has almost no chance of survival.

We need more books like this: irreverent, funny, wise, cruel — and at the same time expressionistic, exaggerated and true. The writers are here; but is society ready? Will it withstand the mirror? The car crash of an actor in crisis opens out into a range of human stories that unfold between the grotesque lens and the most familiar social truths, in a total novel — complete, defiant — that will fight tooth and nail to endure, because it has been written tooth and nail and in blood, where tenderness and the blackest humour can stand side by side.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons