Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Unai Siset. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Unai Siset. Mostrar todas las entradas

4 nov 2012

Vicent Usó's La mà de ningú: A Review


Vicent Usó, La mà de ningú (Barcelona: Proa, 2011). 237 pages.
On occasions you feel like finding a book that simply fulfills its purpose as entertainment, a book that makes you enjoy the time you spend reading it, a book that frees you from the need to delve into philosophical or aesthetic issues. For many readers such an ideal is represented by the thriller. At the end of the day, all the reader needs to do is not to lose track of the plot and its threads. If the author is skilled enough and places good enough bait in the hook, the rest is usually, so to speak, a piece of cake.

Yet in La mà de ningú [Nobody’s Hand], Vicent Usó goes even further, for his take on the thriller is one that sets the reader a goal they can consider from various viewpoints and ultimately reach by taking different roads. The novel is made up of six apparently different, autonomous stories. Divided onto eight chapters, seven of those occur over two consecutive days (a Wednesday and a Thursday), while the last one is set on the following Monday. Each of the chapters is named after the key character in the corresponding section of the story.

The first one is André Labarbe, an old farmer who is stuck to his unchangeable habits. On an early morning he finds a hand, severed at the elbow, in the middle if the country track that runs parallel to the motorway. This macabre finding is to change his routine, as he decides to return home to call the police.

However, the next chapters appear to be unrelated to Labarbe’s gruesome discovery of the severed limb. This may put off readers who are accustomed to more simplistic, linear narrative plotlines. My advice, all the same, is to carry on reading: take up Usó’s challenge and find out what it is he is exactly offering you.

The novel is set in France. The set of characters comprises, apart from old Labarbe, a wacky truck driver from Eastern Europe, a Senegalese immigrant who struggles to eke out an existence on the streets of Paris, an estranged housewife fleeing her husband who finds shelter at a castle owned by a wealthy female philanthropist, a young squatter who earns her money juggling on Parisian streets and a rich doctor who lost her wife in a road crash, seemingly preoccupied with looking after their two daughters.

Should I give away any clues about the many events and their type that lead to Labarbe finding the hand that seems to have fallen out of the sky, I would be doing some great disservice to whoever wishes to read the book. I will simply say, thus, that it is a great read, that it has excellent pace, closer to allegretto than vivace, and that Usó polishes his language while being economical when making the portrait of his characters.

The dénouement is surprising because Usó has kept hidden an identity until that very moment. The well-off can easily put on a mask of bonhomie while wielding the power money gives them. But when the truth is out they become bogged down in depravity.

Vicent Usó had published nine novels before La mà de ningú, two of them shortlisted for the Sant Jordi Literary Prize. Read my review (in Spanish) of the also nicely surprising collection Subsól, by a writerly group named Unai Siset, to which Usó contributed a short story. 

I now invite you to read a brief excerpt in English.

André Labarbe
Suppose it was a Thursday. One Thursday in late November just a few years ago, not too many. The sun was not out yet and André Labarbe, 76 years of age, an officially retired farmer and decorated veteran of the Indochina war, felt an uncomfortable tickle in his belly and was suddenly afraid to face the day about to start. Even though he did not look like the type to get easily frightened and that nothing seemed to portend that this day would start in a way different from those that preceded it.  Let us say, therefore, that it was some sort of presentiment.
The thing is that André’s fears were not unwarranted, and in a few more minutes, at exactly eighteen minutes past six in the morning, already the victim of a remarkable upheaval, he was going to bend over double to vomit, by the side of a dusty road, the white coffee and the two pieces of toast his wife, Delphine Sainthuile, housewife and part-time farmer, had so lovingly spread with two layers, one of creamy soft butter underneath, and one on top, a thick flavoursome layer of their homemade tomato jam, the kind you cannot find in shops. But it was still forty-four minutes before that moment, and for the time being the alarm clock had just started to shatter the silence with its daily, rusty and bitter vibration. Like an indecisive snake, the man’s hand crawled from under the flannelette blanket that covered the married couple’s bodies towards the bedside table and, after feeling for it once or twice without success, found the origin of the noise and pressed the lever that put an end to the hammering of the two cracked bells. The silence restored, André lazed about for a while, as it was his habit, and finally turned on the bedside light and carefully got up. First he put down his legs on the floor, and then he pushed himself up on his elbows to avoid placing the strain of the manoeuvre on his back. He washed his face with cold water, as he had always done, and reacted to its biting contrast with noisy spasms, not realising that every morning he sprayed the mirror, the basin and the floor, but those were details he had never noticed before, and Delphine, probably too indulgent with him, had never thought it necessary to point them out to him. After making sure he had totally washed the sleep out of his eyes, he returned to the now empty bedroom, still feeling an immense weight behind his eyelids, and slowly began putting on the clothes that Delphine had purposely left on the radiator, so that he could feel the nice warmth of the fabric on his skin. At one end of the dresser, beneath the frame from which the pale faces of his two grandchildren watched him, was the letter he did not quite know how to assimilate. He looked at it for a second, but did not grab it. He knew what it said by heart, having read it and reread it scores of times, but hesitated to make a decision, and his indecision caused him to feel a tickle of unease in his belly. He tightened his belt and then put on his dark green overalls.
The lights were on when he went into the kitchen. He said good morning, turned on the radio to listen to the news and sat down to eat the breakfast ever-so-kind Delphine was already preparing for him. He took notice of her slowness, the vacillations that now affected his wife’s hands, and thought about how the years had already begun to be considerably onerous for her, although fortunately old age had not yet altered their loving devotion for each other and the reciprocal affection they had observed for who knows how long. A lifetime, so to speak. The idea comforted him, and he was even able to overcome the cramps still rumbling in his stomach. He heeded the radio announcer, who was updating details about a police investigation following a raid two days before on a Paris-based mafia network dedicated to the human trafficking of Sub-Saharan women, who, having being recruited by the criminals in a range of ways, were being forced into prostitution on the Parisian streets and brothels all over the country. The number of those arrested exceeded seventy, including pimps and prostitutes, claimed the announcer –whose voice was remarkably firm and clear so early in the morning– but the police were investigating whether one of the ringleaders had vanished thanks to an internal leak. Oblivious to any kind of self-criticism, a Parisian politician made the most of the report by declaring in his baritone voice that the fight against human trafficking was one of the priorities the government had set its sights on, and they would not spare any effort. When he finished his coffee, André went to the radio and turned it off, which did not give an NGO representative the chance to ask a (markedly rhetorical) question about what sort of fate would await those women captured by the officers, who apparently saw no distinction between a prostitute and a criminal. While his wife took the plate and the cutlery and began washing up, André returned to their bedroom. He opened a drawer in the bedside table, grabbed his wallet, his keys and a clean handkerchief, his initials elegantly embroidered in gold on a corner, and he distributed the lot in the many pockets of his overalls. When he was about to go out, he retraced his steps and stretched his hand to seize the letter, but his fingertips remained for a second on the soft white paper, without clasping it. He observed the happiness of the two children in the photograph and let his finger slide down the glass, fantasising about caressing their gentle, soft cheeks. He lifted the frame with care, took the envelope and put it in his pocket.


29 nov 2011

Reseña: Subsòl, de Unai Siset



Unai Siset, Subsòl (Alzira: Bromera, 2010). 181 páginas.


Vaya por delante la siguiente aclaración: Unai Siset no existe como autor. Unai Siset (del catalán: “una i sis, set”; es decir, una y seis, siete) son en realidad siete autores: Pasqual Alapont (1963), Manuel Baixauli (1963), Esperança Camps (1964), Vicent Borràs (1962), Àlan Greus (1967), Urbà Lozano (1967) y Vicent Usó (1963). Todos de una misma generación, todos residentes en el País Valencià, y todos con una aspiración compartida: escribir buena literatura. Subsòl, aparecido en 2010, es una inusual apuesta de la editorial valenciana Bromera (que solamente publica libros en lengua catalana) por hacer algo distinto y valiente, algo que suponga una nota disonante en el paisaje narrativo un tanto facilón y bastante monocromo que tantos halagos recibe de la crítica española convencional, la cual –salvo contadas excepciones– parece  deliberadamente olvidar la literatura escrita en catalán.
Subsòl es ante todo un experimento, un juego: siete narradores se enfrentan a una fotografía de Peter Turnley (aquí la página de Wikipedia sobre Turnley; y para los aficionados a la fotografía, aquí su web personal) tomada en el metro de París en 1979, la de la portada del libro. Cada uno de los siete narradores escogió una de las personas más prominentes en la foto y la convirtió en personaje literario, escribiendo un relato que tenía que integrarse con los otros seis.
La propuesta de Subsòl funciona porque los relatos están construidos mediante técnicas diferentes, y narrados desde diferentes puntos de vista. Alguno hay contado en primera persona; otro tiene un narrador omnisciente; otro se estructura en torno a un diálogo, del cual solamente oímos lo que dice una persona. El aliciente para el lector es ir comprobando cómo los diferentes relatos, cada uno con su propio estilo, van encajando en una narrativa coherente, bastante bien hilvanada en torno al motivo de la fotografía.
El primero, ‘Una K voltada (Andrea)’ cuenta la historia de dos hermanos gemelos que fueron separados al poco tiempo de nacer por las circunstancias de la vida, y de cómo uno de ellos, Andrea, acude a París en busca de su hermano. El segundo, ‘Henri’, sigue las vicisitudes del hijo de un gobernante francés que trata de salvar la reputación de su padre, envuelto en un turbio asunto de corrupción que implica a un dictador africano y una bolsa repleta de diamantes; el tercero, ‘Jules’, cuenta los instantes finales de un suicida que ha encubierto un crimen.
El cuarto, a mi juicio el más divertido de todos, cuenta la historia de una arquitecta valenciana incomprendida que enloquece con el paso del tiempo. El quinto, ‘Avram’, es un cuento sobre las obsesiones y las supersticiones, que han dado lugar a un terrible desenlace. El sexto, ‘Vítor’, sigue a un emigrante portugués cincuentón enamorado de una jovencísima terrorista bretona.
Por último, ‘Aude’, completa cabalmente el juego metaliterario que proponen Unai Siset, y nos muestra el nerviosismo de una anciana exprostituta, que en la actualidad vive cómodamente retirada en una casa de campo donde añora a su difunto marido, cuando recibe unos relatos (el lector debe asumir que son los seis que le preceden) y la fotografía del metro, que la obligan a rememorar la época en que la foto fue tomada.
Subsòl es una entretenida propuesta lectora; un libro para nada convencional, del que se disfruta bastante desde el principio al final, y en el que ‘Aude’ pone una especie de guinda metanarrativa, el relato que cierra el libro y del cual traduzco aquí al inglés un fragmento de un par de páginas:

As I was telling you, Mr Lawyer, none of the envelopes that have arrived home these last days has a sender’s name on the back, and that makes me feel very insecure. Defenceless. Helpless. I know not who’s sending me all this crap. Receiving anonymous letters is not the best way to achieve peace of mind. Balance. All my life seeking stability and when it appeared I had found it, when I was readying myself to live my final years in serenity, when I had put my memories in order so that the time I shared with my Ives would always be at the top, then came these papers , these anonymous letters, these questions. Oh my God!

I’ve read all this rubbish, and believe you me, Mr Lawyer, I can only tell you that the documents contain disjointed data. They make gratuitous statements, and in some of them they even ask me about issues I am under no obligation to know about, because they deal with people I have never met. They are… I’m not sure how to interpret them, they’re kind of fragments of biographies. Yes, that’s what: incomplete reports on the lives of people I have never heard of, stories about events that may indeed have happened, such as milestones in the history of our country. And politics, too, Mr Lawyer. It’s as if some sort of madman had randomly dug about in the files of the State’s Secret Services in order to retrieve some records, and then that same madman had mailed them to a person chosen by chance, too.  They ask me about murders and about news on our Republic’s international relations in the 1970s. I did not read the papers then, Mr Lawyer. All I know is what I may have learned from my conversations with Ives. Nothing more. Our conversations and the visits of some of his army mates. The most remarkable thing for me is that in those papers I have received, there are also fragments of my own life. Drafted in the coarsest way. As if intending to hurt. There’s no randomness or chance here. My marriage, the rented unit where I used to live when I was single, my timetable. What I used to do before I found the job at the school. I was very young, there was only poverty at home. I arrived in Paris on a train I do not wish to remember. I wasn’t pretty, yet I attracted attention when I was young. Now you see me like this, with all the bygone years stuck on me as if pressed by a steamroller. And have I suffered, oh boy! But I have been a woman. Young and poor. I’m not ashamed to own up that I worked the streets for a few months, I’m not ashamed to say what I would do to make a few francs. Life hasn’t been easy for me. Now you see sitting on this sofa with plenty of comfortable cushions around me, you see me in this house that my Ives owned, you know I have a lady who every day comes to help with the household chores… I was a prostitute but for a short time, but they know. The letters, or the texts, or whatever this shit is, excuse my crude language, they’re written with some double intent that escapes me. That’s why I made you come over.  You do understand how ill at ease I feel, don’t you, Mr Lawyer?

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