Reseña: Past the Shallows, de Favel Parrett

Favel Parrett, Past the Shallows (Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2011). 251 páginas.

¿Nos da la lectura del debut de un autor una indicación acerca de si estamos ante la primera obra de un gran creador literario? Posiblemente no, pero sin duda alguna, ayuda a hacerse una idea.

El título de esta brillante primera novela de Favel Parrett (Victoria, 1974), Past the Shallows (Más allá de los bajíos), se refiere a la zona donde el océano se convierte en un universo vasto, profundo, un lugar donde predomina la amenaza de peligros latentes, ocultos. Pero esos 'bajíos' tienen también una posible segunda lectura: la adolescencia como etapa vital que supera la niñez, y que se presenta poblada de escollos y simas insondables, que se concretan en inseguridades, incertidumbres y amenazas.

Joe, Miles y Harry son tres hermanos, huérfanos de madre, que malviven con su padre, un embrutecido pescador (a veces furtivo) de abulón en la costa sur de Tasmania. A Joe le falta poco tiempo para cumplir los dieciocho años y largarse para siempre; ya se había marchado del infierno en el que viven sus dos hermanos pequeños cuando el padre le rompió el brazo. Miles, mucho más joven en cambio, no puede marcharse, pero además siente la obligación de cuidar de su hermano pequeño, Harry.

En una casa donde nunca saben si habrá suficiente comida para un desayuno, el almuerzo o la cena, Harry se queda solo muchos días, mientras que Miles, pese a ser demasiado joven para trabajar, se verá obligado a salir diariamente en la barca. En uno de esos días, uno de la cuadrilla sufre un accidente mientras pescan salmones: un tiburón (un ejemplar de la especie que aquí se denomina mako) invade la cubierta y provoca el caos. Desde ese momento las cosas solo pueden empeorar.

Para desarrollar la trama, Parrett adopta el punto de vista de los dos muchachos, y ello resulta en frases cortas, despojadas de lo superfluo. Y sin embargo no faltan hermosos pasajes, muy líricos, en los que la autora hace gala de una cuidada prosa y en los que las imágenes muestran los aspectos más agrestes del paisaje de Tasmania. Por la constante presencia del océano, por lo lacónico de los personajes (la mayoría de ellos masculinos) y por la desazón que reina en sus vidas, Parrett me ha hecho recordar a otro de mis (muchos) narradores australianos favoritos, Tim Winton.

Past the Shallows es una terrible historia, y está muy bien contada: Parrett se guarda ciertos datos sobre la muerte de la madre de los chicos y sobre sus vidas antes de ese suceso que los traumatizó – Miles y Harry iban en el coche que ella conducía cuando se estrellaron contra un árbol. Con ello va creando una nebulosa de misterio en torno a ese suceso en el pasado que tanto ha marcado sus vidas actuales. Para cuando Harry, un chico todavía inocente y temeroso, empieza a intuir la verdad, ya es tarde. La suerte está echada, y el caos y la fatalidad han tomado el control del destino de la familia.

«Creo que sería mejor que hagamos lo que dice Papá, Harry. Creo que es mejor que vayamos. Es porque estabas en la carretera cuando ya era de noche.»

«Pero tú dijiste que iba a estar picada hoy. Dijiste que no creías que la barca pudiera salir hoy.»

Y era cierto. Miles podía oír el oleaje incluso desde allí. Podía oír el océano.

Si hay algo que se pueda objetar a esta primera novela de Parrett (que ganó el Premio ABIA al debut literario de este año y fue finalista de media docena de premios más, entre ellos el prestigioso Miles Franklin) es que no profundiza en el personaje del padre. ¿Es un hombre atormentado por lo que oculta de sus actos pasados, y que se redime trabajando muy duro, en condiciones muy peligrosas, sumergiéndose junto a rocas y acantilados para cosechar el muy preciado abulón? ¿O es un monstruo que maltrata a sus hijos, alcoholizado y embrutecido, azuzado por las insidias de su malvado colega Jeff?

El desenlace no lo deja totalmente claro; mientras Joe regresa para recoger los pedazos rotos y tratar de darle un sentido a la vida de Miles, los interrogantes que habían quedado planteados en las escenas más trepidantes de la novela solamente quedan parcialmente resueltos. Eso no le resta méritos a Past the Shallows, pero sí deja algunos huecos en el esquema final del retrato que el lector elabora de los personajes.

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.