Bloody

Alaine Agirre

Elkar, 2014

Are you sure? Do you want to read this book? Do you think you cannot influence or influence you? The World Health Organization affirmed at the beginning of the 21st century that the number of mental illnesses will increase throughout this century. Depression is the most widespread mental illness and it was said that by 2020 it would go from being the fifth cause of disability to the second, and that before that there would only be heart disease. The protagonist of this book has psychosis, but not depression. Lack of contact with reality. Hallucinations, delusions and thought disorders. And he tells us in five chapters his process, in 100 chapters and with the help of characters he designates with all the letters of the alphabet, from when he touched the background to when he came out of the hole.

Three years ago, Itxaso Martin published the novel Ni, Vera. The connection between women and madness appeared from adulthood to old age and from a historical perspective. In the work of Alaine Agirre, on the contrary, the protagonist is the young woman and her psychological evolution, and her axis is the embodied subject, who in her first novel narrates pain, disease, how she turns her body into body and how she becomes body again.

On the cover of the book are the keys, among them the title Ghost blood, which shows the physicity of the body, with its leaks and meats: “And with blood you get half dissolved thorns, nails, metals, glass fragments; it’s clotted blood, curdled, but at the same time it’s red, coming out of your wounds.” However, the patient, drowned and asleep, the heart and clitoris will wake up as the story progresses.

The journey of our protagonist can be summarized in three photographs: In the bed “In the War on Sheets” we see at first bathed and exhausted by sweat, blood and tears. In the psychiatric “hungry slaughterhouse” he takes seven or eight pills that cause him hunger a day and goes on to group therapy in the house slippers. Finally, he “drags the stones that are glued in the shadow” and is a young woman who tries to complete the puzzle of life remembering “the traces of the conquerors of the past” but making the way.

The discourses and lists are intercalated with interviews with the psychiatrist, the episodes of a single phrase with more than one sheet, the passages narrated in the second and third people, who seek identification at the beginning, alternating the self and tu, and which later mark the distance in history, intercalating the humorous gestures and the sexual scenes, as occurs with the passage of the waves.

So think right if you want to read this book. As we have said, it is diseases of the 21st century that have brought us anxiety, depression, types of life and current relationships. And you may be in one of those guys, or in one of those around you. And it will be painful to read. Something can move within you. So, read in advance how to use this medication novel and ask in the pharmacy – let’s read Miren Agur Meabe’s foreword – we’ll notify you.