Facing the mirror
(Translation: Josu Zabaleta) Katakrak, 2019
It systematically torture; it methodically perpetuates structural criminalization; it perpetuates uninterrupted generalized violence; it regulates unjust random arrests with impunity. That is the Spanish state that the novel Sofia Petrovna has put me in the mirror; and – without needing to stay in a state – also the vast majority of the sacrosanct democratic West.
I don’t know what I expected, but yes: Lidia Txukovski’s novel retains the reader in the mirror, with eyes nailed across the glass. And this effect is achieved even if it is situated at the time of the Great Purge of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. I would say that it is the aesthetics to which literary achievement should be subjected, that is, to overcome the narrative context and to reflect on the reader’s daily life. Two words from an aesthetic that has distracted me.
See Agur, the narrator of Meabe’s latest novel, notes that the prose of Simone de Beauvoir is admirable. Despite speaking of such a disturbing experience as the death of his mother, he says that he uses “a simple and sentimentalist prose”. It seems to me that it joins Beauvoir, like Meab, in that simplicity of the prose in which even Chukovski talks about violence.
The second consideration brings me to David Foster Wallace. This is the water. Danele Sarriugarte brought the famous graduation speech to the Basque Country. The parable of fish that don't realize they live surrounded by water served Wallace to try to shake the thinking of young college students who would populate the American suburb. The American writer reflected on the difficulty of seeing the most obvious violence and the blind certainty of denying it makes us prisoners of ourselves. Sofia Petrovna does a similar job.
Descriptions without sentimentalism open a gap between the violence that the protagonist cannot intuit and that the reader clearly sees. This gap leads the reader to reflect on what you don't see. And in our case, what is “water” if it is not a generalized and systematic structural and violent state?
Snarka Lewis Carroll
Hunting
Images:
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