I dreamed that all the national newspapers woke up with the same photograph on the cover: one in black and white, with three women's bodies as protagonists, all of them caught by an almost spring sun that forced them to squint, even though it resonated in their faces. a will to laugh. The image was not foreign to me. In fact, I had seen it too many times, whether in literary history books or memes, but this time there was something different. Where did those chicks come from? Why did they dress and pose like Ana María Moix, Esther Tusquets and Ana María Matute on that terrace in Sitges in February 1970, if in reality we were in February 2024 and their faces were completely different? During the dream, I went down to the newsstand on my street and bought a copy of a newspaper to see if the caption gave any answer to the enigma of the usurpers. And there they were, finally, in very small writing, their names: Andrea Toribio, Paula Ducay and Julia Viejo.
It could be that everything we dream of, no matter how fanciful it may seem, carries a bit of truth. On the nightstand, after staying up late in the morning, I saw his books waiting for me, one on top of the other:
Children of the Future,
by Toribio,
La ternura,
by Ducay,
Bad Star,
by Viejo; three first novels that I had begun to read with the curiosity of someone who knows that among their pages there is something new—and something good—, with the suspicion of someone who understands that among their pages there is something strange—a change of register in what the novels written by authors of her generation, you mean?—and with the joy of someone who, analyzing the form, the speech and the lyrics, ventures to affirm that her dream was real: three first novels by three authors whose disparate imaginaries but Similar, let's say, “tonal crossroads” allow us to glimpse other directions for literature here.
In
Children of the Future,
to start, Andrea Toribio is the most experimental of all. With a lyrical and neighborhood exercise that reminded me of
The Orange Blocks
, by Luis Díaz, and using a diaristic writing that made me think of the formulas of the blogs of yesteryear, Toribio brings something between autofiction and self-parody; the story of someone who grows as a reader, despite the precariousness that adult life offers her. All the conflicts and violence that affect the narrator—the drama of Madrid Arena, for example—are told gently, as if she did not want to worry her readers, or as if she were trying to make us see that nothing is as serious as it seems, that Even love is a game, and that the self can also become literature without falling into victimhood. In the words of Toribio: “How difficult it is to have a kind and sincere life, a life in which being able to agree with everyone means not agreeing on anything.”
This search for kindness permeates everything in
Tenderness,
by Paula Ducay. The title, simple and direct, evokes the teacher Annie Ernaux, one of the authors who has most correctly chosen her name for her stories:
The Occupation, The Shame, The Event
, etc. However, no matter how much passion Ducuay has shown towards Ernaux's imagination in the
Sound Punzadas podcast,
her first novel is far from the Frenchwoman's tormented aesthetic. In Ducay's prose the reflection on love is not depressive but light, emotional relationships do not contain layers of lies but are honest, and although the story he presents to us exposes many conflicts associated with asymmetry and the complexities of upbringing, His speech ensures a calm unprecedented in contemporary love novels. Its protagonist, Naima, spends the hundred and a few pages of the book unraveling knots and making us understand that, before throwing everything overboard, we should wait to see all the shades that the sky can offer us after a storm. What matters here is not so much what is seen, but rather what is suggested. Something like an uninhabited paradise.
A little more foul-mouthed than Naima, but also elegant, and a little more innocent than the narrator of
Children of the Future,
but also in the process of discovering the world, Vera, the teenage narrator of
Bad Star
, the novel with which that Julia Viejo continues the trail of manners that she already started with the stories of
In the cell there was a firefly
. Although in Vera's summer there is no time for flowers, although her family is a bit of a bastard, and although her story as an exceptional
teenager
could make her a narrator as odious as Holden Caulfield's bore, in this story of discovery at the Bad luck is called a star because, even in the worst of the worst, its narrator trusts in magic, that is, in herself, that is, in the good things that life will bring her despite the misfortunes. How much love for the future there is in Julia Viejo's literature, I tell myself as I put her book back on the bedside table, how much confidence in what the work of writing can heal from our wounds.
Rosario Ferré said that anger is the incentive for many women to write well. But Ana María Matute also said that writing is a long question. I, who generally tend to fall in love with books that play with blades, that threaten their readers with death, that rub themselves in the mud of language or that bet on the most filthy philosophy, have not been able to avoid falling in love with the peaceful questions, calm and spacious that open these first three novels that one night in February sneaked into my dreams. The long calm of the questions of some is not incompatible with the long rage of the viscera of others, and that plurality, what do you want me to tell you, is fucking cool.
Children of the future
Andrea Toribio
The Swiss Army Knife, 2024
152 pages, 18.20 euros
Look for it in your bookstore
The tenderness
Paula Ducay
Altamarea, 2024
120 pages, 17.90 euros
Look for it in your bookstore
bad star
Julia Viejo
Blackie Books, 2024
240 pages, 21 euros
Look for it in your bookstore
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