'Los Escorpiones', by Sara Barquinero: brilliant nonsense about helplessness

I do not know the commercial fortune that this April 23rd awaits the zillions of pages of

by Sara Barquinero, but just because it exists, it would be good news if it were on a list. Its extravagance is not in its 800 pages of length, but in the complexity of the narrative, the subtlety and the internal interconnection of a multitude of stories that are not separated from the will to explore the helplessness of multiple characters by land, sea and air. in search of anxious and false solutions to their breakdowns. They neither get an explanation nor an exit ramp, or maybe they do, because suicide is almost always hovering there. The unitary conception of a story that spans from the political conspiracies of D'Annunzio and the fascio in 1922 to beyond the present (the time of the narrative ends in 2025) does not suffer if the reader allows himself to be lulled by the fluffy plot and It detects and ties together the allusions, the winks, the clues of intertwined stories that do not want to melodramatize vital anguish and disorientation but rather narrate it from the evidence of a routine, painful and persistent normality.

Sara is the author's name and the protagonist Sara shares some external data with her: together with Thomas, she controls a story that has many spokespersons because this is the material reality of individual and collective helplessness. There is no material, structural, moral or biological precondition, there is no chosen class that predetermines a life immersed in the feeling of misfortune and impotence to stabilize the head, desire, fantasies and sadness. Addictions are a substantial part of the characters' existence in the form of alcohol, weed, cocaine, pharmacopoeia, synthetic drugs (or internet forums and video games) without anything attracting attention beyond the chronic self-justification of another self-permission, a line more, another

, or not, not now, but it will be yes, while the escape sinks the characters, or some of the characters, a little deeper into hells often narrated with an astonishing visual and plastic solvency and a freedom. of style, resources and methods that elevate the book to a genius experiment by a writer gifted in the narration of damaged intimacies without excess fat, tense and precise, without preaching digressions, without preaching almost at any time (perhaps sometimes towards the end). , feeling like the owner and mistress of a cosmos of stories without geographical or temporal limitations.

But perhaps the highest gift of this experiment is in weaving a capricious and paradoxically vitalist balance between the autonomy of the book's multiple stories and the only story it tells, a bit like the story of stories that is Don

: temptation. of attributing to conspiracy and Martian theories the intimate harms that each person suffers according to their hobbies and their delusions, their fantasies and their anxieties, particularly when a certain range of video games seems to be at the center of all the evils without it being known whether yes or no (although we all know that the income statement is the cause that justifies the existence of any company). The musician who has never again found his way to the creation or perpetuation of a musical metaphor—the irrevocable disturbance caused by exposure to a certain sound, including waitresses—contains powerful doses of moral truth throughout the book. to illuminate lost or ruined existences, and without showing either self-pity or regret, but only the will to explore frontier lives but also their survival resources. The disruption of introducing an episode with historical events related to fascism (as a narcotic as powerful as the most powerful of drugs or the most destructive of video games) is also nothing capricious and makes sense in Sara Barquinero's exploration of self-destruction and power: both the infernal and Dantesque drift of some of these episodes and the narrative diary that tells of another ruined life fit into the story fluidly.

Like any original and unique experiment, this novel also imposes its own reading conditions, but surely the first of them consists of agreeing to embark on a route full of twists and turns, with a lot of time ahead and the certain gratification of a prose sure of herself, without antics but with moments of great brilliance, with very free daring and a natural voice that is unprejudiced and consistent with drugs, sex and the fear of life, of pure life, that forces you to take off your hat or your skull. before the talent and narrative power of Barquinero. The gigantism of the book is the least important thing, obviously, whatever the laziness of the critics in a hurry and "bad reputation", as Alberto Olmos, an expert who forgives lives even in the face of 30-year-old writers with the talent of this woman, titles his own column. .

asks for the freedom of reading time that Sara Barquinero has given herself to write it, although not everyone has it: a brilliant, intriguing and convincing piece of nonsense, whether or not today is the day of the book.

'Scorpions'.

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