A bag of lost illusions at the bottom of the swamp

The reading of Els erms is electric: you have to applaud the skill of Chance brings them together in a remote and somewhat unpleasant place, the inn next to the Sau dam. The chosen location is ideal and well described: the stale and decadent decoration, the fog that envelops everything and turns the hotel into an airtight chamber, the almost empty reservoir: everything contributes to creating the oppressive atmosphere of imminent tragedy that serves as a perfect backdrop for the story of Ramona Ra, a podcasting sociologist and columnist with a bit of imposter syndrome, who has doubts about the relationship she has with an English girlfriend. In addition, she has to write a lecture and, what is worse, she has signed a contract to write an essay that she has no desire to undertake. It is Christmas Eve and there is a sister with a family who is calling for her, but Ramona prefers to hit the road and isolate herself from a world she judges harshly.

Making mistakes constantly

On the other side of the thread holding the novel, we find Faust, the head of the Sau dam, a fat and anxious man, cowardly and gluttonous, for whom life has lost its appeal. Faust will be trapped on a broken-down high-speed train in the middle of the Monegros, another hostile and almost dystopian desert, will be towed by bus to Lleida and, from there, will take a train again. A pathetic and slow journey, during which he will make some acquaintances that will not end well either. Sitting on a bench in front of Sants station, under the thunder of firecrackers and the explosion of rockets (six months have passed and it is the eve of Sant Joan), Faust is the perfect image of a man lost for a story that hinges entirely on the possibility of recognition between two people: Ramona and Faust meet once (or perhaps twice) and have the feeling of seeing something special in the other that could unblock them. But we are not in the realm of attraction or love, nor even that of hidden interests or life strategies: Gurt wanted to work on the projections and mirrors we see in others when something inside us is not working, and he has written with great flair a story of losers who make wrong decisions non-stop.

And not everything is plot in this book: the narrative voice embeds here and there a series of reflections and intuitions, some quite sharp, on the state of the world, but also on the capacity of fiction to overcome the onslaughts of real life. There is not a single thesis, but rather layers of meaning that overlap and a handful of good images to illustrate them: the scars that run across Ramona's body crack like the fissures at the bottom of the Sau reservoir in full drought, a drought that also appears in the dry eyes of the two characters, who survive on eye drops, and in the total absence of sex, because these fluids are also running low. Los erms is a nervous, chiseled, very well-constructed novel, inhabited by a man and a woman of flesh and blood.