Barcelona as a mother and as a grandmother

With her first book, Contra la nostàlgia, Maria Canelles Trabal drew rare critical unanimity. Her emotional sophistication, narrative maturity, and range of themes related to femininity (sex, motherhood, family ties...) treated from an original point of view were celebrated therein. For Si fos una sibil·la, her second novel, I augur a similar reception. Canelles, certainly, has a vigorous narrative capacity and knows how to build worlds simply sustained by the word. Because that is what her characters do, talk and talk, and when they do not speak, the narrator speaks for them. This powerful verbal edifice is convincing and makes for pleasant reading.

Si fos una sibil·la addresses the story of three generations of a Barcelona family. Amanda, a bookstore clerk, is the daughter of a cult writer, albeit an author of unius libri. Amanda's mother, Maria Mercè Paloma Soler, died when she was very small, but she was able to write the novel Com un crit de fàstic beforehand. For Amanda, her mother represents a double enigma: a biological one and a literary one. She was actually raised under the wings of Clara, her grandmother. Clara is one of the most attractive characters in the book. She fought to keep Amanda on her lap for as long as she could and poured into her the love she could not or did not know how to project onto her own daughter. Clara Soler is very religious, but she has also undergone psychoanalysis. She is a character who is at once modern and traditional, also subjected in some way to the spell of literature, even in matters of extramarital affairs: “Anna Karenina was twenty-eight years old when she lived the great love story with Count Vronsky, and when I turned twenty-nine [Clara reflects] this fact obsessed me. It highlighted to me that my time was running out. That is why when Robert appeared in our lives I clung to him. I had just turned thirty then, and I did not want more time to pass, distancing me from the options of living a novel”.

Inaugurating an art center with olives

Beyond the family, other characters related to the world of Barcelona's 'cultureta' scene swarm through the volume. The author is a cultural manager, and this shows in the meticulous and sometimes hilarious descriptions of the ambitions and miseries of a cross-section of characters, among whom perhaps Màrius Plana stands out, a playwright who never quite consolidates his fame. He and others star in the inauguration of an art center that allows the author to narrate such ceremonies with verisimilitude, with many speeches but the added cruelty that only olives are available to snack on (stuffed with anchovies from l'Escala, mind you). Around Màrius Plana, there is perhaps a certain narrative nonchalance, as the narrator announces a thread that leads nowhere. Someone has painted in stages in front of his house the proverb "Every dog has its day" and Màrius, reading about the case of a theater director who recalls the episode of abuses uncovered at the Institut del Teatre in 2021 by this newspaper, reveals an uneasiness. We would expect the graffiti and this case to have further development in the story, but that is not the case.

Beyond anecdotes, it is evident that Com si fos una sibil·la is a good novel. For its capture of the characters' orality, for its psychological penetration, for the portrait of the artistic environments of Barcelona, and for delving into the mother-daughter relationship, which is always a Gordian knot. It is clear that this relationship, in the story, is not resolved, but can it ever be definitively resolved in any way?