A fascinating story by Jordi Lara from beginning to end

If we asked ChatGPT, with the vast amount of information it has about the writer Jordi Lara (Vic, 1968), to write us a story imitating his style, his imaginative soul, I highly doubt that it would give us a product as unique, and at the same time as complete, as this one. The Cat and the Stars It seems to mark a new turning point in the career of the author ofA machine for waking up birds at night (2008) and Mystic rabbit (2016). There is no celebration of memory like the one we found in the books cited, for example. Nor is there a reconstruction of a real person through their last days of life, as occurred in Six nights in August (2019) with Lluís Maria Xirinacs. Here it seems rather that the author wanted to make a vehement defense of fiction per seThe beginning might remind us of those desert-like, civilization-overwhelming settings found in some American authors like Cormac McCarthy. A tradition that also goes back to Faulkner.

With this new book, Lara offers us a hypnotic, extreme, poetic narrative. A little gem, a fascinating story from beginning to end. What is usually known as a dystopia. Or a kind of mystical fable, with a magnificent opening: the protagonist, wielding a knife, busily peels the remains of an animal from the asphalt of a road, remains that have stuck to it—and which he will later use as fertilizer for his garden.

Santos Haddouche is an internationally renowned musician who has gratefully abandoned the world. He lives in a very inhospitable place, where other members of the booking cultural aspect of the country. As if the productive society had been pushing them out, to confine them and make them easier to forget. Specifically, it's at an out-of-service gas station. In fact, the setting, along with the two main characters, represents one of the novel's most powerful attractions: grassy wastelands, housing developments in an advanced state of neglect, industrial parks that invite the darkest of moods, tennis courts without nets, and a mountainous amusement park littered with the wreckage of an old airplane. As if that weren't enough, the sea will invade the city, leaving behind putrid waste that floats menacingly. The apocalyptic nightmare seems very near.

The musician has stopped composing, although, "surely," as the protagonist—who narrates the story—states, he carries music "sewn into his very being." As if he had never composed, despite its excellence, embodied in a work that will endure. Thus, a modern-day Salinger, the composer wants nothing to do with anyone. He has given up writing music, or perhaps he has embraced silence—which will be, at Ultimately, it is the purest expression of music and of all language. Be that as it may, he has chosen to embrace the silence "of surrender and absence," that of "music immolating itself." However, a woman passionate about his work will not rest until she finds him, and the search, so to speak, will continue until the end of the story, because Santos, despite his considerable physique—130 kilos and a rather modest height—is an elusive, antisocial individual.

Defying the Algorithm

While he was still alive, the musician had already challenged the algorithm, introducing small errors into his works. One of the big questions this raises is... new A philosophical ambition stems from the all-too-human obsession with always finding meaning in things. Santos Haddouche has made a radical act of renunciation because he wants to rid himself of the "human torment of conscience." Herein lies the crux of the story: admitting that "the narrative of life didn't always owe us a meaningful ending." The composer aspires to look at things, to embrace the reality that surrounds him, forever freed from the heavy burden of conscience. In a pristine way, then, without the buds or the squeezing ties of memory. He would like to face the world like a cat: "You know what?" he said. "I'm learning to look at the stars. I have a good teacher: my cat knows how. Without seeking reasons, without any pretension. Without desire." The sea, in the end, is becoming master and lord of the civilized representation that is the city. And the man, who no longer feels his ego overflowing, will obey its call.