A good book against domestication

In Teoria de gèneres, the second book by Josep Girós (Tarragona, 1968), the architect and writer focuses on a temptation as old as the human being: to classify what they do not understand. Literature does not escape this either: novel, poetry, essay, thriller, autobiography, science fiction... Genres, subgenres, labels or compartments that promise to guide us before opening a book and that, often, only serve to tell us what we should expect from them. Girós writes precisely against this need to put everything in its place. The author plays with the very idea of classifying until it wavers. And he does so with a paradox that runs throughout the book: he plays at classifying while questioning classification. Instead of accepting the academic divisions of genres, he proposes his own view, deliberately eccentric, and turns literary taxonomy into a playground. The book does not seek to resolve what a novel, a poem, or an essay is, but rather to ask why knowing it calms us. Classifying a book is also domesticating it: anticipating it, reducing its mystery. Girós seems to suspect that literature begins to lose something just at the moment we believe we have understood it. Theory of genres moves away from the solemn literary essay, the kind that seems to demand that the reader maintain a certain gravity even when talking about books. Here, there is no desire to build a definitive system or to erect a new Bible of classification. The proposal is more interesting when it resists being turned into doctrine. And here one of its best weapons appears: humor. Not as an ornament, but as a way of thinking. Girós uses the joke to dismantle the formality with which we often speak of literature and culture, this ridiculous need to turn any reading experience into an operation of prestige. Leave room for error and surprise

Theory of genres is less a manual than a provocation. It does not offer a compass so that the reader does not get lost, but rather suggests a much more uncomfortable idea: perhaps getting lost is, in fact, the best way to read. The paradox is delightful: to rebel against classifications, Girós must manufacture others (unfinished narratives, admirably incomprehensible narratives, narratives translated more than once into Catalan, etc.). The game also has rules, but these do not intend to imprison literature, but rather to demonstrate that every border is provisional, artificial, and revisable.This awareness saves Gender Theory from becoming a mere catalog of eccentricities. Beneath the game lies a deeper question: what happens when we stop reading to confirm what we already knew? In an era in which algorithms increasingly decide what we read, leaving room for error and surprise is almost an act of resistance. Josep Girós does not ask us to abandon genres, but rather not to turn them into borders. The most vibrant literature has always been a bit of a smuggler: it enters territories that do not belong to it, mixes registers, steals forms, and disobeys the labels that try to contain it. After all, the book starts from an apparently modest question and ends up touching on an essential issue: to what extent do we need to order the world to be able to inhabit it? Girós responds with a proposal that prefers the crack to the wall, curiosity to certainty, and disorder to the tranquility of having everything classified. Perhaps reading does not consist of knowing which shelf we should put a book on. Perhaps it consists of taking it off the shelf and seeing what happens.