Nerea Pallares: "From women who gather to knit together, a revolution can be derived"

BarcelonaFishermen, witches, and pillow laces. Perhaps no one foresaw a novel with these ingredients. But surprise and risk are a complete statement of intent, in Punt d’aranya (in Catalan by Periscopi, translated by Eduard Velasco, and in Spanish by Asteroide): at the heart of the book are the most particular and identifying elements of life on the Galician Costa da Morte. Nerea Pallares (Lugo, 1989) has woven a novel about a world that is violent but doesn't seem so, and about a revenge that can change reality.

Pillow laces and randas seem like a small thing, because they are women's things and, on the other hand, you place them at the center of Camariñas' life.

— Lace is associated with the domestic sphere, with an activity typical of older people, because it's true that the women in the novel are more or less 50 years old, but in reality, right now, the ones who do bobbin lace in Costa da Morte are older ladies, and it's easy to associate them with something harmless. I really liked the idea of reversing this symbol and making a possible revolution stem from women who get together to weave. It's a power we truly have, the question is giving ourselves permission to wield it.

As Maria Arnal sings from the poem by Joan Brossa: "People don't realize the power they have".

— Yes. Because they are women who are sustaining an entire reality and, if they stopped doing so, the system as such would collapse. Sometimes I think we don't realize it. I've been in feminist self-defense groups many times, where they teach you techniques to protect yourself in case of suffering an assault, but they also teach you, and it's very important, how far you are willing to go: will you give yourself permission to defend yourself? Because it's also a matter of changing your mindset and thinking that you have the right to exercise this situation to defend yourself.

If it would already be difficult for us to dare to tell a stranger that we do not want to share an elevator with him, so as not to be rude or cause discomfort.

— Female anger is not tolerated much. Nor do we give ourselves permission to be angry, nor to be violent. Imagine if this situation you mention implied violence.

The novel connects the real world of fishermen, net makers, percebeiras, fishmongers and cannery workers, with telluric forces that have to do with this wild landscape and also with ancestral beliefs.

— As I set the novel in Camariñas, it seemed organic and very obvious to me that the sea, the wind, and the environment – not just as a landscape but as a living force, because I think it has a lot of presence and you realize it immediately if you set foot in it –, it seemed to me that it should take physical form with the spiders, which materialize this wild force, and it should be another character.

In this closed world arrives a girl, Ari, to work at the lace museum and be a tour guide. But the day comes when they bury a dead girl, who had gone to the high seas with her father to do a job. An accident that is the last straw.

— For there to be a click it means we come from a situation of prior structural violence: the glass was about to overflow. There is a reflection of many types of sustained everyday violence that all the protagonists have suffered, in different situations. But the gravity of what happens is a kind of catalyst that makes them say "enough is enough" and sets them in motion. It is a collective response to a problem that is also collective. Although we might think the problem belonged to one person, they all make it their own and respond as a community.

Everything happens in a town of 5,000 inhabitants. From the smallest and most concrete point, a structural and universal reading emerges.

— It is a very local, concrete story in a very recognizable setting, but this unequal structure is transferable to many simultaneous presents, to many other contexts. That is why I am interested in the crossing between what is mythical and what is everyday; this intersection allows you to explain what is universal from what is local. It connects something that happens in the present and is immanent with something more transcendent, in the sense that it comes from afar and continues to flow through time. That is why the novel is circular.

The book stretches the symbol of the thread, which has to do with mythology; also with language, because there are many expressions about following the thread or losing the thread; it refers to the network that women form, and there are also real threads, those of the points and the nets they are sewing.

— For me, the trigger is embroidery as an expressive form prior to the word and the relationship between text and fabric. There are many expressions in everyday speech that make this evident and, specifically, I wanted to look for a cause-and-effect relationship for the expression "losing the thread". What would happen if, by weaving and unweaving, there were another type of implication here? This leads me to the question of who the weavers are and, therefore, who holds everything together in an invisible way. There are two realities coexisting, the more mythical and the more everyday. On one hand, the weavers are the spiders, which refer us to all this mythical part that the novel captures. On the other, they are the women who are related to the fabric of the sea, the "redeiras" (net-makers) and the "palilleiras" (bobbin lacemakers). And here is where the novel also takes on its most political dimension.

The novel's purpose is precisely to give a voice to those who didn't have one and takes it away from those who held it, like a curse.

— The total paradox is that those who sustain the voice of others are those who do not have their own voice. I undertake a continuous exercise of making the invisible visible, of making present what is taken for granted and not valued. Because silence is a form of punishment. Yes, there is a political dimension in the choice of point of view: I wanted it to be a choral novel, in the mouths of the village women, women of this age and this class of occupation who are not very present in fiction. I believe that fiction spaces are spaces of representation, they reflect what happens in reality, but they also end up influencing it.

The novel gives hope in an apocalyptic moment.

— I was the first surprise that something came out of me that I don't know if it was optimistic, but it was certainly propositive. I think we are now very clear what is not going well and it seemed to me that, as a gesture, it was interesting to say: perhaps there is indeed the possibility of reversing a situation and doing things differently. Let's not give up everything. At a time when we feel that the apocalypse is imminent around us, that there are many threats and that there is no possibility of thinking of new ways of doing things, I think this also leads to a certain reluctance and immobility, and a work of utopian construction from fiction is still subversive.

You had already published two collections of short stories, Sidecar (2015) and Los ritos mudos (2021) in Spanish. Here you opt for Galician, which is the language mostly spoken in Costa da Morte. And you do it in the Fisterran dialect, which deviates from the standard, and with specific idiolects, because there are percebeiras and reggaetoneras. How have you worked the language?

— I choose Galician because it is my language and because it is a novel very linked to the territory, tied to orality and that thinks a lot about language, reflects on where the word comes from to name pre-existing realities... It was the most natural and logical thing. And attending to orality involves collecting different idiolects, effectively, because women of 50 years of age do not express themselves the same way as their adolescent daughters.

I don't know if there is an awareness here regarding the Galician language.

— It was very organic and it's a line I'd like to follow. I couldn't tell you why not before and yes now. I think in Galicia we are in a good moment, there are many authors who are releasing their first novels and it's an interesting moment, especially fertile, for very different voices. This novel came out in Galician in June and worked by word of mouth, and now with the release of the book in Catalan and Spanish, there is indeed quite a bit of visibility thanks to editorial support, but it's also true that the sheer number of books arriving in bookstores is overwhelming. I published previous books with very, very small literary imprints; in fact, one no longer exists. You can never predict reception and I don't think you should think about it: it's not characteristic of literature and it can condition you in a way that is counterproductive.