Individuals are a communal fruit

“Tradition is above all important for those who are not traditionalists”. The phrase, brilliant, provocative, and lucid, is by the Majorcan writer Guillem Frontera, a master at creating very modern literature but, at the same time, full of the lessons and baggage of the past. The author of Els carnissers and of La mort i la pluja, among so many others, wrote the phrase to highlight and discredit the 'adamism' of that type of artist who poses as a disruptor, transgressive, and experimental, but who, in reality, spends their life discovering the wheel. Reading Corcs, the surprising and daring first novel by Olívia Lund (Felanitx, 2002), made me think of Frontera’s phrase.

Lund is very young, but she does not fall into either of the two temptations that novice creators most often fall into, which are the pretentious innocence of believing that everything started with them and the smug and laughable contempt for everything that has preceded them. Here it is quite the opposite. Lund has written a thematically and formally modern novel –the perspective is feminist, the style is lively and free and draws resources and diction from both orality and more bookish literature, the narrative structure follows established patterns from the start and, nevertheless, maintains agility at all times–, but she has also written a novel pregnant with the past, with ancestral antiquity, with communal memory.

The theme of the novel, perhaps better called its expressive core, is precisely the influence of the past on the present, the incorporation of many yesterdays into today, the living consciousness that what a concrete individual is now and here, in the present moment, is the consequence of many inheritances, of many individuals and many concrete lives that have preceded them.

Two narrative spheres

The narrative maneuver that Lund has set up to give shape to her conception of individual life as a communal fruit—also as a burden of germinative worms...—is very simple, but it is also of very notable audacity and effectiveness. Throughout the novel, Lund combines two narrative spheres that barely touch directly but are highly interconnected. The main plot recounts the life of Glòria, a Mallorcan woman from Felanitx, from the moment she is born until she herself becomes a mother, without leaving aside any of the stages of a conventional life: school, the divorce of her parents, the relationship with family and friends, the initiation into love and sex, and so on. This narrative plane, which Lund makes the skeleton that articulates and drives the work forward, is complemented by the flesh of other stories, with the recovery of the lives of people from the past: not just any people, of course, but ancestors of Glòria, those ghosts that have reached her through cellular memory and that she carries within and will transmit to her daughter. Because no one is just themselves alone, and this idea, so luminous and colossal, Olívia Lund knows how to write very well, beyond some small details to polish—a cacophony here, a somewhat stumbling flow of a sentence there.Lund's novel has been published by the Nova Editorial Moll, which for a few years now has been revived thanks to the drive of businessman Antoni Mir and the keen eye of editor Tomeu Canyelles, who have managed to ensure that a mythically prestigious brand that had all but disappeared has recovered an admirable level of activity. It is highly pertinent, all things considered, that Corcs has been released by Moll.