Joan Miquel Oliver writes against boredom

There are experiences that do not allow for a rational explanation, memories that distort when we try to retrieve them, ideas that appear without asking for permission. Reality has this bad manners: it refuses to be ordered. In Life is not mathematics (La Magrana), Joan Miquel Oliver (Sóller, 1974) turns this impossibility of squaring the world into a literary principle. The seventy-seven micro-stories transit between anecdote, reflection, memory, and the absurd, without submitting to narrative conventions. Because disorder can also have a form.

The composer of Antònia Font does not need to coat existence with solemnity to speak about essential questions. It is enough for him to observe it and let a daily situation deviate into an unexpected territory: a phone call, a bar, a glue stain. Literature begins when what seemed insignificant becomes a question and thought abandons the straight path to discover other possibilities.

The texts have something of a diary about them, but they are not a confession. Experience blends with imagination, and memory takes on a different form when it passes through the sieve of writing. Oliver preserves this ambiguous boundary between life and fiction, there where experience ceases to belong only to the one who lived it and becomes a literature that shuns excessive calculation. The author prefers intuition to demonstration, the discovery to the mechanism. This freedom can produce inequalities of intensity, but it also preserves the capacity for surprise.

Humor is one of the book's main weapons. The irony, insolent and irreverent, dismantles appearances and uncovers the ridicule hidden behind many certainties. This gaze approaches surrealism: the world can be absurd without ceasing to be real, and an unusual situation can reveal more than a reasoned explanation. Thought also stumbles, retreats, and gets distracted by nonsense. It is not always in a straight line that we arrive at some truth. Memory recovers the Mallorca of childhood and adolescence without turning it into a lost paradise. It is an internal geography made of scenes and experiences that persist despite the passage of time. Remembering is not returning to the past, but checking to what extent it continues to intervene in the present.

Staying awake

Music traverses this universe as a way of understanding creation: rhythm, unexpected associations, and changes in register are part of a writing style that does not need unanimous approval to justify itself. Nor does fame guarantee the value of a work: recognition can enlarge a figure and vanish without having explained anything essential. Oliver writes against boredom, against time slipping away, and against loneliness. Writing does not resolve these issues, but it allows for transforming a dead moment into a creative possibility. Sometimes, literature serves to keep us awake in the face of the world and to prevent time from passing without leaving a trace.

Life is not mathematics is an irregular, free and refractory book to classifications. It turns dispersion into a form of knowledge. Life is limited, contradictory and often ridiculous; it forces us to improvise while it happens. Oliver writes from this territory without guarantees, with humor and a healthy lack of reverence.