Madame Bovary in the Eixample district of Barcelona

Every debut novelist is expected to have a voice. They're also expected to have a technique, a style, a skill, or the ability to create memorable characters, but what will make them stand out from the crowd is whether they've managed to offer a different, original introduction. If we were right now inside Etna Miró's novel (Barcelona, ​​2001), "different" and "original" would be in italics to emphasize irony and detachment, two of the mechanisms the author uses most effectively to describe a group of Barcelona residents—those she has had the brilliant idea of ​​creating—who are students of philology, literature, or political science. Like a swarm buzzing with great social intelligence around the hive formed by the islands of Ildefons Cerdà, they come and go, chatting about everything except money, as if they were always in front of an audience. What isn't foreseen is that they will have "spiritual crises," and that's what happens to the novel's protagonist, Amelia de las Camelias, a charmingly ornate, old-fashioned name, an obvious literary reference. The one who has pushed her into it is Amelia herself, who has put on a beautiful shell, but doesn't realize it's empty: she's an Emma Bovary who, no matter how much she reads, doesn't grasp a single one of life's ironies.

Towards the end of the novel, which gradually darkens while still making us laugh, Amelia feels alone, but it's a loneliness that "for the first time, for her, was neither a fantasy nor a projection of a book": the novel masterfully traces the rise of fiction, which doesn't understand that the character she has created from herself is just that, a character, and not a person who must make adult decisions. Not even the series of romantic disappointments she suffers makes her react: therein lies part of the novel's greatness, which teaches no one anything, not even the protagonist, but merely places her within a series of vignettes that leave her and her friends frankly ridiculed.

Favors, blackmail, and power struggles

The satire of Barcelona culture, Catalan subsection, contains all the necessary settings and characters: the wrapping paper at the Espitlleres bookstore, the meetings of shamanic readers from the Cercle Rodoreda at the Poma bookstore, editors who look remarkably like Ester Andorrà, writers without a body of work who manage to get a Bernat Dedéu knock-off, young students of Literature Studies intolerant to gluten who have posthumanist debates, scenes from the Classics Festival that must be discussed "over a drink" in the Beckett Dining Room, drunken and pathetic seductions in the L'Ascensor bar... All the descriptions are meticulous, and the cultural system, the favors, blackmail, and power struggles are subterranean currents that generate a series of more or less shameless public displays. Miró nails this, because she knows it well and because she's intelligent enough to laugh at everything and everyone, and probably at herself too, given that she's studied literary theory and comparative literature and is doing a doctorate on Marcel ProustPerhaps the excessive use of references will reduce the novel's readership, but this is a calculated risk, because it's a book that knows its audience.

The language Miró has chosen to tell this story is affectionately archaic, somewhat antiquated (there are "his"), and some sentences are a bit too long: this detracts from the reading pace, but also gives it a parodic air. bildungsroman Romantic or modernist novel style suits her perfectly. Everything has a purpose and nothing is out of place in this debut, which has a very distinctive voice: remember the name Etna Miró.