Nostalgia for a future in which looking back is pleasant

Aina Fullana Llull (Manacor, 1997) published her first novel, Els dies bons, in 2021. That text was already striking and literarily remarkable. It was a family story. The father, a drug addict since adolescence, finds a little peace in his marriage. The mother, less sociable than the father, bears the marital disturbance in silence until she can take no more and divorces. It will be the daughter, finally, upon whom the mission of reconstructing the family memory will fall. This daughter first takes refuge in a too-idealized conception of love and then in a spiral of promiscuous self-destruction. Peace will only come when she can make peace with her father and discover the expiatory and transformative power of literature. When I grow up I want to be a house is the logical, moral, and literary continuation of that troubled, dissonant, and sharp family world from the previous book, The Good Days. Here too we find a protagonist, Emma, with an absent father (this time without addictions) and a mother who doesn't quite get along very well with her daughter. Sober, precise and powerful

Emma has a psychotic episode and must be admitted to a psychiatric hospital. A part of the novel takes place there. It is her world that unfolds throughout the pages of the story, her passion for painting, the difficulty in relating to others (and to herself), the longing for the affection her grandparents gave her, the great shipwreck of love (with men and with women). If there is one thing When I grow up I want to be a house has, it is a powerful literary language (attentive to the heartbeat of colloquial Mallorcan) and a way of narrating with sobriety and precision. A poetic style that starts from simplicity to suggest depths of interest: “At sea, when it rains, you only hear the water baptizing the water. The thunder gets confused with the waves that hit the rocks and from afar you do not know if they are waves or thunder. The world turns black with water. Then there is nothing but the world turned to water; it just rains. I would like to be the sea, when it rains”.Emma, who if she could have chosen would have opted “not to be born” (like Cioran), feels nostalgia for “a future in which looking back is pleasant”. And the fact is that her life is difficult to bear, but also the backdrop against which it unfolds –the irreversible transformation of Mallorca into a fake setting for tourists– has another point of anguish and bitterness.It is difficult to empathize with the protagonist of such a story. But there is no doubt that Emma, as a character, is vivid and plausible. The author can be very satisfied with her creation.