One of the most original books in recent Catalan literature

There are books that open like old wooden wardrobes, with creaking hinges, drawers where someone has left papers, fossils, yellowed letters, and drawings of whales made with squid ink. Anna Aguilar-Amat (1962) has written one of these books. Dead naturalists (Pagès, 2025), a delightful blend of genres that is simultaneously archive, initiatory journey, elegy, and homage to a naturalist legacy that lives both within and beyond the body.

Narrated in a gentle yet meticulously researched voice, the novel invites the reader into a territory that oscillates between intimate memory and scientific reconstruction. There is a protagonist—a daughter, a sage, an observer—who views the past through the microscopic lens of a lineage marked by the study of nature and the silence of the deceased. The family archive is not merely a collection of documents, but a habitable space where voices intertwine, clash, bid farewell, or become animalistic. The snails, whales, bats, and tigers in this book are not mere scenery, but language itself. There is a grammar of fauna that resonates like an evolutionary cry within the text: a way of saying that the world is vast, precise, and terrifying. Aguilar-Amat writes with a philological respect for nature: each animal is a symbol and a presence; each word, a form of life.

Science and family

The prose is elegant and uncluttered, and the author opts for a clean style while simultaneously taking pride in its use of archival material and dust. It's as if the narrative itself is unsure whether it's a novel or a natural history report. And that uncertainty is precisely its strength. Dead naturalists It doesn't aim to provide a chronological narrative of events, but rather an emotional cartography of the traces left by people—and their field notebooks. Because there is a strong fractal quality to the way Aguilar-Amat structures the story: pieces that replicate themselves, that contain within themselves the form of the entire work. Time is not linear but fluid. Historical moments are interspersed with domestic observations, scientific reflections blend with family memories, and all of this gives the book a porous texture, full of interstices and echoes.

One of the novel's great strengths is its way of narrating science not as a cold and objective exercise, but as a burning passion that leaves its mark. Naturalism, in this book, is not just a discipline: it is a way of seeing, of reading the world, of living. A form of intimate resistance. In an era of wars, changes, and losses, the naturalists in the novel are figures who want to understand, who want to preserve. But they are also men and women who remain silent, who leave wounds, who transmit life. Inheritance is one of the book's major themes. But not legal inheritance, rather the other kind, more subtle and difficult to manage: the kind that comes through glances, butterfly collections, unspoken words. Inheritance as both weight and mystery. The book exudes this ancient, unmourned grief that often accompanies family legacies. And it does so with a delicacy that cuts like a scalpel.

Dead naturalists It also stands out for its firm—never propagandistic—critique of the ravages of war, the scientific patriarchy, and the silences imposed by power structures that still operate today. But there are no pronouncements. Everything is suggested through the lives portrayed, the absences, the traces of violence that seep between the lines. In this sense, Anna Aguilar-Amat practices a writing of the hidden layer, as if she knew that literature—like nature—says more through shadows than through direct light. We are faced with a book written by a naturalist grafted onto poetry: knowledge and beauty, classification and admiration. An intelligent, moving, and necessary anti-novel. And one of the most original books that Catalan literature has given us in recent years.