A song of optimism in a time of collective trauma

Doctor and writer, Ada Klein Fortuny (1975) is the pseudonym of the author of the essay The white plague(L'Otra, 2020), with which he entered the Catalan literary scene and in which he linked six writers and tuberculosis. Now he publishes his first novel, Lisa Cohen, a love story that relies on the epistolary narrative mechanism. We read a long letter to her lover—to whom she addresses herself as "my beloved lord"—written by Lisa, a woman who boards a train to Paris and reflects on ambition, inequalities, betrayals, desire, forgiveness, motherhood, prejudices, and the passage of time. At the same time, she takes stock of her lineage and the sisterhood that develops among friends. A letter that, evidently, she will never send.

The entire epistle written by Lisa Cohen's narrator-protagonist stretches the cord of feminine vulnerability "between thinking maybe he doesn't love me anymore and how I come to want him to love me." With spring within, an untimely happiness, and a romantic infatuation calling to the four winds, Lisa doesn't hide that she feels old and ugly except in his eyes, the only moment when she sees herself beautiful. She warns her lover that "this is an instruction manual," because he is not the first and the others, the previous ones, have made her the way she is now and how, in fact, he liked it. The instruction manual looks back and reviews the narrator's emotional life, which begins at thirteen with her first kiss in a shed in a slum on the outskirts of Liverpool and continues with a string of failed relationships that are not always disappointing (in fact, important men have always helped her grow and enriched her). Through the filter of time, the creaking of memory and, above all, from the perspective of individual freedom without prejudice: "Men have desired me a lot," and Lisa affirms that she has used this power a lot because "I am snobbish and haughty like a crowned empress."

Ada Klein Fortuny writes a simple story, with plain language, and with dialogue that often seems from another century. However, Lisa Cohen It is a hymn to optimism in a time of collective trauma, a well-written piece of entertainment by a woman who transcribes what she thinks as if she were filling out a diary knowing that someone will read it. estrafot", but it also delves into the world that opens up inside each person once love has ended, or everything that goes through people's heads during reunions twenty years after a breakup. Sexual assaults, the debate between naivety and guilt, or the castrating love that leaves Miles questioning his life decisions.

Lisa Cohen is a debut with many of the shortcomings and excesses of many early novels, but, paradoxically, it reads well and is entertaining, as happens with first-person stories that, at one point or another, empathize with the reader and commend them for the joy of living. And from this desire derives the creation of an atmosphere that is rare in contemporary literature: we are in a parallel world, a space where women still write letters on the train, men wear hats, and women get perms, and where, nevertheless, it is worthwhile to get ahead and not sink in the mire of existence.