Swimming against the shipwreck

Floatation Manual, the first novel by Jordi Marrón and winner of the 46th BBVA Sant Joan Prize, starts with a death to set a stalled life in motion. A woman returns to Portugal with her mother's ashes and, with them, to a summer of adolescence trapped in memory. Marrón avoids the more predictable path of solemn mourning and opts for humor, intrigue, and a protagonist who contemplates her own disaster from a distance.

When her mother dies, pharmacist and writer Teresa Saurí inherits much more than a house in the Eixample: silences, absences, and an adolescence linked to a Portuguese summer that still weighs on her. The protagonist is vulnerable, self-interested, and capable of making questionable decisions. But irony does not always turn into depth: sometimes it only diminishes an emotion that could have been more uncomfortable.

The problem is that the novel has more mechanisms than depth. Marrón wants to talk about grief, family, identity, literature, and memory, but makes the gears visible. The story works better when the protagonist acts, observes, and contradicts herself than when the text stops to explain what it is we have just read.

The plot incorporates an investigation into the missing father, detective Albert Vivancos, an editor with sentimental and financial interests, the notary Amadeu, and a novel within the novel that the protagonist delivers to her literary mentor, Empar. There is a lot of material, perhaps too much. The succession of elements makes it difficult at times to know what is essential and what serves only to maintain the intrigue.

The metafiction starts from an interesting idea: when we remember, we also write; when we write, we also manipulate what we remember. But the work tends to make explicit what is not necessary. The reflection on the life-literature relationship is more valuable as a premise than as a result. When the metafictional mechanism is too exposed, it becomes just another piece of the plot.

The Barcelona of the Eixample also functions as more than just a backdrop. The family home represents an immobilized past, and the Portuguese trip opens up the possibility of setting it in motion. The symbolism is too readable: the house is the past, the trip is movement, the water is survival. The reader does not need to discover symbols that the novel has already explained to them.

The mother moves away from the sentimental portrait of the exemplary deceased and retains a life of her own and areas that the daughter is unaware of. Discovering that loving someone does not mean having known them completely is a good narrative intuition, although even here the text could trust the reader more and explain less.

The title promises a poetics that the novel does not develop. The metaphor of water and shipwreck is attractive, but also obvious. And here the main reservation appears: Marrón has a story, characters, and a clear will to flee from the commonplaces of grief, but does not always make the elements stop seeming like pieces of a narrative mechanism. The intrigue drives the reading, but also conditions it.

Floatation Manual is more interesting as a project than as a resolution. It is a novel about mothers and daughters, absent fathers, sex, literature, money, desire, and memory that attempts to avoid the museum of trauma. But to swim against the shipwreck, having a good metaphor for water is not enough: the reader must also feel the weight of the body, the fear, and the fatigue. The book has moments where it succeeds. In others, it remains too focused on explaining to us how we must learn to swim.