Swimming against the shipwreck

Flotation Manual, the first novel by Jordi Marrón and winner of the 46th BBVA Sant Joan Award, starts from 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 her adolescence trapped in memory. Marrón avoids the most predictable path of solemn grief and bets on humor, intrigue, and a protagonist who contemplates her own disaster from a distance.

When her mother dies, the 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 heavy. 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 what we have just read means.

The plot incorporates an investigation into the missing father, detective Albert Vivancos, an editor with sentimental and economic interests, the notary Amadeu, and a novel within the novel that the protagonist gives 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 journey opens the possibility of putting it back into circulation. The symbolism is too readable: the house is the past, the journey is movement, 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.

Manual of flotation 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 tries to avoid the museum of trauma. But to swim against the shipwreck, it is not enough to have a good metaphor for water: 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.