A chilling witness to the war in Ukraine

The phrase dark hour It appears several times in these two books (a novel and a collection of poems) by Quim Español (Girona, 1945). It does so on a double temporal axis: as an expression of the time of day when the sun is about to completely bury itself and, more importantly, as a metaphor for the entry into darkness of human existence. In the lyrical version, darkness is imprinted in the title itself.

Virgil Nóvak is a retired Ukrainian surgeon with firm pacifist convictions. When the Russian army invades his country, One of his sons enlists as a volunteer soldier to fight the enemy, and the other works on logistics. In a Kiev hospital—an irreproachable professional that he is—Virgil operates and treats both Ukrainian and Russian wounded. One of the latter must be discharged early due to a shortage of beds, so the doctor, after consulting with his wife, decides to take him home. The day he says goodbye to his hospitable hosts, fully recovered, he commits an abominable act that will disrupt the lives of the Novak family, and particularly the father.

Virgil's descent into hell, his journey to the depths of the night, begins at this point. So far, Quim Español has managed the information admirably. This is not the only plot twist that will be allowed, and although it does not have the impact of the first, the second makes us consider the documentary value of the events: in this one, the author himself and his wife enter the scene and participate in the story. Moreover, we understand that the authentic story of Virgil has been entrusted to the writer from Girona, who chance has placed in the path of the Nóvaks. As in the technique of manuscript found.

The protagonist, who feels condemned by that unfortunate event, has only one obsession. And, despite his age, he will not falter until he achieves it. Like Prince Andrew of War and Peace, he moves forward looking at the sky; but the conception romantic The Napoleonic Wars against the Russians have nothing to do with the spirit of the 20th century, the century of mega deathThe compassion we find in the pages of the Russian classic is absent in the bloody history of the last century. Virgil It is a brave and lucid novel about evil and the fatal intoxication it produces, for which there is no redemption. It is also about the very thin line that can separate good feelings from hatred. And, still, about the ill-fated destiny that precipitates the "dark hour of a blessed time." And about the extreme difficulty of maintaining a personal opinion, not induced by the tribe.

A prodigious novel of ideas

Virgil feels like a theologian who no longer believes in God: "He was overwhelmed by the human fascination with the apocalypse." He has become another man. But finally soiled—let the reader judge—with the integrity of crushed stone. In a collective drama that continues to simmer ("a war that, even if we won, we would also have lost"), Quim Español fictionalizes the chilling witness to a family tragedy. And an individual one. How difficult it is to fit the individual into the collective, in turbulent times! The "black milk" of the poem by Paul Celan It nourishes the pages of the book. A prodigious novel of ideas, yes, which still emphasizes the "enormous power of the aggressor," which "can destroy not only the body, but the soul of the attacked."

Ambitious, serious literature. In prose and verse. When it gets dark It seems to be placed under the auspices of Rilke's elegiac poetry (and of many other classics of the 20th century: T.S. Eliot, above all). This is a river poem in several cantos that integrates different voices—other people's quotes, fragments of conversation—to construct a profound reflection on the individual and its exposure to an increasingly precarious world, in which civilization becomes a fig: "Soon after, one begins to realize that no house, from now on, will be theirs." The voice of this magnificent poem asks what our descendants will be able to see in a world as melancholic as ours. It seems to question contemporary man, immersed in absurdity: "we touch eternity as we touch infinity." What remains for us? Beauty. But beauty also—Rilke wrote it, and Español remembers it—constitutes the beginning of the terrible.