The hunger to live, the desire to die

Some books are written to create literature, while others are written because they simply cannot be left unwritten, because the author needs to confront some ghost that haunts them or exorcise some demon that torments them. This doesn't mean, however, that these latter books aren't also written with literary intent. Such is the case of... Hunger, a mixture of personal memoir, medical chronicle, and desperate cry by the translator, narrator, and poet Núria Busquet Molist (Cardedeu, 1974). It is not true that honesty doesn't exist in literature. It does. It just so happens that honesty also requires the strategies of formalization and artifice. Literary screams and vomiting—Busquet uses both similes to describe her book—are also a matter of style.

The demon that burns and torments at the very heart of the book—that is, the concrete fact that is both its starting point and its central core—is the severe eating disorder, anorexia nervosa, suffered by one of the writer's daughters. One day, she stops eating and begins to lose weight, gradually becoming trapped—she and all those drawn to her—in hospitals, treatments, monitoring of what she eats and doesn't eat, admissions, and readmissions. The mother, the protagonist, who is not exactly the author of the book but is, in a way, the author, witnesses her sick daughter's progress with love and terror, driven by a desire to save her and also by the frustration of not knowing how to do so or finding anyone to help her. "My daughter is sick, and I can't cure her. I can't save her, I can only be there": the impotent frenzy of having a transcendent goal and not finding a way to achieve it consumes the mother and sets the overall tone of the book.

Hunger It is constructed with diverse materials, both thematic and textual. On the one hand, there is everything associated with the disease process: the pain, anguish, and guilt; the changes in family dynamics; the neglect of healthcare services on the verge of collapse; reflections on the standards of happiness and beauty and how social media ingrains them in the minds of teenagers... On the other hand, there are passages that function as existential essays or as lyrical flashes, counterpoints to the prevailing starkness: "I have to serve her food and not force her... angel, but use her wings to drown her, if necessary." Thanks to an urgent and gripping prose, marred only by a few clichés with a touch of self-help, a certain prolixity, and an occasional Manichean judgmental attitude toward some aspects of contemporary society, all of this conveys the experience of a raw and terrible drama.

In addition to that, Hunger It is also an existential and autobiographical recapitulation of the writer and narrator. As if the life-or-death crisis suffered by her daughter were drawing from the depths of the author's own soul a whole series of unresolved, intimate crises—nostalgia for lost energy and the squandered illusions of youth, the uncomfortable management of past expectations, the routines and compromises of age. These memoiristic passages, triggered by her daughter's illness, perhaps at times seem somewhat clichéd and repetitive (the obsession with Nirvana and the grunge(the partying, drinking, fucking, and dancing), but they enrich the whole, and above all underline one of the themes of the book: that of vitality, which can be both a creative force of life, when it is released constructively, and a beast that breeds destruction and death, when we do not know what to do with it.