The novel about the collapse that is born from a plate of macaroni

BarcelonaThere is a teenage memory in the life of Irene Rubio (Sallent, 1991) that remained etched in her mind. When she was 16 years old, one day her mother decided to teach her how to make macaroni. "She put me there, with the boiling pot in front of me, and told me: 'Now you have to put salt in the water.' When I asked her why, she replied: 'Because that's how it's been done all my life,'" explains the writer. Over time, she realized that this answer was repeated on other occasions, and this made her uneasy. From that strangeness, Rubio has made a novel: Seràs la vall (L'Altra Editorial), with which she has won the Documenta 2025 prize, it is a dystopia about a female community that has always lived constrained by ancestral customs.

"This novel talks about patriarchy, environmentalism, capitalism, and sisterhood, and it does so by generating a lot of emotion," emphasizes editor Eugènia Broggi. The jury chose Seràs la vall unanimously and, during the deliberations, the connection between this story and the novel Et vaig donar els ulls i vas mirar les tenebres (Anagrama, 2023) by Irene Solà was recurrently mentioned. "It reminded us of it in terms of theme, writing style, and structure, but Rubio goes even further. She manages to make the past speak about the present and also about the future," points out Broggi. Rubio acknowledges that she is a reader of Solà, but when composing the novel, she had two other titles in mind: La mort i la primavera by Mercè Rodoreda and Els desposseïts by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Seràs la vall is structured around two contrasting scenarios: a ruined city, with marginal neighborhoods, crime, and occupied apartments, and the village of Vall Seca, where only women live and are strongly marked by tradition and rituals. Although they are two close places, they have no connection whatsoever. From the city, rumors have spread that Vall Seca is cursed and should not be approached, while the women of the village are convinced that anyone who leaves will die.

"Everyone lives in a context of extreme drought. The water has run out and this has strained the valley's rigidity to the limit, because its customs are conditioned by cultivation and harvesting. When this is no longer possible, collapse begins," explains Rubio. In a way, the city and the town in the novel draw on her childhood and youth memories. "The aridity of Vall Seca is my grandparents' village in Castilla-La Mancha. I spent some summers there and I remembered the very degraded white houses and the fact that I never saw men in the street, because they were working or at the bar, while the women were always busy, running errands or talking to their neighbours," she points out.

The city resembles a fictional Barcelona and is dotted with Rubio's experience in the Catalan capital when she went to university. "I worked and studied, I had a life that I enjoyed little because I had to manage many things to be able to survive. I stayed there for a couple more years, but I had three jobs and practically didn't make ends meet. Barcelona kicked me out and I decided to return to the village," explains the writer.

Women governed by spirits

The history of the Dry Valley advances through the voices of the novel's protagonists, all women. Most of them are from the village and have no names: they refer to each other by the name of their family home and depending on whether they are girls, mothers, or grandmothers. There is, for example, Mare Riereta, who has an unbreakable faith in the spirits that govern the Valley and is a friend of Àvia Malapeça, a woman with a deep need for love and profound sadness. Her story is conditioned by Nena Malapeça, the last one born in the Valley, who left with her mother for the city and has since returned to the village.

"The relationships between these mothers, daughters, and grandmothers are complicated. They depend on the cycle of the land, but it is broken. There is a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of hierarchy, and a lot of loneliness among them," points out Rubio. The character who most differentiates herself from all of them is Irma, a firefighter who lives in the city and has an extreme curiosity to know what is happening in the Dry Valley, even though everyone tells her not to go there. For the writer, the formal challenge of the novel has been to tell it in a choral way – each chapter changes narrator – and to ensure that each voice has its own personality and is distinguished from the others. "They all have parts of me, but it was important to differentiate them. Also because each one tells reality in her own way, and that makes you not able to trust her," she adds.

Leaving Sant Jordi

In recent years, the Documenta prize arrived in bookstores in early March, but this year L'Altra Editorial and the Documenta bookstore – responsible for the award – have decided to publish it after Sant Jordi. "We have the perception that, in recent years, it is becoming increasingly difficult to have visibility for Sant Jordi. Large groups occupy a lot of space and it is complicated for small publishers to achieve it," explains Eugènia Broggi. To break with this dynamic, they have postponed the publication date of the book, and this has allowed them, according to the editor, "to have more time to work better on the text and do things calmly".