Toni Sala's disenchanted and self-destructive ventriloquism

The title of the new novel by Toni Sala (Sant Feliu de Guíxols, 1969) is Scenarios, but it's the characters, and especially their voices, that carry the entire weight of the work, which is more reflective, speculative, and psychological than properly narrative. I mean that what the characters say, think, and explain is more important than the events that occur and are told with them. Conceived and structured as an exploration of what happens when people who have nothing in common meet by chance and interact, Scenarios It unfolds as a mosaic of psychologies and at the same time as a portrait of an era and a country: the depressed, debased, and sordidly erratic Catalonia of the post-pandemic and post-process. A phrase spoken by one of the protagonists, a famous actor ashamed of his success in audiovisual media and now in the process of reinventing himself as a theatrical stand-up comedian, defines the prevailing mood and general atmosphere of the novel: "I don't think you can pass it off with dignity."

The novel begins with the lead actor explaining his pre-performance routines. He likes to drive, and while he's reviewing his script, while he's getting his mind and body ready to perform in front of an audience, he gets in his car and, without any direction, drives for hours and hours. While recounting this prep routine, the actor also recounts his humble origins, as the son of a family that ran a coca-cola bar, and the reasons for his fame, a series of horror films. gore, later converted into a television series, titled MaliciousThat his success and prosperity rest on dozens of hours of violence and bloodshed—fictional violence and mock blood, but violence and blood nonetheless—gives the character and his biography an unassailable patina of amorality. More important than the pre-performance routines, in any case, is the traffic accident—a wild boar on a secondary road in Cerdanya—that nearly kills him. The one who saves his life is Vadó, a young and obese security guard desperate to find a woman who will pay attention to him, and who, coincidentally, seems to find her the very night of the accident. The woman in question, Olga, is a nurse who is also overweight, solitary, obsessive, with a single goal in life: to find a man who will bear her a child and then disappear.

An emotionally tough and difficult novel

From the interconnectedness and interaction of these three characters, each with their own voice and their rhetorical torrents of grievances, manias, fears, tastes, expectations, passions, misfortunes, fortunes, hopes, disappointments, miseries, and shortcomings, Sala constructs a disjointed introductory novel, which progresses and unfolds, taking on an increasingly languid and gloomy tone. The pathological vulnerability of the three protagonists—one due to excessive ego and overexposure to the world, the other two due to a lack of self-esteem and excessive inner claustrophobia—as well as the inventory of wounds they carry and the traumas they drag along, make the novel emotionally harsh and difficult.

Sala wants to write a tough and difficult novel, which is why he pushes it to the brink of exuberance. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes not so much. The way he describes the nurse's obsessive desire to get pregnant and Vadó's compulsive relationship with food—of a gluttonous opulence that is both fascinating and disgusting, makes one think of the memorable Older brother of Lionel Shriver, also published in Catalan by L'Altra—are very powerful and give the novel a sickly vigor, a self-destruction full of vitality. Vadó's farewell letter before his suicide, on the other hand, as well as the sarcastic and self-punishing monologue about the Catalan language, act as if they were foreign to the whole, and in and of themselves function only relatively.

Scenarios It is a portrait, written in muscular and sometimes dazzling prose, of a degraded society and country, populated by disoriented men and women in search of a redemption that eludes them, men and women who often seem to be kept company only by their own wounds.