An incredibly traumatic and very funny sexual experience

There has been a lot of literature - or meta-literature - about the process of writing a book. These writers suffer for every sentence, drunk or drugged, secreting an infinite pain in having to produce a text with the doses of originality or at least formal gravity and drama that justify their herculean effort. Dick or the sadness of sex, instead, I imagine its author, Kiko Amat, having a great time with his writing. Because although what is addressed is an outrageously traumatic sexual experience, the author's intention and the resources he puts at his service are still completely humorous.

Dick or the sadness of sex The story tells of the sexual awakening of a thirteen-year-old boy, Franki Prats. However, it turns out that Franki awakens to tumescent emotions (he does what the author calls "the change") by unorthodox paths. To begin with, he feels a deformed Oedipal attraction towards his own mother, a badly married former model who still retains much of her youthful appeal. Franki's father, for whom his wife no longer deserves attention, is a university professor with the pretensions of a novelist. The rest of the family is no more interesting than the family dog, Perla, except for a homosexual uncle from whom Franki seems to have inherited, if not the sexual attraction for members of the same gender, then the congenital oddities. He sublimates these by inventing a character, Dick Loveman, who traverses space and time doing everything that Franki is incapable of, a kind of conjunction between Captain America and Rocco Siffredi.

The protagonist's incestuous passion is expressed in an excessive interest in the mother's armpits, but since there is little to do in this regard, he will be content to exchange photos of the ex-model with a friend, the Sexpert, who provides him with pornographic films. These films, by the way, are on video, because the novel is set in the late 80s. Now that kids are already introduced to porn through mobile phones from the age of 8 (sic) it seems pure archaeology to remember the times when it was accessed through crumpled magazines and life-saving frames. But for those of my generation, who were sexually socialized with the New Voucher and the cardboard screenshots advertising the "S" rated films in the lobbies of all the neighborhood movie theaters that have now disappeared (what memories!), this novel is a lovingly grotesque vision of a vivid and stark reality.

The point is that Franki has his first satisfactory sexual experience with the bitch. This is not counting the unsatisfactory ones, among which we should mention a certain lewd episode with his uncle and the clumsy maneuvers with a classmate with whom he does not quite get along. The grace of all this, naturally, is not the episodes themselves, but Kiko Amat's way of telling them, with a disproportionate language, full of technicalities to allude to sexual terminology and always ready to make the reader smile, if not provoke a frank laugh. An erection of the protagonist (or his alter ego), for example, is not such, but rather, a "hydraulic shock", a "rise of his manhood" or the "peremptory rise of his manhoodAmat's undoubted narrative ability is fused in the crucible of a language perfectly adapted to the dramatic-morbid needs of the story.

A book, in short, that explains sexual awakening as what it is: a great misunderstanding. And the miracle is that teenagers come out alive.