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 explains the sexual awakening of a thirteen-year-old teenager, Franki Prats. However, it happens that Franki's tumescent emotions awaken (he does what the author calls "the change") along unorthodox paths. To begin with, there is a deformed Oedipal attraction to his own mother, a badly married former model who nevertheless retains much of her youthful appeal. Franki's father, for whom his wife no longer deserves attention, is a university professor with other relatives, a homosexual uncle from whom Franki seems to have inherited, if not the sexual attraction to members of his own gender, then at least their congenital oddities.

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 eight [sic], it seems like 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 of his alter ego), for example, is not such, but 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.