Núria Perpiñán's book to love and marvel at the human body

BarcelonaWriting often serves to understand, at least for Núria Perpiñán (Lleida, 1961). Each new novel by the writer is a journey into an unknown landscape, from fog and madness to Mistana (Proa, 2005; Critics' Award) to a world without water in Diatom (The Granada, 2022)Her latest obsession led her to think about the dualism between the flesh and the mind, so to unravel the entanglement she decided to throw herself headfirst—literarily—into a human body. The invisible body (La Magrana, 2025), Perpignan imagines an enzyme, Ubis Q10, that runs through every corner of the woman who lives within it in a fascinating epic, written in vibrant Catalan and full of funny moments. "How could I demonstrate that our body is intelligent and, biologically, a prodigy? I had to go inward," explains the author.

The invisible body It's an odyssey and, as such, it has a little hero. "I needed a cell that would bring energy and travel throughout the body. That's how I found Ubiquinol Q10, which I renamed Ubis after Ulysses," says Perpiñán. The book, in fact, features many classics—from the Hamlet from Shakespeare to the characters of Dickens—, but he has two great Ulysses as references: that of Homer and that of James Joyce. "Some time ago I had studied theOdyssey, although in a more academic way. Here I take it as one entertainment. I've always been very much in love with Joyce. He takes Ulysses and transforms him into an antihero with Leopold Bloom. I've decided to do the exercise in reverse: Ubis becomes a hero again, even though he weighs only one nanogram," he notes. "It slows down the aging of cells and helps mutations. It was perfect for my story," Perpignan emphasizes. Proteins, bones, and tissues pass through the adventure of Ubis, but it is accessible to readers without specific knowledge of human biology. After all, the book is not a scientific treatise but a novel about human existence based on what, for some, repels them.

"We should be more grateful for our bodies, and instead, we've always been told to reject them. 'We live within vile matter; the body is a sack of dung,' the saints say. And not just Christianity, but other religions too. Most intellectuals and philosophers don't agree. The connection between the body and the mind cannot be denied," Perpiñán points out. This link translates into human and surreal situations, such as when the Column explains to him that "death is a stab in the back, not because it is treacherous but because we force it to stand behind us so as not to see it" and, immediately afterward, an attack of sciatica shakes Ubis like an earthquake.

As with Homer's Ulysses, love and death are the two great engines that drive the hero. Ubis is a promiscuous enzyme, with a toxic relationship in his stomach, platonic love in his ears, and dolls for his eyes as lovers. "Cells are constantly reproducing. Inside us, 50 million die every second, and at the same time, 50 million are born. It's hard to understand. I've translated it into sexual terms to bring it closer to our experience, and also because Ubis injects ATP. It must penetrate the cells to give them something.

Every corner of the body is new territory to explore. As the protagonist tries to decipher them, the reader discovers that the right hand and left hand are in conflict, the lungs can't keep up with expelling all the tobacco smoke, and while one kidney only talks about money, the other is a scoundrel. Each character expresses themselves with their own voice, which Perpignan enriches with a barrage of idioms and words and expressions typical of Ponent. "When I write, the popular language of my family comes to me. I don't want all these words to be lost, so I've been using them in a context where they're understandable," he explains. At the same time, many verses by Carles Riba appear in the novel because I discovered theOdyssey with his translation and I fell in love with his language."