Poisoning, raping or lying like someone who takes the bus to work

The readers he had Anna K. By 2006, she was remembered as a meteorite, a rare elderly which everyone received with an euphoric: "It's about time, something different!". In 2025, the year in which the publishing house La Segunda Periferia has decided to bring it back, the panorama of publications in Catalan is more varied and rich, the world has turned upside down and the perception, by force, must change. The edition has a couple of epilogues that contextualize both the author and the work: Tina Valles accurately recounts the Premiano de Mar by Martí Rosselló (1953-2010), which is also his own, and Borja Bagunyà He sees in the work traces of a tradition of the grotesque that seeks to expose the principles that sustain reality. The novel receives all kinds of praise. Everything seems to be in its place, then.

Everything? Well, the prose is not excellent, there are unnatural syntactical constructions, and an overly generous use of epithets, which is a practice that has always grated on me. And, furthermore, as if a pebble had gotten into our shoe, we close the book and cannot help but think that there has been more than one frankly unpleasant moment throughout the reading, and it has not been due to the accumulation of gruesome, violent and macabre events, completely impossible coincidences, successions of successions. It is clear that everything responds to a desire to move away from realism and verisimilitude, and it is also clear that the surgical coldness with which the narrator exposes the most horrifying events is calculated and entirely voluntary. The question is with what objective he does it. The characters poison themselves, rape, lie, take revenge and abandon relatives in containers as if they were taking the bus to go to work, and they are impassive in the face of tenderness and cruelty. They all are, and this is the first part of the problem: the lack of contrast obscures what is meant to be explained. There are passions in abundance, but the characters live them as if they were anesthetized. If no one – not even the narrator – feels empathy or has feelings of any kind towards anyone, it becomes more difficult to connect with the story we are reading. The indifference that the characters feel towards the whole world around them is what invades us as readers as we follow what happens to the protagonist, this Anna K. who trembles with fear in a library, hires a private detective or lives locked in the window of a furniture store but we never really know what she feels.

Precisely the part of the furniture store is one of the best in the book, in addition to the ending, which does manage to capture a very complex emotion. Life inside a window could have been an extraordinary story, if it weren't for the fact that, when the male character appears, staring in wonder Anna K, we read: "He did not feel worthy of sharing a word, a conversation, or a glance [...] with that marvelous being who inflamed him with poetic passion. For him, the sight of Anna K. was a symbol, rather than a reality." Here lies another of the book's problems: if the adored element is not a person, but functions as a symbol, then it doesn't matter what we can do to it, right? It is this mythical and unrealistic construction of the figure of the woman, made from a masculine imaginary that venerates what in fact frightens it, that makes us uncomfortable. And yes, we are in the realm of fiction, where everything is permitted, of course, but isn't placing an insulating glass between the reader and what we are writing forgetting the communicative function of literature?