The Sant Jordi award by Roc Casagran: a motivational novel

"I love you and this is a cry for help. I love you and that is a let's do it together, please". These are the two opening sentences of We dreamed of an island, the novel with which Roc Casagran (Sabadell, 1980) has won the 2024 Sant Jordi Award. These are phrases that give an indication of what the novel will be like: they establish the narrative and stylistic coordinates – a realism with poetic tones –, they mark its ethical and ideological orientation – in humanism with utopian echoes – and on the surface.

The protagonist and narrator of the novel is Carla, a woman in her forties, married, a mother of two, a screenwriter and audiovisual producer, who is facing the final stretch of a major marital crisis and an intimate tragedy that we won't discover until the end. Disoriented but full of goodwill—goodwill, both on the part of the author and the characters, is omnipresent in the novel—and at a peak moment in her professional career—she is about to premiere a documentary series—Carla sets out to overcome the crisis by taking stock of her life, inventorying her hopes, reservations, misgivings, and desires. The way she chooses to do so is by writing to the man she loves, whom she has betrayed and hurt, and who is naturally willing to forgive her.

A life path unfolded in a tame and predictable way

Carla's life story has as its traumatic central axis the fact that she was raised by a single mother who never spoke to her about her father. This absence of a father, coupled with the fact that she and her mother don't communicate openly until she is almost dead, doesn't make Carla a dysfunctional woman, but it does destabilize her. Hers is, in any case, a soft trauma, which still affects her. Thus, her life trajectory (life in the village, entering adulthood, friendship with a sad boy, youthful promiscuity, work, falling in love, children, conditions of motherhood, routine, doubts, infidelity, acts of contrition and reparation, and final overcoming) unfolds before the reader in a single breath. It doesn't help that Casagran's prose is eminently functional, spiced with a few clichés and rhetorical fossils—"the devilish dynamics of capitalism," "our horizon was to be happy," "they filled their lungs with utopias," "the disastrous world we are building"—are recurrent. The feeling left by all this is that of reading a flat, univocal, and Manichean account of a biography rather than a complex, plural, and problematic expression of a life.

To expand the narrative and metaphorical scope of the novel, Casagran uses the motif of islands, which is obviously the theme of Carla's documentary series, which aspires to be "a space for reflection on humanity and the planet." Interspersed throughout Carla's personal narrative are passages that recount, in a manner somewhere between Wikipedian-like and entertaining, the history, vicissitudes, and inhabitants of eight unique and remote islands, each one (large, small, natural, artificial, potential paradises, or tragic scenarios) different from the others. The resource of interspersing information about the islands de-routines the reading but does not deconventionally deconstruct the novel. They are also a pretext for the narrator to reflect on various issues—loneliness and commitment, communication and lack of communication—that have to do with what we have agreed to call human relationships. In the end, of course, Carla finds "the strength to climb the abyss." He overcomes the difficulties that beset him through pure faith in the "we're still together," not through the conflicting acceptance of the complexity of life and the world.