The values to be learned from a shopkeeper

Kindness, austerity, trust, perseverance, loyalty, honesty, solidarity, realism. The family—the extended family of the title—of the narrator of Antònia Carré-Pons's new novel, Montserrat Vidal, owns a delicatessen, and these are the values—the values of a shopkeeper—that she learns.

Montserrat had a sister, Concepció. When they were little, their parents called them Rateta and Sió. Over the years, Sió would take over the family business, but Rateta could never bear the sight of those enormous pigs slit open, drained of blood, and turned into sausages. She would rather dedicate her life to medievalizing, but what she doesn't expect is for parents and children to be affected by what doctors call "polyfamilial cancer." Like all families, they will have to learn the language of grief and loss firsthand.

Antonia Carré-Pons spent many years (decades) studying the volume Mirror or book of women, the great classic by Jaume Roig. If he had not written it in tetrasyllabic verse, this story would now be a novel as readable, at least, as the Throwing the White AwayBut the format has made it almost exclusively the domain of specialists.

Carré-Pons could have focused exclusively on his academic work. However, in 2018 he made his first foray into narrative with the volume of short stories How to break the bad temperWith his original nursing home stories he demonstrated narrative skill and the possession of a personal world (corroborated by critical and public success), which later The casting (2024) and now The big family have confirmed.

The need for links

The big family It has some similarities with the previous books, such as its reflection on old age and its autobiographical style. But it's a novel that goes beyond that. What it contains is the meaning of life as a whole, the need for family ties, and a certain reconciliation between the protagonist and her own ancestors.

Medievalism, in any case, serves the narrator to introduce some reflections on the origins of the condition of women in our society. Precisely theMirror by Jaume Roig, as Joan Fuster imagined, could have found a feminist response (forward the letter) in it Vita Christi Isabel de Villena. After all, Roig was the doctor at the convent of the Trinity in Valencia, where Villena was the abbess.

In fact, Carré-Pons is perfectly aware that Roig's misogyny was a comic device to attract potential readers of the time. But that, of course, is another story.