Theory and practice of good fucking

Game theory studies, in a decision, what is the optimal choice for an individual when the costs and benefits of each option are not predetermined, but depend on the choices of other individuals. Arià Paco's novel, the latest Anagrama Books Award winner, could be defined as the playful embodiment of this theory: a philosophical and literary experiment that is both the portrait of a generation and a treatise on the relationships between the individuals within it. An experiment that has turned out remarkably well, especially considering the difficulty of the challenge posed by the writer from Igualada, who had already written a good novel about his city: Coward, old woman, so wild. If there he skillfully and vigorously outlined the end of youth and the form of bonded friendship, here he aims to write the First Great Novel on a concept as slippery and one that has oozed as much ink as New Masculinities.

The book begins with a more or less metaliterary prologue, at the end of which we are told that he hasn't even started the novel yet. So to speak. A woman warns someone who wants to write about desire and love: "You're a man, and a writer must belong to his time; you can't write today without ignoring the fact that you're a man." The struggle between the writer and the materials he wants to talk about is always bitter, but when someone tries to write about men who want to behave according to new parameters, different from those that until now have governed the power relations between them and women, the struggle is more unequal than ever. The writer chooses a rather classic weapon for the battle – pure fiction – and, once the prologue is finished, he switches to the third person and begins to describe the life of a certain Ernesto: from the charming child we move on to the sexual awakening of the adolescent and end up with the lost young man of the new love and sex news. With him, we meet two women who have very different ways and rules of love, and a few more ways of fucking: pay attention to some memorable sex scenes. And, like him, we move from one woman to another, from one scene to another, readers seduced by the intelligence and the know-how From the writer, who writes with a ductile prose, with just the right amount of lyricism when it's time to pause, and with absolute effectiveness when it's time to move forward. He knows how to make us laugh with the adventures of the author of a successful essay on new masculinities, and makes us think about the limits of literature: "Freshly falling in love, what literary hold does it have?"

Walking without signs or marked paths

The novel unfolds a whole sentimental and political education of the generation of the mems, the whats and all kinds of millennial tics. It is a very good literary elaboration of the effects of the pandemic on young people: as if the misfortune that erased everything allowed them to draw a new world. It also contains a somewhat melancholic description of the depoliticization of the followers of the alternative left. And it is, above all, a celebration of sexual desire as the driving force of life, a force that continues to drive men (and women) who must walk without signs or laid out paths: everything they try to do it must be invented and everything a writer born in 1993 tries to write also Dickinson in Plato, from Sally Rooney to Doris Lessing. Literature and philosophy nourish as much as food or sex, and the characters in Game theory They know it and they practice it in what is one of the novels of the year.