BarcelonaLast Wednesday was Saint Joseph's Day, and apart from thinking about the burning, my father and all fathers also came to mind, of course, although I haven't had to make any effort to think about it lately. And not only because of the usual marketing for Father's Day, which we've never celebrated as such in my house, but because three books I've read (all three new releases) made reference from the start, in one way or another, to the father figure.
The first one struck me and surprised me. It's about I have a small death, a profoundly sad, but also beautiful, anthology curated by poet Anna Gual and published by Angle Editorial. Vado has compiled the texts of around fifty poets who have spoken about grief in the wake of gestational, neonatal, and early childhood deaths. We associate the loss of a child above all, and rightly so, with women, who are the ones who most directly suffer its consequences. But in the book we also find poems by men because, as the author of the compilation explains, "only by accepting the diversity of perspectives on something so tragic can we grasp the complexity of the grief that accompanies this misfortune."
Thus, in this sensitive choice, we find verses by fathers like Jordi Pere Cerdà, who, narrating his wife's experience, wrote: "Between your mother's thighs / a thick river / silently ran / the rotten soil, / a blockage of your scream." The same is collected and named after the verse of another poet, Vicent Andrés Estellés: "I have a small Death / mine and very much mine alone. / As I nourish her, / she nourishes me equally. / I have a small Death / that takes its feet out of its diapers." What I like about the book is Anna Gual's attitude, who looks for a place in literature from which to confront pain, and offers this space to all the people who find themselves in the same situation. Sometimes, when you're screwed up, you think that no one will ever understand you, and you read a book where you see yourself reflected and you feel accompanied and understood in a way that you thought you could never hear yourself, and that embrace is what Gual and all the rest of the poets in the collection offer.
A Rather Tortured Father
In the second book, the father's experience is more endearing and easier, despite his thousand and one ways of complicating his life. I'm talking aboutThe future is a small flame, written by journalist Jordi Nopca and published by Proa. The protagonist is a man—well, that's a lie, he's a hedgehog—who has just become a father. This is one of the plots we find in the book, the birth of the little one and how it affects the couple, but others are also mixed in: the story of a computer scientist who is asked by certain powerful minds to erase the information from some computers; that of a friend who has opened a publishing house and, at the same time, has a marijuana plantation in his house; the story of how the hedgehog occupies her time; the health of the protagonist himself...
Fatherhood hovers throughout the novel which, of course, taking into account all these headaches, shows a rather tortured father (can there be tortured men who don't become tortured fathers?). One of the reflections I like most in the book is, precisely, when the parent reflects on the stage at which babies communicate with the world through words that still have no form or meaning. Nopca writes that this little hedgehog "is like a half-tuned radio. Any day now it'll find the station it's looking for and start chatting." A language comparison I find very apt and endearing.
The third book is The sweetness of living, a collection of short stories by Joan Todó published by LaBreu. In the first two stories, I encounter two very different fathers: one who doesn't accept his daughter's boyfriend and who, through a series of events you'll discover if you read the book, comes into contact with an immigrant who has fled his home on a small boat and must help him in his final moments; and one about a man who never leaves the kitchen, and his son watches as he becomes part of the room. The latter is more traditional, but overall, the collection doesn't strike me as one of boring, un-epic times, as I read on the back cover (one, in fact, takes place in the middle of the war). But I suppose this is what the author of Sénia wants to show us: that wherever they want, they can't find like-minded people. As the father in the first story says, and as all fathers well know, even though this isn't the image we've traditionally been given of them: "We live on a thin crust."
