Women who love with a heart-rending nostalgia

A black cat in the garden It is a collection of eight stories set in small towns and starring women who love from a heartbreaking nostalgia, from "a rage" that "disfigured" the narrator. Before winning ex aequo the Documenta award with this book, Irene Zurrón (Palma, 1990) wrote a children's novel, The tribe in the middle of the mountain (Tándem, 2021), but A black cat in the garden is her debut in short fiction. A debut that doesn't seem like one thanks to the quality of the writing, the refined style and the powerful language that the author masters with ease.

Taking as a reference the literature of Mercè Rodoreda —which Zurrón knows well from the preparation of her doctoral thesis on suicide in literature, especially in the work of the author of How much, how much war—, Zurrón's stories are inspired, as she herself states on the last page of the book, by the beginnings of films (Niagara Falls), verses from songs (Spice Girls, Cal Eril's Little One), phrases taken from series (Twin Peaks), verses from poems (Maria Antònia Salvà, Emília Sureda), or a panel from the Barcelona History Museum. It's no surprise that the author went on to study Catalan language and literature at the University of the Balearic Islands. For Zurrón, writing is a collage of fragments in the image and likeness of the contemporary world. The author can cover everything from very current topics to traditional ancient tales.

The crisis of coming of age during a major global crisis

The stories ofA black cat in the garden They explore themes such as loneliness, intimacy, and interpersonal relationships from a broad and diverse cultural understanding. Each story is marked by a worldview that reflects the fragility of human experiences. The well-developed characters convey vulnerability and resilience, triggering a quick identification with the reader, who connects deeply and finds calm, like the protagonists of Zurrón, "in a disturbed universe." The common thread and the characters may seem the same in all the stories, but at different moments in their lives. The same is true of some ideas that are reiterated from diverse perspectives. It's a very generational book. And, to put it mildly, an imaginary that, from the black cat, which, by tradition, is linked to bad luck but also to the belief in fortune-telling, the feeling of uncertainty, of escape, of being dragged down by the context in which they find themselves (partner, rent, work), disorients them. Horoscopes, astrological charts, the Sibyl... myths and symbols are repeated to give a more festive and playful meaning to the stories, an aesthetic characteristic of the crisis, especially in 2008, the year in which expectations were completely shattered. Collective discourses about the global crisis coincide with the adult crisis of the generation born in the 1990s.