Literature is pleasure of language

When I see that the most popular books and those that occupy the top spots on the bestseller lists are works without any literary ambition, without any stylistic awareness, written in poor language, full of clichés and flat characters, and that what is most highlighted about them is that they are about this or that, my heart sinks. Wal·lah (I swear, as they would say in my neighborhood) that I don't say this out of envy (I feel fortunate to have readers who have conveyed their affection to me since I published my first short story in my high school magazine, and although this may be a capital sin of national scope, I envy writers capable of overcoming the numerous doubts that accompany our work to create magnificent works, those that I would have liked to write, but in this case, the destructive force of envy transforms into its positive counterpart: admiration).

This is not an elitist complaint or a disdain for popular literature that entertains and has an effect on those who consume it comparable to that of works considered first-class. What seems like a danger to me is that increasingly the books that are published with the aim of reaching large masses of readers are created with the idea that, the poorer the language they use, the easier they will be to sell. And thus, a true process of sleight of hand and substitution occurs: we read believing we are reading good literature when, in fact, good literature is denied to us. Reading a romantic novel of the kind that so many teenagers consume now is not a problem at all, the problem is when these readings begin to occupy all the available space and the market does not even offer the opportunity to discover other accessible books (hermeticism seems to me a form of snobbery, almost a classism that hides nothing more than the emptiness of authors who have nothing to say and must make themselves incomprehensible to seem more intelligent than their readers).

In all this, the readings we give to students in training are decisive, they shape their taste and can broaden their literary universe or reduce it to a miserable minimum. If at 12 years old I was dazzled by Aloma, why can't today's girls find a work of the same literary quality that has the same effect on them? Perhaps because we have told them that the protagonists of the stories must resemble them and we have killed their curiosity to discover the lives of very different people who live very different situations, perhaps because the audiovisual market is conditioning the way we understand fiction. But literature is not just about telling a story, it is also about articulating a language whose main objective is to seek beauty in its most diverse forms. They are now making a new film adaptation of The Odyssey, for example, and I refuse to go see it because poor Homer (if he even existed) not only introduced us to the adventures of Ulysses and his companions, but also created a unique language to which we have access thanks to good translators.

For all these reasons, I bid you farewell with a book that I discovered thanks to the recommendation of a good friend, Javier Pérez Andújar, and which deserves much more attention (and readers) than it has received. It is The Sparrows, by Montse Virgili, written in a Catalan that is a feast for the senses, original and full of beauty. Some of the images she creates with her descriptions have settled under my eyelids and I know I will never forget them. Just a couple of examples of the numerous sentences I have underlined in my copy: “She has a permanent smile on her lips and her tongue is sharpened by the whetstone of life” or “My nation will be that of women like Cinta, who get dirty and have torn away, like the head of a sardine, the fear of losing”.