Six years had passed since Carme Riera (Palma, 1948) had published a novel. The writer has spent a lot of time engrossed in the biography of Carmen Balcells, Carmen Balcells, traficante de palabras (Debate, 2022), and made a brief appearance with La paz de los sueños felices (Bruguera/Edicions 62), an illustrated novel that was more of a fairy tale for adults in which she reclaims the figure of mermaids. For the editor of Edicions 62, Pilar Beltran, such a long wait turns the launch of Una sombra blanca (Alfaguara/Edicions 62) "into a first-magnitude event," with the return of an author who knows how to weave a novel so that it grows on each page, regardless of the multiplicity of voices. "The reader has to build the text as they go," says Riera, allowing the narrative to mature when its foundations are questioned, being aware that her characters, like those of flesh and blood, do not always tell the truth. "Like a Russian doll," summarizes Carolina Reoyo, editor at Alfaguara.
She even allows Una sombra blanca to straddle the American South and Mallorca, as she already did in Cap al cel obert (2000), where she combined her native island with Cuba. She is clear that she has never left Mallorca; she remains in that "very close and endearing place." Pulling on the thread, she remembers a little girl who lived on the island without her parents, cared for by others, which impacted her greatly, a plot present in the novel. That little girl, named Diandra Luker, became a film producer and married Michael Douglas. Regarding the United States, she says she has been able to narrate it because she has lived there several times. "America changed my point of view," she confesses. She even remembers some places she visited, like a very picturesque oyster bar, where the remains were thrown directly onto the table.
The surprise, as her Catalan editor points out, lies in her venturing to inquire about near-death experiences. "I wanted to write for years about a topic that worries me: what happens when we die?" explains Riera, not forgetting that this novel was written during the pandemic. "Everyone is afraid of death; if there were another life, we would be less afraid. I would like to think it exists," she adds. The writer has the protagonist of Una sombra blanca, the world-renowned opera singer Barbara Simpson, suffer a heart attack in the middle of a performance but she doesn't quite leave the world because she has an unresolved issue to sort out. Riera has dedicated herself to researching cases of patients who survive after being clinically dead, who explain that they enter a place of peace, very luminous. "The novel can be understood as a self-help book. If we put this as a slogan, we have some chance of it working," the writer ironically comments, also a professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and a member of the Real Academia Española (RAE).
This trigger constantly mixes with music, from the operas Barbara Simpson talks about, with nods to the Liceu and the Perelada festival, to the life of street musicians that the protagonist's parents led. "I really like opera," emphasizes Riera, who wrote the libretto for L'Arxiduc, about the life of Archduke Ludwig Salvator, an Austrian aristocrat who lived in Mallorca between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Furthermore, she has now been asked to write an opera about the converted Jews of her island, present in the novel Dins el darrer blau (1995), a plot she continued in Cap al cel obert. With Giacomo Puccini's Tosca being one of her favorite operas, it's not surprising that it's the one the soprano is performing when she suffers a cardiac crisis. She also does it at the Met in New York, a hall that Riera visits whenever she can.
Despite almost 50 years having passed since she became known with the short story collection Te deix, amor, la mar com a penyora (1975) and accumulating a dozen titles, Riera still has many doubts about any new project, as with the title this time, trying multiple options ---Los colores del arcoíris or El retorno de la diosa blanca--- until settling on Una sombra blanca. "The worst moment in the world is the galleys, they are terrible," the author emphasizes. For this reason, she never rereads herself, which has led her to forget many of the things she has written, a fact she confirmed when she stopped entering a conference in which she had to participate, thinking they were talking about someone else. What she does have quite clear at this point is that "literature does not serve to move the world," as she once believed, but that does not stop her from continuing to warn about those situations she considers unjust, such as the racial and gender discrimination that appear in Una sombra blanca. "Writers transgress from language and everything politically correct should not affect us," she defends. For now, she has two ideas for new novels, but she has not yet wanted to reveal any details.