Like the vast majority of Catalan-speaking readers, I was completely unaware of the existence of Danish writer Suzanne Brøgger before editor Diana Coromines published Alliberem-nos de l'amor at BonPort. Diana had sent me this extraordinary book, translated into more than twenty languages worldwide, months ago, but as I live too busy devouring dime-a-dozen novels, I had left it half-dead in the ocean of pending readings. I returned to the text recently because the editor had the generosity to invite me to chat with Brøgger for a while at a joint event between the Calders bookstore and the headquarters of the Gyldendal publishing house in Copenhagen. It is time to thank this editor for her insistence, who has defended Brøgger in the best possible way (translating her into an immaculate Catalan version) to thus put us in contact with a text of colossal intelligence, the fruit of a powerful voice.
The thing is even more astonishing when you consider that Brøgger (who is now approaching eighty) wrote this book of immeasurable ambition at only twenty-seven years old. In fact, it is surprising that in 1973 an author optimized the resources of the nouveau roman in such a way as to give birth to a literary device where the reader does not know exactly whether they are reading a novel, a chronicle, an essay on political philosophy, or even a dramaturgical text. Brøgger has Svetlana Alexievich's skill in the art of creating narrative artifacts with a great multiplicity of voices, but which never disperse, because the author controls them with the power of music itself. I know that recommending a book that talks about freeing oneself from love for Sant Jordi may seem strange or forced, but I would say that precisely today (a day when book chauvinism masks literature) it is more appropriate than ever to talk about a text that forces us to think differently.
The existence of a critical work on fundamental aspects of European emotional anthropology such as the prototypical family, monogamous sexuality, or the overprotection of children would not constitute any news. But the key to the matter lies in verifying the methodical way in which Alliberem-nos de l'amor dynamites these forms of life, linking them to the consumer economy and the progressive self-absorption of the Western individual. This is a book of curious post-pandemic relevance, because Brøgger is a very detailed analyst when it comes to reminding us that family and partnership are cowardly ways of alienating ourselves from the world to avoid getting dirty with the disturbing experiences it gives us. If this had been written by a progressive academic from her pulpit, this would be just another Foucaultian recipe book; but, as Diana reminds us in the prologue, Brøgger has dedicated herself to living many existences.
The extraordinary thing about Alliberem-nos de l'amor lies in the brilliant hilarity with which Brøgger makes the reader end up laughing their ass off at the most brutal sexual humiliations suffered by her protagonists, and it is thus that we are surprised by the fact that we burst out laughing while the author narrates a mass rape by police officers or the sexual fantasies of a psychopathic child abuser. The author places herself at the limits of sordidness to put any conviction in parentheses and exposes her own body because she prefers to live in constant danger and face brutal harshness rather than having to buy an alienatingly tedious well-being. Reading this book is a more urgent necessity than ever in a country like ours, where feminism has become a nun's recipe book and provocation has been kidnapped by the bad boy comedians of TV3. Reading it is to suffer from enjoyment.
If you expect a reading to fortify your convictions or to continue being part of the national union of offense, do not approach the prose of this war correspondent of our everyday life of apparent middle class and limit yourselves to buying the mass of novellas of this Sant Jordi (books that will fall into oblivion in a few weeks). If you wish, on the contrary, to peek into real literature, read this beast of a woman. And starting the day after another predictable Diada, since we're at it, we could even begin to exercise ourselves in the art of chasing love away from our very boring lives.