Irene Solà (Malla, 1990) wanted to explore magic in her new book. Without losing the universe she patented in Canto jo i la muntanya balla (Anagrama Novel Prize 2019), with a majority of characters and stories made of flesh and blood, Et vaig donar ulls i vas mirar les tenebres (Anagrama) stems from the curiosity she felt about making a pact with the devil. "It's one of the premises of a lot of tales and legends. Furthermore, it's present in many cultures," the author states, without forgetting her taste for folklore and oral narrative, always related to the innate pleasure in the act of listening to stories.
"I have looked into the darkness while writing this book," Irene Solà cryptically confesses, letting everyone feel the darkness as they prefer, without taking for granted that it has to be something unequivocally bad and challenging. For Solà, precisely, her third novel deals, beyond magic, with the multiple points of view that can exist about any event. "I tell a family story, but I do it from diverse, even contradictory, subjectivities. It must be understood like most family stories, as something fragmented. It's unlikely that someone will come and tell you the whole thing; instead, you will gather fragments, moments, and details, and you will organize them," she explains.
From that plurality, and in turn ambiguity, Irene Solà narrates, over the course of a single day, successive generations of women who inhabit a farmhouse in les Guilleries to this day, all of them enclosed in a home that mimics its surroundings and memories, always partisan, as the only way of escape. The pact with the devil that determines the future of this saga is crystallized by the matriarch, Joana, invoking him to find a husband even if she has to kill a cat and urinate on its grave.
Solà narrates in a single day successive generations of women who inhabit a farmhouse in les Guilleries to this day, all of them enclosed in a home that mimics its surroundings
From this peculiar initial complicity, the narrative voice, "almost phantasmagorical, as if it were a gust of wind entering the house and fluttering around," invades the characters and accompanies them to shape their lives, which intertwine paragraph by paragraph, jumping from one to another, gaining speed and even sharing lines. All of this, with a precious vocabulary that recovers forgotten tales and traditions, including their expressions, placing them above current ones, making them the ones that describe the world, past and present, evidencing the difficulties in explaining contemporary gadgets like a mobile phone or a car.
Et vaig donar ulls i vas mirar les tenebres, written before the boom of Canto jo i la muntanya balla, with more than 100,000 readers worldwide, is also a novel that challenges the hegemonic subjectivity that has been transmitted century after century, focusing on "those who do not star in history in capital letters, nor even most stories in lowercase." "They are not only women," she continues, "they are also old, supposedly ugly, and they are dead." That is why everything happens in Mas Clavell, because they do not have the possibility of escaping its interior as men do, who can go out to see the world, participate in wars, and live adventures, even if they can never return, with a nod to the mythical Serrallonga included. In fact, Solà bases all the stories on deep research that seems to never end, reading a lot, talking to experts, treading ground, and watching YouTube videos, sometimes making it weigh more than the narrative inertia.
Despite the dark magic surrounding a devil of a thousand faces, Irene Solà wanted the novel to be very corporeal, building a plot full of contrasts, whether between the versions of the same story told by each protagonist, or between the afterlife and its ghosts, and the smells, sensations, noises, and flavors that permeate every corner of Mas Clavell and its inhabitants. "It constantly describes and talks about the bodies of women and animals, also about the house and the landscape, how food is prepared or traps for wolves, how someone is tortured and how pleasure is provoked," she relates. That omnipresent physical presence coexists seamlessly with the fantastic, merging, making the everyday more unreal by exaggerating it and allowing the impossible to become true.
And, she recalls, in a story, a pact is also established between reader and narrator. "You turn off the alarm and incredulity sensors, and, instead of spending the whole novel saying 'this can't be,' you immerse yourself within, you imagine the unimaginable and you believe the incredible," she remarks. As if it were the very devil pursuing Joana and her offspring, Solà presents a story that begins by bewildering until everything fits together, providing the key for the reader to feel like one more in that elusive Mas Clavell and live with its women, as if pursuing them, even when they are about to die, hearing their last gasp very closely and plunging into new darkness.
It is not yet clear if the melody that Solà has learned to play in Canto jo i la muntanya balla and Et vaig donar ulls i vas mirar les tenebres will continue to be present in new stories, "it will have a lot to do with the moment I am in," but what she does reveal is that she is already working on a new project. "I never stop. Research opens up paths and possibilities. But, with promotion processes like the current one, you have to slow down, you can't write every day," she maintains. For Anagrama's editor, Silvia Sesé, the fact that a writer's style focused on recovering tradition is so popular has to do with her dealing with stories that affect everyone, regardless of their origin: "She doesn't flatten differences as globalization does, which is why her works are universal."