The protagonist of Marí (La Magrana) is a perverse voice that inhabits a girl's head, to whom it speaks, orders, castrates, and undermines. Maria Mercè Roca (Portbou, 1958), current dean of the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes (ILC), has wanted in her latest novel to delve into the play of voices that characterize fiction: "The first thing you ask yourself when you write is what voice you are going to use."
After her return to literature with Al final t'agradaré (Rosa dels Vents, 2020), published after her time in politics and a few days before the lockdown, Roca this time proposes a third-person narrator who mixes with the orders of a constant and authoritarian voice, allowing this monster to be heard unfiltered at first, when the girl has just been born and her worst nightmare has already occupied her temporal lobe. All this, listening very little to the voice of the young woman, Marí, always subjugated. "There are moments when you don't know who is speaking," Roca maintains.
Marí addresses mental health and incomprehension, isolation, rejection, and the pain it generates. She does so "in a very poetic way, without becoming dramatic," remarks its author, who has liked to position herself "from a tender distance." She started it in 2021 and, despite these illnesses having been brought into focus since the pandemic, it is not what has been decisive in Roca's writing: "I had been thinking about this novel for a long time, about how to solve the problem posed by this type of voice, it was difficult for me and I wasn't sure it would end up working, but I think it is understood and is credible. It has coincided that mental health has been talked about a lot since then, but it is a novel and should be read as such."
In fact, it is not specified what pathology Marí suffers from, who eventually has to seek treatment, so the writer skirts around the medical aspect and has not compiled extensive documentation. "I have gone very lightly over it, the medication she takes is not mentioned, but I do like to explain the side effects it causes," she points out. "I would like to think that the voice can be understood as the one we all hear within ourselves and that measures the satisfaction and self-esteem we have," she adds.
What weighs most in Marí is the style with which she has configured it, "concentrated and removing everything superfluous, treating even the most serious things naturally." "I built the story and then it hasn't moved. I have dedicated myself to rewriting, rewriting and rewriting," Maria Mercè Roca emphasizes. The most refined style is found in the mini chapters with which Marí's childhood and adolescence are explained, as if they were briefly explained photographs, "I could have put more things, but it wasn't necessary, Marí was already drawn." The plot is not as important this time, compared to other titles of hers, where the characters and the relationships they weave were central, "made with a style always sought to be accessible and contained, but here it is more so, what is really important is the way of saying things." For now, Roca is not writing anything else: "I finished Marí recently and it is still very much within me."