The latest title by Marta Orriols (Sabadell, 1975) occurred to her leaving the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC) on a very hot day. After spending hours enveloped by air conditioning and surrounded by paintings, a fire in Montjuïc made her collide head-on with reality. "This contrast is what ignited the spark to write the novel. I thought, wow, inside, we are preserving works that are many, many years old, and possibly they will outlive us because we are taking care of them as if they were the most precious thing we have, and, outside, the world is falling apart," explains the writer.
Orriols had not long published That Place We Call Home (Destino) and had not yet started thinking about the next novel, but she had already found a thread. From that original contrast, the author clearly saw that the protagonist, Joana, had to take care of the MNAC's works, to restore them, but without anyone taking care of her. "I wanted to talk about a female character about to turn 50, because it is important for women to be narrated, which has been done for many years, but also to encompass all types of women, and also normal women like Joana, who live their daily lives as best they can. She enjoys many privileges, but has little autonomy to exercise them," she indicates.
"From here, everything came on the fly," she points out. This is her favorite part of the writing process, when she starts without knowing where it will go and focuses on the main character, even falling in love. "I make a click that I don't know how to describe with words and I start to see the protagonist, I know what I can surround her with, what can happen to her, what can make her waver and what can make her feel safe. Then, I start putting elements around her," she adds. One of them was the male character Joana falls in love with, inspired by a Catalan musician living in Bangkok who often appears on Orriols' Instagram. "This doesn't usually happen to me, but here it was like that. I write in a way, not chaotic, but very organic, and I just go with it," she reasons.
After that, the crisis arrives because she is not one to bet on very strong arguments or on many things happening, but rather on recovering the themes that obsess her, such as family and relationships. "I feel very comfortable narrating the most intimate aspect and emotions, and then I find it very difficult to find the necessary action for the novel to advance. I have to stop and let the text rest because I start thinking about where I've gotten myself into and how I'm going to get out of here. I never know the ending," she admits.
A male protagonist, Mateu, was needed because Orriols wanted to write a love story this time. "It's a feeling that is so questioned, but the promise of love still prevails greatly. When I started, a story full of fears ended up coming out," she reveals. Since she always puts the title at the end, it ended up being Al otro lado del miedo (Destino). "In this novel, there is a feeling that weighs quite a bit, and that is loneliness. It is very characteristic of these current times: nowadays, narrating love is also talking a little about loneliness," she points out. About how collective fears, in a time of more wars and global uncertainty, also influence personal decisions. The war in Gaza and Greta Thunberg appear, as well as closer episodes, such as the corpse found in a container in Esquerra de l'Eixample, considering that "fear scares her" and she avoids the obsession with true crime that has spread so much.
Everyday Barcelona is very present in Orriols' novel, in very vivid scenes, such as going down the MNAC stairs ---if they work, even more painful when the journey is uphill--- or leaving the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (TNC) after seeing a play. Going to work by bus or noting that the Christmas lights have been turned on too early, the city makes it easier to understand the story, making it closer and more accessible. This leads to flesh-and-blood characters, especially the protagonist, without the need to resort to great narrative tricks.
As usually happens to her, the writer is fascinated by certain professions. If in Ese lugar al que llamamos casa everything revolved around the life of a correspondent, who closely resembled the journalist Txell Feixas, now the focus has been placed on an art restorer. This time she has had the help of the head of the Restoration and Preventive Conservation area of the MNAC, Carme Ramells, capable of easily explaining how a Zurbarán painting is restored and a layer of black color added later is removed because it contains too much iron.
"I don't know why this happens to me. I must have a complex for not having a job that has always defined me, and I like that, but there are professions that I find fascinating," she points out. She has met with Ramells several times to prepare the protagonist. "She would tell me anecdotes and the novel would write itself. For example, a job that I find fascinating, being a courier, which is accompanying the work from the museum to where the painting will be exhibited. You think, wow!" she indicates. Joana needed to travel far and Tokyo was chosen, even though Orriols has never been there and passed "on tiptoes." "Since I do a lot on the fly, every time I went to the museum and heard someone say something, I appropriated it," she confesses.
"The MNAC is a museum, like many others we have in the city, that if it were in New York or Florence we would take planes and wait hours to enter"After that came all the baggage of having visited the museum many times, not forgetting that she studied Art History. Although she never practiced, she did an internship at the MNAC. "It's a museum, like many others we have in the city, that if it were in New York or Florence we would take planes and wait hours to enter," she defends. If he has to choose some works, he keeps the Romanesque mural set of the Pedret Paintings, The Battle of Tetuan by Marià Fortuny or the modernist painter Lluïsa Vidal.An artist whom she makes travel to New York in the novel to reverse the grievance she has suffered in comparison with contemporaries like Ramon Casas or Santiago Rusiñol and of whom one of the great praises said was that "she painted like a man."
With this fourth novel, published in Catalan by Proa, Orriols continues a literary career that exploded with the short stories of Anatomía de las distancias cortas (Lumen, 2016). With the success of her first title, the author has managed to be translated into sixteen languages, among which are English, French, Italian, Chinese, and Arabic. Afterwards came Aprender a hablar con las plantas (2018) and Dulce introducción al caos (2020), edited by Lumen.