Pol Guasch (Tarragona, 1997) resorts to fiction to find answers. After delving into love in Napalm al cor (Anagrama Books Award), translated into several languages, the author wanted to go to another place, friendship, about which he believes many values are being poured that were previously projected onto couples. "For me, fiction writing is a place where I explore questions that do not have an obvious answer in my daily life," defends Guasch, always restrained, but accompanied by firm reasonings that align with everything he says. "I wanted to think about a very obvious but difficult question to answer, what do friends do?, but also, how do they think about each other?, what do they expect from each other?, what do they say and what do they not say?, what can't they say?... To delve into silences, betrayals, and secrets," explains a writer who has in recent years turned his poetic voice to narration, having previously published poetry books such as Tanta gana and La part del foc.
Liton and Rita are the two friends in this social experiment that Guasch has executed in Ofert a les mans, el paradís crema (Anagrama Books), a novel with which he has had a good time and done what he wanted, starting to write it shortly after the success of his first title, which has not overwhelmed him, feeling that the only pressure he always has is knowing if what he talks about will be necessary. "It's a tentative story, like everything I do, I never start writing with anything planned and I don't know where the writing will take me. But there were a few truths that I had clear," he reasons, a difference from Napalm, where the exploration was total.
"Friendship saves lives. There are people who find it hard to be in the world and friends save you. But, like in any other relationship, it is not genuine, pure, transparent, non-negotiable, there is also selfishness and need," continues Pol Guasch, thinking about what he has been able to understand by putting Rita and Liton into action. "Friendship is full of fractures, failures, and pains. We say that friends tell each other everything and it's not true, they also have secrets and envy each other and that doesn't make them less friends," he reflects.
The main truth of Ofert a les mans, el paradís crema has been friendship, "a disguise to forget that we are profoundly alone in the world," but he also wanted to talk about class, desire, and an illness whose name is not mentioned in the novel but refers to AIDS. "I don't write about things that interest me, but about things that affect me, worry me, hurt me, and disturb me, which are not innocent and from which you cannot emerge unscathed. One of these issues is what the memory of AIDS is. To what extent the way we love has to do with something we haven't lived and how death, indifference, and the silences that occurred in the 80s still beat today in our way of relating," says the author, who emphasizes that he does not feel he has written a queer novel, just as he did not with Napalm even though it was interpreted that way: "For me, writing about non-normative ways of loving is not an intention, it is a reality."
How something that has not been lived marks the present, Pol Guasch summarizes it thus at the beginning of Ofert a les mans, el paradís crema: "All lives begin before birth: there is a mother who reviews the list of names before sleeping, undecided, or a father who imagines the absent face of the creature that does not yet exist." This inheritance, often unconscious, makes it difficult to know who we are, hindering the fullness that can be aspired to with anxieties and discomforts that are not understood. "The characters are constantly asking themselves about their identity and origin, but they are marked by a set of things that no longer exist," the writer emphasizes.
"I don't write about things that interest me, but about things that affect me, worry me, hurt me, and disturb me," Pol GuaschThat mix of past and present is seen in the sad landscape that surrounds them, absolutely desolated by fires and drought, but with a meager materiality that recalls what was there before. Also by those known as old women, three women who are the only remaining witness of that previous world, revived with their stories that sound too distant.Fly over an everyday end of the world, now that the lack of rain is a reality, with the aim of being able to rehearse possible futures, wondering how they will act when all this arrives, tinging it with a melancholic point for unfulfilled promises, a detail in which he feels he has been more generational: "It is a response to the characters' awareness of their inability to change the course of things. I feel that, around me, we are very broken and sad, we know the space that has been left for us."
A time that does not look at past, present, and future but does it all at once. "I try to create a kind of alternative, new time, that mixes these temporalities," he indicates, a clear inheritance from Napalm, "the novel again has no time or place, this disorientation allows me to create worlds that function on their own and to be able to address the issues that really concern me." A limbo that combines with a disordered story where memories, scenes, and images of different characters are mixed, although they all revolve around the same story: "It has a lot to do with how I experience reality. For me, ordering life is betraying it." A gamble that draws from one of his references, Ursula K. Le Guin, for whom books had to be like small first-aid kits to which everyone goes to look for what they need, making each chapter work separately and together.