Laia Viñas portrays the generation of the Bakalao Route to ‘Aqui Baix’ | Literature

The first set or view of the pagesHere below són meravelloses: the reader attends the climax (“the bass drum that goes ficant-se dins and s’acobla al cor i ja no tinc batecs, tinc ritme, tinc els ulls grossos, tinc les cames duras and la jaw ballarina”) and them subsequent finishes of a night of bauxa boja, when it is time to step out into the sunshine and walk tired and eat carbohydrates, and here the movements of the protagonists acquire the light paradoxically weighing the vivid records, in an atmosphere that could remember the end of The sweet life by Fellini but in a polygonal, almost desert version, including such a simple and natural contrast with the life he follows there (a very beautiful girl, in the film; a popular tradition of gifts that remember the dead, in the novel). Since the book will not be able to sustain any longer than the initial impact, and since the whole does not suffer from irregularities, such an intense outburst and such a prose of the rain allow for a solid idea of ​​what Laia Viñas intends i gaudir dels encerts.

The protagonist of the novel·laté 24 anys and in the most euphoric moments is able to confess that “I could be colossal.” Afterwards, day by day I give a reason to suspect that it will not be easy to achieve (emancipation is difficult, the tragedy of sobtades deaths has shown its face, the future is uncertain and love, unstable, etc. .), but per sort there exists that “here below” of the title, that is, the map of the Bakalao Route, a territory full of parking and industrial buildings, of cigarettes and pills and shared ratlles, of things that stretch or it is violent or ballen, sound, vomiten, and also from a Catalan border that is not known if it belongs to the south of the Principality or to the north of Valencia, impur and xalest. The group of friends that Viñas presents fan la Ruta with a perillosa and exuberant mass, and the author’s prose is impossible to reproduce that hedonistic intensity of the noranta. It’s not easy, but she has achieved remarkable liveliness.

A risk of caure in the error of the critic that demands a book that followed the one that he would return and not there that is, the meu problem amb Here below It begins when the novel is filled with stroboscopic lights and shared information in the most conventional everyday life of its characters, drawing in the family environment or weekday routines, making the contextual elements explicit. that explain the enthusiasm between the innocent and the nihilist for the party and the drugs. In these passages, which are not exactly scarce, they are not bad, but neither are they passionate about feeling fully submerged; I believed that the result would be better if Here Below, which with every probability is promoted as a “novel about the Route”, is encouraged to be, in effect, a novel about nothing more than the Route. To cap it all, in the display of gestures, actions, sounds and glances that offer the pages in the atmosphere of the discotheques or the voravies and the intuition of envelopes to which Viñas explains more serenely (but not better) to the remains of the book, it is to say: the echoes of those times of crisis in the present are not menys ferotge; the vindication of a people, the bakaladeros, who form jutjats in the moment with mere irresponsible ends that they have as members of a complex culture and related to the sociological reality of the time; and the autobiographical love that the author felt for characters similar to her peers.