It will hit bookstores next week. the wanderers (Ed. Anagrama), by the writer Guadalupe Nettel. It is a compilation of stories –very good– in which memories, intuitions, fantasies and the imminence of the monstrous dimension of routine alternate. It also includes a futuristic and spectral presence of the pandemic and of a Barcelona framed by Carolines street, in Gràcia, Plaza de España and the author’s imagination. Another, more earthly presence, is that of exiles, emigrants or addicts to transhumance understood as an existential option. They can be introverted and charismatic Uruguayans or prosaic and expansive Mexicans, expelled from their place of origin by political tragedies or economic catastrophes.
Sometimes, and without meaning to, they find in the literary arbitrariness of the exodus the roots that the protocol of nomadism denies them. A strict but contradictory protocol, which establishes that, under certain circumstances, the only possible homeland is the grave of the ancestors. Nettel writes: “If you think about it, the habit of visiting the place where the bones of the people we love rest is absurd, but in that wandering life that we always had, my family was my only nest, my only burrow. That’s why I visit his grave every time I go to Mexico, and when I do, I try to bring a little honey to attract the hummingbirds.”
Lucía Lijtmaer defines herself as a Barcelonan with a Polish surname and born in Argentina
Chance, however, is generous. Nettel’s book shares a collection (Hispanic Narratives) with almost nothing to wear , by Lucía Lijtmaer, who, balancing her own identity, defines herself as a Barcelonan with a Polish surname and born in Argentina. Here fiction is a formal resource to explain memory, lived or inherited, and the ambition of being a writer who, happily for her readers and out of obstinacy, takes the liberty of mixing genres and writing an autobiography through other people’s biographies. There are phrases that condense the abysses of exile without immersing themselves in the drama that, by tradition, is presupposed. The appearance of frivolity that they exude is deceptive: do not trust them. Nostalgia, for example, is dispatched with a relieving and luminous irony, and the past –the childhood of an Argentinean woman who arrives in Barcelona without knowing that she will find another language and unidentified edible objects such as panellets or chestnuts– is diagnosed with the A coroner’s posthumous precision: “Your past is a narrative.” And, connecting with Nettel, there remains the logic of turning the tombs of the ancestors into temples –generally off the map of a conventional chronology– of consolation and answers to the type of questions that, as a hallmark that the literary liturgy needs to emerge. , exiles are made.
