CRASH FORCE
TONI SALA’S INTRICATELY WOVEN TALE OF DEATH SIGNALS A NEW CATALAN LITERATURE FOR A NEW CATALONIA
The Boys
Toni Sala; Mara Faye Lethem, trans. Two Lines Press 265pp $14.95
When Toni Sala got up to the podium to read from The Boys this past October at the International Festival of Authors, he apologized for his English. Unlike the half dozen other Catalan writers there, Sala’s English is halting, uncomfortable. But within a few sentences, it was obvious the way he was reading was the only way to read this book, focusing on every word, his pace a little slower but his rhythm more insistent, stresses hammering every word as he made sure to get each one right. Though I’d read it a few days before and enjoyed it, when I read it again, it was in his voice, and I felt it.
The fuel for this novel is the death of two brothers, 20 and 22. They’re men, strictly speaking, but the novel runs on their youth, their potential, their unexpended energy that serves as a fuse that runs through the four sections of the book, each focusing on someone in their sphere, from around the small town where they farmed. It burns slowly at first, through the chapter devoted to a banker who works in the town but is not from it. He knows the people through their accounts, the pulsing of money back and forth between them as mortgages and loans are taken, land and equipment is bought. He’s in his 60s, has a pot belly Sala comes back to often enough to make you think there’s probably something to it, and through his distance in age, geography and relative prosperity, is able to hover above what’s happened, though you get the impression he’d like to be more involved than he’s able to be.
He visits the site of the accident, the plane tree the boys slammed into after seeing a concert. He sees the skid marks, notices they stop before the end of the pavement — meaning the driver, the older brother, took his foot off the brake at the last moment — and dives down into what will be the first of many excavations of hypothetical moments throughout the book, paragraphs devoted to a millisecond, trying to imagine why. He feels it, but only so deeply, only as deeply, it turns out, as he seems able to feel anything, whether it’s the clients whose loan applications he rejects, the sex he has with a prostitute dressed in angel wings, or his relationship to his wife and daughters. He’s a shell, both as a character, and as a device in a book that gets fleshier as it spirals toward its centre.
While at the crash site, he meets a trucker, Miqui, who’s the subject of the second section, a good-looking guy, he thinks, in his 30s, who spends his professional life on the road, his social life online and his sex life with prostitutes. Though once again an outsider — he lives a couple of villages over and drops into town to deliver some hay to the family of the fiancée of the older of the two dead boys — he’s more visceral, more engaged with his life, whether through a joyous friendship with a guy he used to drive with, now gone, with the Internet itself if not the people he meets there, which he convincingly describes as an “oasis of altruism and warmth,” or with his dying father, a man he thinks about killing with a shotgun but whom he cares for, scrupulously and unstintingly.
He’s had a tough time, the recession that hit Spain harder than most the backdrop to the whole book, but to Miqui’s section especially. The way he sees it, the old have mortgaged the young, stealing their future, like the old plane tree stole the boys’. He sees them living forever, using their borrowed wealth to borrow time, rejuvenating, dropping their kids off at the stations to send them to Germany to train and work, on their way out to the clubs, the Catalan version of the boomer generation a pulsing dead end, their kids vestigial copies of themselves, doomed from birth. The banker’s potbelly comes to seem in retrospect like a monstrous pregnancy, tumorous and flabby.
The third section is about that fiancée, Iona, daughter of the farm adjoining the boys’, a fact she realizes for the first time when her father takes her over the day after the funeral to negotiate a price to buy this now childless, and therefore futureless, plot of land. It’s only after the death that she starts to realize how much a part of a continuum she had been, born at the right time and place to serve the land by making another generation with the boy next door.
The other boy next door, Nil, went away to art college in Barcelona and is now back with a flesh tunnel — one of those interior ear rings that expands the flesh of the lobe into a loop which, in English anyway, is maybe too spot- on a metaphor for what both he and Iona come to realize is their role in the world, passageways of flesh meant only to connect an ever- receding past with a future coming in like a train across a bridge, leaving you with only two options: get hit, or jump.
If this story weren’t as thick as it is, as layered and as dense, the fact that this artist, Nils, specializes in setting living things on fire and watching them burn up and out would, again, be too on the nose. But these chapters are like epitrochoids and hypotrochoids, those complex patterns known better to some of us as Spirographs; spirals within spirals with connecting paths only traceable with close study, but all forming a shape enjoyable just as well at a distance.
Catalan literature is surging in tandem with an independence movement that all the writers at the IFOA were sure was a done deal with the decade. Overshadowed by the Spanish for centuries — we call Don Quixote the first novel and ignore Tirant lo Blanch, written more than a 100 years earlier — it may now be coming into its own as the idea of a nation takes more concrete shape. As an heir to Ramon Llull, Narcis Ollder and Mercè Rodoreda, there’s probably no better writer to usher in the new age.
THE NOVEL RUNS ON THEIR UNEXPENDED ENERGY THAT SERVES AS A FUSE