“Fiction is the most honest way to approach the life of my grandparents,” explains the writer Laura Gost about the key to Les Cendres a la Piscina (Proa), the novel with which she won the fifth edition of the Proa prize, endowed with 40,000 euros and which was delivered tonight at an event at the Macba led by Anna Guitart. The book will hit bookstores on November 15.
And Gost (Sa Pobla, Mallorca, 1993) had begun to write based on the story of his grandparents at the end of last year, seeing their end near, and they died at the beginning of this year ten days apart, a fact that It made him reaffirm the idea of the novel to “try to retain their lives.” He does it from the life of Sebastià, a man who starts out as a farmer and becomes a patriarch who will get rich by building hotels for tourists. The different chapters of the novel speak from the point of view of the other characters, especially his three wives: “Catalina loves the man who was, Mercedes, the man who can still be, and Leidi, the man who can no longer be.” ,” says Gost, who adds other voices to these characters such as that of a granddaughter named Laura and a writer, who does not deny that she assimilates to herself: “It is an exercise in transparency to approach these lives and give a narrative which, if not, would be a series of episodes,” and serves to “better explain who I am.”
Sebastià is a man who “earns money and also loses it, and that generates ambition, a change in status and expectations that end up affecting his children and wives”, in a chronological arc that begins in the fifties and goes through “ frenetic and transversal changes” until today. For the writer and screenwriter – she won a Goya in 2018 for the short Woody
The author wanted to make it clear that in the novel she does not judge the lives of others, but instead tries to approach them without prejudice, based on fiction to "understand the paradigm beyond the specific situation of Mallorca, a more human part that can be extrapolated to other places where the same thing has happened.
“It does not want to be a novel about the impact of tourism in Mallorca,” says Gost, aware that there are already recent novels such as Tots els mecanismes by Melcior Comes or Contra el món by Pere Antoni Pons, or before that the work of Antònia Vicens, and That is why he does not make any explicit complaint or seek to redeem anyone, but rather “explain and understand,” because he cannot assess what happened so many years ago “with the information we have now.”
Throughout the novel, written with many dialogues, he uses irony, “my favorite language after Catalan,” as well as “humor, an antidote to solemnity,” and sprinkles it with cinematic references – “the Life is never like movies” is a motif that is repeated – and musicals “as an environmental sphere that interacts emotionally with the reader.”
A novel that Xavier Pla - member of the jury along with Clara Queraltó, Anna Sáez, Vicenç Villatoro and Josep Lluch - defines "as if the granddaughter of Antònia Vicens now had a Majorcan Sally Rooney as her sister".
Catalan version, here
