It is still curious that award-winning novels deserve a different and generally more positive critical appreciation than non-awarded ones. Even more curious is that Luis López Carrasco puts the conclusion date of The White Desert in September 2023, when the call for the 2023 Herralde Novel Prize closed on April 28. We deduce, and could have pointed out, that this is the review date.
Luis López Carrasco (Murcia, 1981) is a professor of Audiovisual Communication at the University of Castilla la Mancha, writer, translator and filmmaker. He is the director of the documentary The Year of Discovery (2020). The white desert deserves both praise and some criticism. Among the praises is, above all, the willingness to depart from the conventional narrative tradition, dividing the novel into seven chapters that are seven stories where what is not said is as important as what is said: “Intrigue, by definition, is based on the concealment.” And where memories and the present meet: “There is not necessarily melancholy in my agenda of activities, just a recovery of the imaginary.”
Everything also has a double meaning, like the shipwreck on an island. The different scenarios are well described and lived. Among the objections is, as Domingo Ródenas has already pointed out, a flat, gray prose, when, however, there are branches of poetic intensity: “The black and dark forests of the hills in front of the house looked like this, seen from a distance , a cemetery appearance”, the trees “looked like old men with sad eyes and such thick beards…”. And he develops some topic so thoroughly that it ends up tiring the reader, such as the immunostaining investigated by Jimena.
It is not entirely clear where the action takes place, although there are several references to Valencia and one story is set in Madrid. There isn't much explicit data about the dates either; Yes, there is a reference to New Year's Eve 2014 or to the political situation, especially to the crisis of 2008, with “the general demoralization into which the country had sunk.” The book opens with a hot air balloon that crosses the ocean and that, with its excess load of people, is in danger of sinking, forcing one of the passengers to have to jump into the sea, this sea, with its island, so protagonist as will the house.
Family and group of friends are always present. As is the need to recover the past. Memories occupy a central place, especially of imaginary experiences, “summoning those other worlds, as if from now on reality were boringly predictable,” which turns the house into “a kind of temple of fiction.” The return to the past creates “a series of temporal layers” in the narrative. A bridge is established between past and present, between children's games and video games or the game of hide-and-seek at 28 years old; living on what has already been experienced, like “the marbles with the most vivid and precious colors, the one we hid for the future.” He never mixes the future with the past, and “dystonia is always reactionary. You are closing the past from a terrifying future”, the one that we suffer every day on television.
Despite the abusive and boring length of some paragraphs and the confusion that the relationship between the different chapters may cause, the novel, stimulated by the surprise of some situations (women urinating or wiping the blood from their nose with their panties) reads with interest.
Luis López Carrasco The White Desert Anagram 168 pages 17.90 euros
