A few days after the 42nd Festival of Fantastic Genres closed down, as if it hadn't ended, the IV Proa de Novel·la award went to Mater, by Martí Domínguez (Madrid, 1966), a work that could have participated in it No problem. The Valencian writer, biologist and journalist has written a novel set in the near future in which the majority of women have been freed from giving birth and the creatures are born genetically optimized.
The prize, endowed with 40,000 euros, was announced this Tuesday night during a dinner at the Fundació Tàpies in an act led by the journalist Anna Guitart, who spoke with the author. After receiving the award, Domínguez recognized that "it is a peculiar novel, but also a tour de force and it fills me with hope that a jury has opted for it."
The winner shuns labels, while for Xavier Pla –a member of the jury with Anna Sáez, Clara Queraltó, Vicenç Villatoro and Josep Lluch– it is rather “a story of anticipation”. And it is that Domínguez has spent a few years with a scholarship on biotechnology in Boston, where he has appreciated a "change of cycle": "The technology is ready, the only thing missing is the human will to carry it out", because much of this private research, assures, it is not subject to the scrutiny of bioethics committees. "We don't know what's going on in biotech, and we should have more information," he warns.
For Pla, the novel dialogues with other classic dystopias such as George Orwell's 1984 or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, but also with more recent ones such as Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and as in it, "fertility and motherhood are at the center of all political concerns and philosophical reflections”.
In any case, for the author the accent of the narration does not have to be the technological factor, but rather it recounts the adventures of a posthuman woman who accidentally becomes pregnant and "decides to preserve the embryo and flee". She is chased from her and she finds refuge in a colony of traditional humans, from which she too will have to flee. "A frenetic flight in search of her own identity," says the author.
"What makes us human?" Domínguez wondered yesterday, and the thesis he maintains throughout the narrative is precisely that "human childbirth is one of the backbones of humanity." “Humans – he adds – are the only primates that give birth with pain and the baby is born very weak”. "What makes us human is motherhood and the relationship we have with our children," she insists, because "human life is based on children," and if we don't have them through childbirth, she says, the relationship we have may It is not very different from that of some cousins. That, however, ensures that it does not exclude adoption either, in the sense that it is not today a majority option or, of course, mandatory.
“Maybe it seems like an extravagant novel, but you start reading it as if it were today. We are on this path, a new world in which society lives in protected comfort”, she says. But it is not a dictatorship like 1984, but rather a "new democratic society" in which people are genetically improved with the will "that there are no hereditary diseases" and that contrasts with the "old human colonies, an old way of understanding existence" closer to self-management and with closer contact with nature and religion.
It is once again a novel of ideas, a trademark of the house, which questions the why of humanity. The writer recalls Joan Fuster's phrase, the one that says that "man is man's great unknown".
Domínguez made his debut in narrative in 1997 with Les confidèncias del comte de Buffon, (Andròmina Crexells awards, 3 and 4), which started a cycle around the Enlightenment together with Goethe's secret (Prudenci Bertrana award, Edicions 62, 1999) and The return of Voltaire (Josep Pla award, Destino, 2007), in which he already reflected on human relations and the notion of progress. And if in La sega (prímes de la Crítica Catalana, dels Escriptors Valencians, Serra d'Or and de la Crítica Amat-Piniella, Proa 2016), he already reflected on violence and evil, especially fueled by fear, the writer establishes a certain thread between his new book and the previous one, L'espirit del temps (Omnium award, Proa 2019). In it he portrays an "evil scientist", a Nazi, who "does genetic research on the perfect society", and conceptually does not seem to be far from this Mother.
Naturally, Domínguez, with a great scientific and humanist background, does not consider that the scientific spirit is bad per se, but he does foresee that it could be a controversial book for how he describes this future that he sees "very close, in just two generations" . "To what extent do we have individual freedom?", He questions, and it is that as he himself recalls "we come from a pandemic with curtailed rights" for a greater cause. In his novel, apparently everyone agrees with what he has earned, to the point that they continue to see themselves as human with that point of superiority towards the previous ones that makes them want to annihilate them because they do not recognize themselves in them. “A vision of materialism led to its maximum expression”. The reader will be able to enter it from the 16th, when Mater will arrive in bookstores.
Catalan version, here
