My mother's book, published by Panorama de Narrativas de Anagrama, in the translation of Javier Albiñana, was a widely read book in the early nineties. At that time, no one remembered mothers. Albert Cohen's song of love and remorse showed that the issue could be important if the blockade was overcome. Thirty years later, books about mothers abound, written with resentment, mania, rage and truculence. Sometimes I think it's another literary fad: you don't know why everyone starts writing the same book or a very similar one. We live in an age of literary confessions, the creepier the better: mothers? clubbing!
Marta Marín-Dòmine (Barcelona, 1959) has lived between Canada and Catalonia. She currently directs El Born-Centre de Cultura i Memòria. She has worked on documentaries about emigration and exile, she has made artistic installations, she has written essays on translation from a Lacanian perspective and a book about the uprooting of her family, Fugir era el més bell que teníem (2019). A few months ago I listened to a lecture about her memory. She explained that in recent years we have turned witnesses of great massacres and holocausts into victims. And that being a victim means not having tools to act. While being a witness means taking the word, opening oneself to dialectics, transmission and the responsibility of listening.
I was reminded of it by I will say that I have invented it, the novel with which he won the BBVA Sant Joan award in 2023. A testimonial book, in this dialectical sense. With a unique structure: the first part is a fantastic, somewhat gruesome tale of a mother-daughter relationship, with zoological metaphors: the mother looks like a lioness and a wolf, while the daughter identifies with Buffalo Bill's bison. Eagles, crows and slugs also appear. It is a violent, visionary, extreme writing, with mutilations, angels and other Rodoredian paraphernalia. In the eyes of the daughter, the mother appears as a beast and a goddess. It is a choppy narrative and sometimes you have the feeling that to achieve the complexity that Marín-Dòmine intends he lacks language.
The second part fits into the story of the confession. It shows elements of the plot of the story of fear and cruelty that we have just read and displays the different factors of the mother-daughter relationship: from the idea of ordinary madness (a topic that Imma Monsó has dealt with with great success), to envy. towards the mother. A disturbing element is that as soon as the narrator addresses the mother to remind her of something she did or a feeling she had as the story is explained in the third person, the mother becomes the Marina and does not seem to be the narrator's mother. . This approach and distance from the other gives the text a psychoanalytic depth.
The story of decline and illness is well balanced, the figure of a nephew who adored his aunt offers a successful counterpoint, the parallel plots - the history of embroidery since the 19th century or the case of an Algerian boy who spends twenty-three years in jail for robbery, a scene in the subway with a woman in a red coat, an ellipsis on Alzheimer's disease, a reflection on the gestures of the actors in an old film – they take the text out of the closedness of the face to face mother-daughter The wound of a hand links dream and confession. Personally, I think that references to “writing” and the “writing process” intellectualize the text in an unnecessary way.
In any case, the book grows, the story wins in the realistic part and, in a third section, it culminates with a splendid phrase from Bergman: "A mother and a daughter, what an absurd combination of feelings, confusion and destruction". Martín-Dòmine undoes the knot.
Marta Marín-Domine. I'll say I made it up. Editions 62. 184 pages 19.50 euros
