Mercedes Abad (Barcelona, 1961) is a journalist, teacher, and author of various plays. She has collaborated with the Fura dels Baus. She already knew success with the book of erotic stories Ligeros libertinajes sábáticos, La Sonrisa Vertical Award in 1986. These stories were followed by Conjugal Happiness (1989), Blowing the Wind (1989) or Friends and Fantasies (2004). Among her novels it is worth mentioning Blood (2000), The Fat Girl (2014) or House for Sale (2020), based on her experience of confinement during the pandemic.
Escuela de escritura reflects her experience as a teacher at the Escuela de Escritura del Ateneo Barcelona. There is nothing here about the nature of schools or writing workshops, in what sense they teach to write or how much there is a succulent source of income for the institutions that organize them, that is, everything that can be controversial, which is a lot. The intention of the narrator to entertain, something that she achieves in spades. She herself has confessed that humor "is a mental illness of mine, I cannot write without humor because it is something that defends us from two abominable defects, such as corniness and solemnity."
Of course, humor is not enough. It is above all the ability to maintain the tension, in an entertaining crescendo full of hypotheses, conjectures and obstacles that can be overcome or not. A virtue that leads us to an intelligent ending. “But allow me to tell my story from the beginning”: We find ourselves in a cemetery by the sea (the action of the novel takes place in Barcelona, of which we only have the names of the streets), in the place where the ashes of Pat, a brilliant student. Her anonymous teacher (few references to whether she is a man or a woman) is the author of highly successful novels.
Success is here, without being treated as a disease or an editorial claim, a recurring motif. Pat was an irreverent student, “a free spirit and that made her enormously seductive”, “she cultivated doubt like others of hers her garden”. When she died, she left behind an unfinished novel, and the narrator (let's leave it at narrator) is interested in whether Pat's computer hides a treasure. She contacts her husband, Boris, who tells her that she has erased everything.
"Not even after looting and drinking a whole winery would I have imagined that a man could be so jealous of a novel," tells us this inveterate drinker who fills the pages of Escuela de escritura with alcohol.
You will not be able to read the new pages, the first obstacle you encounter. However, he manages to finish off the company. He sends the manuscript to Doc who tells him it's an imitation of Pat's style, not his own.
He manages to rewrite the novel, but now he has a doubt: he feels that it is plagiarism. She decides to consult with the students in the same grade as Pat, and this is where the succession of obstacles, conjectures, and failures come in. By the way we are getting to know a series of attractive characters for the reader from their very names. It begins with Ada (Pat and Ada, kick no less), who is not forgiven by her daughter for having baptized her with the name of Oliva, "thinking that this way her life would be a permanent appetizer", Madame T, who keeps the score of the men and women who look at her. Madame Curie, who asks the professor to do what he has done with Pat before giving her opinion. And, above all, Mr. X, who tells him that he can publish it, but with an encrypted code, which ends up becoming the mysterious code that leads us to the unconventional ending of Writing School.
We are accompanied by the varied readings of the narrator, the intensity of the emotions and Pat's demands are met: “choose an exact tone and give it humor, lightness and a little melancholy.
Mercedes Abad Writing School Tusquets 184 pages 18.50 euros
