The writer Jordi Puntí is promoting his latest novel these days, Confetti (Proa), winner of the Sant Jordi award, which is based on the life of Xavier Cugat. He was interviewed a few days ago in this same newspaper by Francesc Bombí and one of the highlighted phrases caught my attention: “Information is a springboard to jump towards the imagination.” After immersing himself for many years in all possible documentation about the musician, Puntí writes a novel and not exactly a biography.
And Kathryn Scanlan has done the same in A todo brida (Errata Naturae / Segona Perifèria), a little gem that deserves many readers. In short chapters – some very, very short, but with a lot of breadth – Scanlan tells us the life of Sonia, who as a child already wanted a horse, dreamed of being a jockey and ends up dedicating her entire life to horses as a stable girl and trainer. He does all kinds of work on ranches and racetracks in the Midwest of the United States. A woman in a man's world, in which "there is a lot of suffering and substance abuse," jockeys stuff themselves and then vomit to maintain their weight, and where being a woman "everything you do you have to do twice as much." "of good."
At the end of the novel, Scanlan informs the reader that he had several meetings with Sonia, in person and by telephone, and that this is where the book, “which is a work of fiction,” came from.
With these two novels as a sample, in principle it seems that it should not be so difficult to understand what fiction is, no matter how much fact it has. But lately we have experienced with perplexity how a few madmen threatened the artistic team of Cacophony, which was performed until yesterday at the Sala Beckett. It was a play on the power of social media. It wasn't against them or their idols, but they didn't understand it. They spat insults without even having come to see the montage. Write it down in case they schedule it again or go on tour, and go see it because it's a good show, not out of morbidity, you won't find it.
