In the wild universe of Laura Fernández (Terrassa, 1981) there is no room for lukewarmness. Every word exudes enthusiasm and passion, and must be experienced with the fever that obsessions experience. She writes herself and confesses the type of language that interests her: “The appearance that the translations that I like usually have. That is, when they are made up of piles of motley things that consider themselves words but are in reality much more.”
From a very young age, she had to get used to being alone for a long time, while her parents worked, time spent watching television series that fascinated her with the way Americans made up life and built family scenarios with a plasticized shine. Already then a voracious reader of translations of science fiction books, she confesses to being a great admirer of authors such as Stephen King, Philip K. Dick or John Fante.
Her desire to know what is happening out there and everywhere led her to journalism, a profession in which she has excelled. However, it has been in her fiction that she has found the possibility of extending her overwhelming imagination, composed of equal parts intelligence, humor, curiosity and humanity.
In 2008 she already dazzled with her first novel, Welcome to Welcome, which was followed, among others, by Wendolin Kramer (2011), The Zombie Girl (2013) or the immense novel that marked her consecration, Mrs. Potter is not exactly Santa Claus. , in 2021. Now he brings together the stories he has written in these fifteen years in a volume that is, effectively, a link between the immensity of elements that make up his galaxy. The book opens with a novel about a cold virus that threatens to destroy the universe, and closes it with a specifically written story starring mystery writer Sandy McGill, where lucid writing keys are given to understand the beats of the music that beats. under so much turmoil.
Convinced that “the imagined life will always be superior to the real one,” her stories are full of Martians, dinosaurs, ghosts, space intercoms, talking buildings and machines, flying vehicles, talking lemon trees, clumsy detectives, tedious journalists and, above all, all, many writers in their different phases of maturation. Absolutely everything has a place in this galaxy in which traveling between planets is as easy as it is for everything to end up ruined. Paradoxically, the Earth is a legendary place, while among all the stars Rethrick stands out, very similar to the formerly blue planet, but in which all its inhabitants have three eyes and where there is a very famous writer, “nothing less than my alter ego, Robbie Stamp.”
Each of the stories is preceded by a presentation in which the author, rather than giving the necessary keys to understand them, offers us fragments of the passion that guided her writing at each moment. She obtains a kind of confession that, at the same time, functions as a manifesto. Thus we can know that Rethrick is herself, as are each and every one of her characters; and that she would have liked to write the books that they write in the most unexpected corners of the galaxy, and we understand that if her delirious books have become a reference it is because she has "become a hunter of everything that had nothing to do with it." to do with the world but that, precisely for that reason, describes it better than anything.”
Laura Fernández invites us to the fascinating costume ball that reading and writing is for her. In that crazy indefinition we move so as not to stop marveling at the possibilities that come true or that, when frustrated, are no less productive.
Laura Fernández Ladies, Gentlemen and Planets Random House 432 pages 19.90 euros
